I Choose, Therefore I Am

Some may contend that you are not your thoughts, and while I understand the premise of the argument, your thoughts ultimately manifest within your brain and within your mind. Therefore, they  are effectively just as much as who you are as your hand and your nose. 

Perhaps the more interesting aspect of our thoughts is that they can be both involuntary and voluntary. At times, we have thoughts that germinate seemingly out of nowhere and streak through our minds. They can be trivial such as what we plan to eat for dinner, or what time we will head to the gym. Or, they can be deep thoughts that linger such as concern for a friend undergoing hardship.

Our involuntary thoughts stem from our unconscious mind which is continually operating without our awareness, hence their seemingly random nature. At the same time, we can conjure up thoughts proactively by simply thinking about something. Triggers from the simulation we live in can cause us to proactively think, and these triggers can combine with our memories to launch a thought that we hold and continue to think through. Whether it be studying for an exam or daydreaming about that vacation in the Seychelles, we have the ability to proactively think about anything we want to.

But what exactly are our thoughts? To answer this, we can use the analogy of a computer to describe how our mind operates:

CPU 

We have the ability to reason and to perform cognitive tasks. The pre-frontal cortex of our brain enables us to calculate mathematics and deduce logic. It is in effect our Central Processing Unit, or CPU and it is the key enabler of processing thoughts. 

GPU

Emotions, and feelings generated from the stimulus of our bodily physiological sensors are processed around the activities of the amygdala of our brain. This includes what we call qualia, or the subjective and conscious experience of the simulation we are in. The taste of chocolate. The feeling of getting tickled. Sensations that we struggle to describe in words without using labels or synonyms. Much like the Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU in a computer, this is what generates our experiential dimension of the simulation.

Memory

Memory chips and hard drives store data with permanence that can be retrieved and incorporated into our thoughts. Our brains have different memory storage units with the hippocampus being the main vault. Emotions play a big role in storage as described earlier, and highly charged emotional memories even have a “4K high definition” special storage chamber in our minds. 

System Bus

If you look inside your laptop, there is what is called a motherboard. It is the main system board that is flat, usually green or brown that everything plugs into. That represents the system bus and in our brains, it is the web or neural networks consisting of over 100 trillion synaptic connections. 

Together, all these system components connect with each other in your computer to produce or generate something. What is that something? Well, it could be music, videos, programs to help you generate content, browsers to access the internet, and the list goes on. You tell the computer to do something, and it obliges.

In our minds, the “something” that is being produced is the rendering of reality from the simulation that we are in. It could be seeing, listening, tasting, walking, running, laughing, crying, and the list goes on. Our minds spin up and render a version of reality based on where we are in this simulation.

Our thoughts are actually part of the rendering process of this reality. They are a product of the simulation, generated by our minds, and are ephemeral except for memories that we may have of our thoughts. The key distinction to make here is that our thoughts are not part of the simulation, but rather a rendering resulting from it. That means, our thoughts cannot be directly measured by science or any other means within the simulation itself. Sure, we can measure brainwave activity using electromagnetic scanners but they are merely measuring byproducts and not the actual thoughts. Our thoughts need to be translated into the simulation, through our bodies before they can be interacted with. 

As such, our thoughts are part of the spiritual realm separate from and beyond the simulation itself. The same goes for our consciousness and experience of our emotions, feelings, and other bodily sensations. These experiences cannot be measured nor can it even be properly described as they are beyond the simulation - hence the difficulty of explaining qualia such as what sweet actually tastes like.

When Descartes famously said “I think, therefore I am” he was referring to the aforementioned thoughts that work in conjunction with our memories and cognitive reasoning abilities to form our mind - all propelled by the biological machine that we call our brain.

Let me take the analogy one step further: our thoughts are actually a means to an end - they exist to serve a critical purpose. Our thoughts lay the foundation and ground work, together with our emotion and memories so that we can accomplish the single most important function of existence in this simulation: making choices.

< The is an excerpt from the upcoming FoFty Manuscript. It is from the chapter called: “Spawn Again” which talks about how to respawn yourself in this simulation and evolve from being a Non-Playable Character (NPC) to a Respawned Playable Character (RPC) >