Living Vicariously In The Mind-Created Simulation Of Reality
The knowledge needed to play a game is the same thing as that game; the information that we need to have in order to operate within the simulation is that simulation. Whatever comes out of the system is that very same system — whatever it does is ‘itself’, and ‘itself’ is all it can ever do. To learn how to play the game it is necessary to allow ourselves to be wholly defined by the game, which is just another way of saying that to learn to play the game is to learn to be who (or what) the game says we are; to learn to operate effectively within the simulation is the same thing as learning to be the simulation of us…
This is what adapting to a formal system means — it means that we are learning to be that system, it means that we are allowing ourselves to be subsumed and replaced by that system. Adapting to the system means throwing away (or turning our backs on) anything about us that the system doesn’t specifically approve of or acknowledge as being real — it means that we are letting the system ‘recreate us in its own image’, therefore. Once the system (or the simulation) has re-made us in its own image then we are free to operate within it as we please — we have been given ‘the keys to the city’, so to speak. The simulated world is our oyster and we can do with it as we please. We have ‘optimised our performance within the given context’, we have become ‘masters of the game.’
This sounds great to us of course. It’s what we want — it’s absolutely what we want. Optimising our performance with the artificial context that has been given to us is what we all do, just about all of the time. Our energy goes into ‘optimising our performance within whatever game it is we are playing’ (irrespective of what that game might be). Getting better and better at doing whatever it is that we are already doing is a logic that we just can’t see past! If we were playing the game at all then it makes sense that the only thing which matters is getting better at it, getting more secure in it. When everyone else is ‘doing the thing ‘then the logic of the situation tells us loud and clear that we have to be able to do the thing as well (at least as well as all the other players, and hopefully better). This is how society works — we don’t question what everyone else is doing, we just want to be able to do it too (which is called ‘fitting in’, which is called ‘being normal’…)
It might seem like the smart move to optimise our performance with regard to the game that is society but in reality it’s the furthest thing from ‘a smart move’ that anything ever could be. Optimising our game means (as we’ve just said) defining ourselves more and more narrowly in terms of that game. We adapt ourselves to the system so much that we ‘become the system’s version of us’; by learning how to function well in the simulation we become simulations ourselves — we become extensions of the simulation that we are adapting to. At this point — when we achieve the magical goal of 100% adaptation — we are awarded the freedom of the city, we are given carte blanche, we are granted the freedom to do whatever we want, but this is virtual freedom not the real thing. The system’s version of me is free to do anything it wants within the context of that system; the simulation of who I am is at liberty to do anything (or think anything it wants), just so long as it stays strictly within the jurisdiction of that simulation.
This is a very peculiar form of freedom, therefore — the system’s version of me is free to do anything it wants to within the context of that system, but what does this all add up to? The system’s version of who I am is simply the system, no more and no less, and so what we’re saying here is that the system is free to do whatever the system wants within the world which it itself has created (i.e., within the world which is its own extension). Everything that the system (or simulation does) is the enactment of the very same tautology therefore, and ‘the freedom to enact a tautology’ isn’t any sort of freedom at all! What we’re looking at here is ‘the freedom to do something that isn’t real but which we mistakenly believe to be so’. A tautological development may look like a development, but there is actually no ‘developing’ going on; when we enact a tautology this may feel as if we’re ‘acting out something’ (or ‘doing something’) but we’re not. A tautology means that we think something is happening when it isn’t — there is the appearance of something happening but there’s no content to it and this is the definition of illusion, the definition of a mirage, the definition of an hallucination…
To not see the tautology to be a tautology is to be trapped in it, therefore. We succumb to the power of the illusion, we become the victims of an incredibly potent form of hypnosis (or ‘mind-slavery’). In a situation such as this we can hardly be said to be free, therefore — if my consciousness has been enslaved, as we have said, by the hypnotic power of the tautology-producing simulation then that would pretty way much do away with the argument that there is freedom in our ordinary, everyday, thought-directed lives. There can be no freedom in a simulation, and it is — we might say — precisely this lack of freedom that manifests itself as tautology. When we get sucked up in the closed circle of logic which is the system, which is the simulation, then we are unfree without knowing that we are; we don’t know that we’re unfree because we’ve been caught up in the process of illusory or superficial change that is there enactment of that otology. It is by playing the game that we render ourselves oblivious to the fact that we’re doing so, and the thing about this is that we’re not free to not play we’re living under the Law of Compulsion, the Law of Precedence, the Law of Immutable Habit, and this law won’t let us stop playing. The playing of the game is the tautology, and we are compelled to keep on playing it, enacting it, by virtue of the fact that there is simply no freedom in the game to do otherwise.
Where we to be somehow rescued from this state of being hypnotised by the illusion (which is which is like the situation where Lot’s wife gets turned into a pillar of salt for looking backwards when she shouldn’t have done) then we would be properly free, but it wouldn’t be freedom in the sense that we would ordinarily understand the term. When we think of freedom we think of it in terms of ‘the freedom for this conditioned sense of identity to do whatever it has been conditioned to want to do’ (or ‘the freedom of the simulation of who I am to do whatever it is programmed to do within the remit of the simulation’) but — as is very apparent from what we have just said — what we’re talking about here has nothing to do with freedom. It isn’t freedom that we on about here but the empty ‘acting out’ of compulsion. When there is true freedom then there is no one there to make ‘use ‘of it, there’s freedom alright but there’s no one there to enjoy it. If there had to be someone there to enjoy the freedom (a static ‘reference point’, so to speak) then there wouldn’t be any freedom; instead, we’d just have a ‘loop of logic’, instead, there’d be the simulation of the one who is unknowingly enacting the tautology (and cannot help enacting the tautology), and who is themselves (as a second-order phenomenon) being produced by this activity. The illusion of there being someone who has to act out the tautology is created by the acting out of that tautology.
We might be inclined to lose patience at this point and object that this is an utterly nonsensical proposition since the cause of an event can’t also be the effect of that same event. The cause causes the effect and not the other way around! If this happened it would a logical error of the highest order — it would constitute the sort of error that would invalidate absolutely everything, the sort of error that will cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down all around our ears. The game would be well and truly ‘up’ in this case. We are arguing here that logic can’t be self-contradictory since logic — by its very nature — doesn’t allow self-contradiction, but this argument doesn’t hold water. When we view the world from a fixed viewpoint we straightaway become incapable of seeing the self-contradiction in that VP, but that doesn’t means that the paradox isn’t there — it just means that we are bound to ‘unconsciously act it out’ in everything we do. The game itself comes down to precisely that sort of activity that distances us from being able to see the self-contradiction that is in it; the whole point of the game is to stop us seeing that the game is only a game. We might object to this definition on the grounds that it is hopelessly tautological (which it obviously is) but just as the definition is a paradoxical or self-contradictory one, so too is the game that we’re talking about. The game is not different from the definition of it, the game isn’t a real thing but a logical description of a (supposedly) real thing, and it exists therefore in Virtual Space, which the space of our descriptions.
Saying that a game (like logic in general) is ‘self-referential’ or ‘tautological’ or ‘self-contradictory’ in nature are different ways of saying that there is no genuine space in it, only space of the theatrical nature. This is the essential nature of the conditioned life — for everything to be forever turning around on itself, for everything to be trapped in orbit around itself. We think that there are such things as ‘a fixed forms’ but in reality there aren’t. There is only ‘the rotation of the wheel’ — movement occurs in a positive direction but then goes back on itself on the reverse stroke, such that the movement in the one direction exactly equals the subsequent counter-movement in the opposite direction. This is the only type of movement that can ever come out of self-referentiality — SR is ‘a loop of logic that can’t escape itself’.
When I’m ‘Living life by Proxy in the Designed World’ (when I’m ‘Living Life Vicariously in the Simulation’) then this situation can be seen on two levels of meaning. Firstly, there is the level of meaning that is being ‘offered up’, the level that is being presented, the level that is being described or stated, and this is where I am being described as being ‘an independent causal agent’ who exists within an objectively existing world that is not ‘me’. This is ‘the Nominal Level of Meaning’, this is how the game itself demands that we play it. Secondly, on the unstated level, on the covert level of meaning, the situation is that the Simulation is simulating me as well as simulating the environment that I am existing within. This means that there is no independence causal agent (or self) and no objectively existing world for that supposed agent to operate within. ‘The game’ and ‘the player of the game’ are the same thing, and that ‘same thing’ is the ongoing exercise in runaway self-referentiality that we keep talking about; the game and the player of the game constitute the ongoing enactment of the revolving tautology which is the ‘conditioned sense of identity’.
