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Simulation Quotes

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Simulation Quotes

“Perhaps the agnostic even prefers signs to reality. Perhaps he prefers this undecidable situation, since you can play with these floating signs and that is not possible with so-called 'objective' reality. The move from the real to the sign opens up an enormous field of play and uncertainty. Particularly where the reality of power is concerned. For if there is, indeed,a risk of anaesthesia and manipulation by signs and images that is to power's advantage, there is the risk that power itself may find itself reduced merely to the signs of power. This profusion of signs and of what is manifested does, moreover, effect a profound change in the symbolic relation to power. That relation is based on the unilateral gift (of laws, institutions, work, security, etc.). It is not so much by violence and constraint, but only by this symbolic obligation that power exists. Now, from the point when all that it gives us is signs, our debt to it is infinitely less great. With power distributing nothing but signs to us, we merely give back signs in return, and our servitude is the lighter for it. Admittedly, the enjoyment of immaterial goods is not so great, but this also means we owe little in return and we respond to the airiness of signs with an equal indifference. We can deny power and set it aside by mere incredulity, simply responding to the signs of power with the signs of servitude. This is perhaps what is meant by 'weak thought' (pensiero debole). With Virtual Reality, this process of disinvestment becomes even more radical, and we enter upon a phase of unbinding [deliaison], of quasi-total disobligation.”

SimulationTranspolitics
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“Nothing distinguishes a natural intelligence from something that can give off all the outward signs of it, and this includes faltering before the test of truth. So one can give off all the outward signs of power, and this includes faltering before the test of strength. A simulation which produces, with just the requisite degree of derision, the image of an illusory normality.”

Artificial IntelligenceSimulationNatural Intelligence
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The little orange, trapezoidal, translucent sail on the river, the boatmen keeping their balance. Further on, the bride in her palanquin, and the husband on horseback ahead of her. A whole parade of luminous figures. In fact, what we have here is a fake traditional Korean wedding and a TV shoot. But whether or not the ritual is authentic, there is the same racial beauty in all the faces. The Diagonal of the Madman, The Parallax of Evil, The Ecliptic of Sex, The Hypotenuse of Death. Given the low likelihood of a meeting in this life or a future existence, the only hope is for a meeting in a previous life.”

SimulationMulti CulturalismTestamento Geometrico
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The heroic quest typically highlights a seemingly average person (think Thomas Anderson before he becomes Neo) who embarks on a perilous undertaking, confronts challenges and temptations, and ultimately returns to his or her starting place, transformed and usually upgraded. This myth appears central to human experience. The Tarot, for example, which reads as a distillation of ancient mythology, is in essence about the heroic quest to become one’s true self. Even the parable of the Prodigal Son can be interpreted as a retelling of the Hero’s Journey. This journey isn’t merely external; it’s primarily internal. The Hero’s Journey, applied to our Matrix analogy, suggests that the only way out of the so-called simulation is into oneself. The hero’s ultimate inner battle is against the enemy within, the shadow self, our own Agent Smith, the unrecognized and unintegrated aspects of the psyche that only battle and hinder us until we make peace with them.”

ShadowMental HealthSimulationTarotMatrixShadow WorkProdigal SonHero S JourneyNeoAgent Smith
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”

AddictionIdeologyAbstractionPop CultureSimulationBanalityContemporary ArtPandemicsDemocratization
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“So they rolled up their sleeves and sat down to experiment -- by simulation, that is mathematically and all on paper. And the mathematical models of King Krool and the beast did such fierce battle across the equation-covered table, that the constructors' pencils kept snapping. Furious, the beast writhed and wriggled its iterated integrals beneath the King's polynomial blows, collapsed into an infinite series of indeterminate terms, then got back up by raising itself to the nth power, but the King so belabored it with differentials and partial derivatives that its Fourier coefficients all canceled out (see Riemann's Lemma), and in the ensuing confusion the constructors completely lost sight of both King and beast. So they took a break, stretched their legs, had a swig from the Leyden jug to bolster their strength, then went back to work and tried it again from the beginning, this time unleashing their entire arsenal of tensor matrices and grand canonical ensembles, attacking the problem with such fervor that the very paper began to smoke. The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F_1) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore. But the King, nothing daunted, put on his Markov chain mail and all his impervious parameters, took his increment Δk to infinity and dealt the beast a truly Boolean blow, sent it reeling through an x-axis and several brackets—but the beast, prepared for this, lowered its horns and—wham!!—the pencils flew like mad through transcendental functions and double eigentransformations, and when at last the beast closed in and the King was down and out for the count, the constructors jumped up, danced a jig, laughed and sang as they tore all their papers to shreds, much to the amazement of the spies perched in the chandelier—perched in vain, for they were uninitiated into the niceties of higher mathematics and consequently had no idea why Trurl and Klapaucius were now shouting, over and over, "Hurrah! Victory!!”

HumorScienceMathematicsSimulationScience Humor
Book:The Cyberiad
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“This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non- enjoyment of the works.”

ArtConspiracyPop CultureSimulationNonevent
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“From the perspective of consciousness expansion, it’s actually a service to us to have so much weirdness thrown at us like classic slapstick pies in the face … over and over again. The weirdness might very well be—it’s at least worth considering—part of our own design from some higher aspect of ourselves to wake us up here in the dream of this so-called reality.”

ConsciousnessDreamsAwarenessMindfulnessAwakeningHigher SelfWeirdnessSimulationSimulation TheoryConscious Evolution
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“What is the nature of this confusing way station between birth and (usually) death accompanied by obliteration of identity we call home? Planet, plane, simulation, hallucination, hell, heaven on earth … The hypotheses as to this realm’s true character are as many as there are bored conspiracy theorists tapping away on crusty laptops in their parents’ basements. But what if the childishly simple answer to our conundrum is given away in this aphorism popularized in ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’: ‘Life is but a dream’?”

DeathDreamsIllusionDeath And DyingSimulationMayaSimulation TheoryFlat EarthDreamtimeConspiracy Theorist
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“A sudden sense of déjà vu, a feeling of being secretly observed, a recurring dream that seems eerily factual. What if these aren’t the misfirings of our own warped brains, random occurrences with no deeper meaning? What if they’re actually subtle hints, whispers from the multiverse urging us to question our reality?”

RealityDreamsAwakeningQuestioningSerendipitySimulationDeja VuSimulation TheoryQuestioning LifeSense Of Being Stared At
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“The rocks are craggy/unmanageable without sufficiently lacerating my Self ~ scarcely solid ground, but more accurately a foothold. Yet in smoothness, the rocks are even less effective against the sweep of the tides than the sands of the shore. I sit here, not terribly concerned about the bruises and scrapes the jagged rocks lend in the moment, but concerned nevertheless by the waves that sweep back so effortlessly over the catchstones and eternally beyond reach—evading capture, leaving only a dissipating froth upon the black ridges to signal, at the very least, that 'it' happened: for whatever 'it' is worth. There is a distinctive tenor to this declaration of presence, this collapsing flow—Something that reminds me of...?—the reverberations of which remain beyond the span of cognition. Reverberations: there exists a memory of a memory of a dream I had once, but never an authentic rendering of the essential Moment. Still I can hear it in dreams of memories of memories of dreams. In dreams: a faint voice. A persona, a belief system distinctly its own, yet for now, the roar of the tides are a whisper ears strain to grasp. Seemingly a clue to a memory locked within. Or it’s all imagination: perhaps the sound of the ocean causes me to assume I’m remembering something. Gives the memory a sentience of its own and a vessel allowing it to surge in and ebb out. Yes, I’ve heard such things mentioned before: the stimulus that reverse engineers the very memory it is presumed to trigger. Still, it bothers me: this evasive, timeless notion.”

ImaginationDreamsAuthenticityOntologySimulationIllusion Of Memory
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“My position—one I share with countless mystics, yogis, shamans, alchemists, and other way-outside-the-boxers—is that there’s no verifiable ‘outside’ reality, no tangible ‘home base’ in the real. Instead, there’s only a simulacrum or, more accurately perhaps, a simulation-style dreamscape mimicking an actual physical world inside an infinity (the Dark Sea of Awareness) of similarly attention-generated constructs.”

RealityMysticAlchemistSimulationShamanSimulacrumSimulation TheoryNature Of RealityDark Sea Of Awareness
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“There comes a time, a sort of epiphany … when you realize that everything you’ve discovered through your ‘research’ has basically been fed to you because you’ve been looking for it! We’re in a complex feedback loop ... that reveals to us an imaginary ‘reality’ that we choose to buy into … just before it becomes our lived ‘reality.”

RealityConsciousnessSimulationMatrixHolographic UniverseSimulacrumSimulation TheoryFeedback LoopDoing The ResearchNature Of The Real
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“What if the world we inhabit—with all its confounding complexities and contradictions—is nothing more than an elaborate stage set, a grand illusion orchestrated by a poorly understood force? If this were true, how could we possibly know for certain? What signs or signals might betray the actual nature of our world and our place in it?”

RealityConsciousnessAwarenessPerceptionIllusionAwakeningSimulationMayaMatrixSimulation Theory
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
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“It seems nothing can counteract the proliferation of this Artificial Intelligence based on the zero degree of thought. Nothing, that is, except this reversibility of intelligence and stupidity - the latter representing a renewed challenge to victorious intelligence. There is something here too like a revenge of evil. Something to which the tyranny of reality leads equally well - to appreciating any old form of madness and illusion.”

RealityStupidityRevengeArtificial IntelligenceSimulationDelusions Of Intelligence
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“The immateriality of signs is alien to me, as it is to a race of peasants with whom I share an obsessional morality, a sluggishness, a stupid, ancestral belief in the real. In reality, I am one of them. The simulation hypothesis is merely a maximalist position. The seduction hypothesis is merely a formal abstraction. It is the phantom of seduction which obsesses me—as for the rest, I have never managed anything other than to let myself be seduced. And this is quite alright: all the rest is merely destructive, moral passion. The seducing monk dreams of Manichean tension between the sign and the real as the most sublime form of morality. Only from time to time, the earth-shattering, hypothetical union of the two… Even then, the beauty of the violent resolution eludes him. Faith and fury first attack the impossibility of believing; they attack signs. Annihilating the world as sign, in order to make it an object of belief.”

RealitySimulationSignsLalo Cura
Book:Cool memories
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“The first human-to-computer uploads of 2100 will prove that a perfect simulation is the thing being simulated - that a silicon soul doesn't need a physical body to inhabit. So eventually everybody who ever lived will be resurrected inside a living machine indistinguishable from God. Isn't it amazing what you can do with unlimited hard-disk space?”

NeedsFirstsHumansSoulHardBodyCan DoSpacePerfectProveComputerMachinesUnlimitedSiliconPhysical BodySimulationDisk
Author:Frank J. Tipler
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“Holland's and Kauffman's work, together with Dawkins' simulations of evolution and Varela's models of autopoietic systems, provide essential inspiration for the new discipline of artificial life, This approach, initiated by Chris Langton (1989, 1992), tries to develop technological systems (computer programs and autonomous robots) that exhibit lifelike properties, such as reproduction, sexuality, swarming, and co-evolution.”

TryingInspirationTogetherEvolutionDisciplineEssentialsComputerApproachModelsProgramPropertySexualityWorking TogetherArtificialTechnologicalRobotsExhibitsReproductionAutonomousSimulationHollandArtificial Life
Author:John Henry Holland
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“There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.”

ThinkingI CanMightFilmReadingSeeingActivityBenefitsCome UpMediumsAssociationSimulation
Author:Chris Ware
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“My reason [for making my own paint] is to force a real-time experience of the work. Most work today is experienced by reproduction, and more specifically by computer screen, like jpegs, but an RGB simulation of fluorescent will never fully accurately depict some colors. For example, our eyes are a lot more sophisticated than you might assume. You can feel a lot more going on on the surface of a canvas than you can on the surface of a screen.”

FeelsRealReasonMightEyeTodayForceMy OwnExampleColorComputerAssumingPaintSurfaceScreensSophisticatedCanvasReproductionSimulationComputer Screen
Author:Ryan McGinness
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“The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.”

IfsMenMindFirstsSelfShowsTurnsFallThreeGoes OnSpeechAdvantageFairsThirdsLaysIntentionSurpriseDeceptionOppositionManifestFreedom Of SpeechReservesDeclarationRetreatFreedom Of ThoughtAdverseSimulationLet Him Go
Book:Essays
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“For most problems found in mathematics textbooks, mathematical reasoning is quite useful. But how often do people find textbook problems in real life? At work or in daily life, factors other than strict reasoning are often more important. Sometimes intuition and instinct provide better guides; sometimes computer simulations are more convenient or more reliable; sometimes rules of thumb or back-of-the-envelope estimates are all that is needed.”

PeopleImportantRealSometimesProblemFoundNeededComputerMathematicsInstinctIntuitionGuidesReal LifeFactorsMathematicalReasoningDaily LifeStrictConvenientThumbsFacts Of LifeTextbooksEnvelopesSimulation
Author:Lynn Steen
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“Photography is a great adventure in thinking and looking, a wonderful magic toy that miraculously manages to combine our adult awareness with the fairy-tale world of childhood, a never-ending journey through great and small, through variations and the realm of illusions and appearances, a labyrinthine and specular place of multitudes and simulation.”

ThinkingWorldWonderfulMagicJourneyChildhoodAwarenessAdventurePhotographyIllusionAdultsAppearanceTalesManageRealmsFairyFairy TaleToysMultitudesVariationNever EndingSimulationGreat Adventure
Author:Luigi Ghirri
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