In digital marketing there is a tactic called “retargeting” where you basically put a pixel on your page and it attaches to a visitor’s IP and serves personalized ads to them based on the page/product they were looking at. Before I knew what this was, I had no explanation for it – it appeared like synchronicity, like the universe (or my phone) was listening to me.
Outside the digital world, maybe this works as an analogy to understand how the universe might feed back to us what we put in. This leads us to the prospect that reality is simulated before our eyes. To me, this is an undeniable conclusion – but perhaps not in the sense most fans of The Matrix might guess.
What we experience is not what is there. At least not the totality. What is there is information. Way too much information. Noise. Our senses filter this information through a narrow lens that is functional and advantageous to us. The device you read this on is not a solid, coherent or even discrete object. Somehow, it is mostly empty space. Secondarily its an undulating mass of energy. Yet to us, the subject, it appears as an object. Our experience is inherently synthetic. Simulated. Though not by a computer, by ourselves and the universe we are embedded within.
And yet, computer analogies seem to be so useful as a way of understanding processes of the mind/brain/universe. Why? We don’t think like computers because we are one, computers think like us because, like any good creator, we designed them in our own image. Perhaps, like us, our creator didn’t know what it was getting to.
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