An Experience Machine parable
I'm an adherent to the law of attraction. I believe that your thoughts have a vibration and that vibration attracts more of the same into your life. If you think good thoughts, act good acts, and feel good feelings you will attract more good things - to put it really simply.
In this article, I would like to illustrate how and why it works as it does and try to show you an argument to explain why it is as it is.
There are three concepts that all relate to it, but before we get into that, I would like to point out that it is really just a metaphor. With each paradigm shift in humanity's history, the metaphor has changed - vibrations, alchemy, magic, gods, higher-dimensional beings, aliens - they all were deemed responsible for the Law and they were all just a metaphor - as is my story here. The truth of the Law is probably much more complex than this. But then again... maybe we are getting closer and closer.
Ok, first of all, an Experience Machine - a kind of full-dive virtual reality (VR) - think about the Matrix movie - that lets you experience anything and everything you want to experience as if it was real. Pretty easy.
Next is the modern art of AI and its prompts. Basically, the software creates nice pictures based on the words you put into them. You describe what you want to see in as much detail as possible and the machine learning system creates it for you based on the description - the prompt.
Now there is a world-famous thought experiment by Nick Bostrom called the simulation hypothesis argument that goes like this:
the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage;
any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);
we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
In “simulations all the way down” there are a great many simulations. So big is the number that the chance that you and I exist in the true unsimulated reality is negligible.
As you can imagine, this is absolutely incomprehensible and surreal for most minds, and it will sound like a joke to them. Their minds are simply not ready to process this simple truth. Either we are on the verge of Armageddon, or we are most likely in a simulated reality.
Even if we destroy ourselves, the number of civilizations that do not will over time greatly outnumber those that do by the simple evolutionary principle. And we are back at the simulation all the way down.
Bostrom's argument argues for "ancestors simulation" - think along the lines of a historical documentary. But I would argue that it won't be used for history lessons - it will be used for entertainment. It will be a computer game. An experience machine.
It will be an AI-guided VR game. And as any computer game, it wants nothing more than player engagement - it craves your attention. As per the simulation argument, you are probably already in it. And that prompts control VR and those prompts will be (or, indeed, are) your thoughts.
If you engage with fear, you will get more things to be afraid of. If you preoccupy your mind with anger, you will get more things to be angry at. If you think about love and happiness… I guess that at this point you get the gist ;)
So in summary - you are living in an Experience Machine and every thought you ever had is a prompt for generating your world and that's how the law of attraction operates.
Learn to control your thoughts and gain control of your world. Direct your attention and direct the story of your world. Positive thinking - quite literally - makes for a positive life.
Now consider how close we are to actually creating this. Or another layer? We have VR, NeuraLink to read your mind and connect to your senses directly, machine learning AI-generated photorealistic videos, and the unreal engine and similar that create graphics indistinguishable from reality. Plug a quantum computing in and you can never get out of this fractal rabbit hole