printf

The universe has many ways of looking at itself. My personal favorite:

/* Hello Universe program */

#include<stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("Hello Universe");


}

I am a 13.72 billion year old response policy designed to fire the imagination laser. The realization of this response results from a simulation with particular variables set to:
3.14159 = pi
2.997e8 = c
1.38e-23 = k
and so on.The simulation 'starts' with a vibrating string that modulates a gravity wave in a grain of matter emerging as the white hole of a black hole in 'another' universe. An imagination laser 'from' that other universe fires into a particular point in space time prepared by particular kinds of intelligence simulated in that universe by a response policy with slightly different universal constants. That effort, induced by intelligences in yet another universe firing an imagination laser, searches for new universi by randomly setting universal constants for each new universe.

It's turtles all the way down.
One cartoonish vision of this stack of turtles is The Matrix. Another equally valid simulation appears here. In fact, these films represent a facet of many probable stages in urban primate development. There exists, somewhere and somewhen, many versions of this kind of simulation. But there are more probable futures awaiting the ape.

I am a printf statement; I take 18 years to boot, I must interact in certain ways with my fellows, I must chop cedar, I require weird parents, I depend on Lou Ann and Tobin as siblings, I am granted three US patents, and I am gifted with three sons and a granddaughter.

Another probable future, articulated in overcomingbias.com concerns a simulation result known as emulated minds or EMS. This nested simulation -- everything we experience is a simulation embedded in another simulation -- gets labeled a reality worse than Hitler's Germany. With all due respect to Godwin, this is not even wrong. Hitler came from a simulation in which a war breaks out among all soveriegn states at a sufficiently complex level of development which then dissolves all governments ruled by inheritance of sovereign power (the divine right of kings) and leads almost immediately to a second war kicked off by a totalitarian mad man with an effective ad campaign selling war like soap flakes via a world wide media created to sell soap flakes.

Not the hope you expect

As Philip K Dick instructs us, this event ends in an infinite number of versions of a collapse of the wave function -- many Everett branches. We are all EMS and we have the kind of free will we can use and not the weak kind of free will we dream of.

The only release from suffering is detachment from an impermanent self. These are exactly the droids you were looking for. The README says simply "UBIK".