brief notes and qualifiers:
at least one sense in which there is no fact of the matter that is not "ultimately" empty and nebulous and "spontaneous" i.e. not up to you per se
at least one sense in which you don't need to figure anything out
at least one sense in which there's nothing to figure out
*
"But when people become enlightened or whatever, they often say they’ve “become one with the Universe”. This has always seemed dubious; even the obscure species of aphid we haven’t catalogued yet? Even the galaxies outside our lightcone?"
"I propose a friendly amendment: they’re noticing that most of what they are - the vast majority of their brain - is a giant predictive model of the universe. This model is big enough that they have lived inside it their entire life, with only slight edits from lossy sensory information that help fit it to the real universe. I’ve written about this before in the context of lucid dreaming - a dreamer safe in bed can apparently wander their neighborhood, seeing each tree and car and dog in detail approximately equivalent to waking experience. No astral projection is involved - they’re wandering around their internal world-model, which contains 99% of the relevant information, with real sensory information filling in the missing 1%. Once you stop obsessing over the character you’re playing, you notice the GIANT SUPER-ACCURATE WORLD MODEL TAKING UP 99.99% OF YOUR BRAIN and you think huh, I guess I’m the Universe."
---from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators [Last accessed: 2023-02-17]
(This is really great, though it's leaving out something I haven't articulated, yet. I've said something similar (still not the just-aforementioned unarticulated thing) above in this section and in one or two other places if you search for "kosmos" in the document and possibly elsewhere, too.)