My sense is that we already live in a virtual reality, but that in order for such vast numbers of people to relate, there have to be the most basic common denominators, thus a normalcy bias, yet the scientists haven't found any foundational substrate. Tiny vibrating strings?
Consider time;
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is as the present going past to future, yet the evident reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
It is like a tapestry being woven of strands constantly being pulled from what was woven.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
The energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorting the patterns, signals from the noise and the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
Meaning the mind is not so much source of consciousness, but referee of it bubbling up in all its various wants, needs, desires, curiosities, hopes, fears, etc. Motor and steering.
Consider as well that galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
Then apply that to our dichotomy of the anarchies of desire versus the tyrannies of judgement.
How might this express in other forms?
We are surrounded by other forms of life in this ecosystem, so rather than projecting our current technologies, we might explore the ranges of interactions and energies.
We exist in this ocean of radiant energies, of which we have recently harnessed as forms of communication and interaction. Given our physiology has been evolving for billions of years, might we already incorporate this basic physical reality into our biological reality?
When you go walking down the street, passing all those other people, do you sense their energies, their auras? Some refer to them as "floaters." Those dark spots in the vision considered optical flaws. Might they be others sense of perception interacting with our own bubbles of perception? Remember consciousness as energy.
I have been exploring them my whole life and there are infinite layers, of how others mental interactions affect the mutual environment and reflect into my own.
Then following the news, I sense these larger thermodynamic cycles of expansion and consolidation, building out and breaking down. Waves rising and falling.
Trying to understand consciousness and life as our current focus on the singular would be like trying to make sense of a radio, without taking radio waves into consideration.
One is the node, oneness is the network.
"Entangled particles."
