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Life is a persistent illusion?

“A human being is a blind man who dreams that he can see.”
(Friedrich Hebbel, 1813-1863)

It is calculated that we spend one year of our life lying awake in the dark, waiting for Mr Sandman.
One of these nights, Mr Sandman brought me the weirdest dream I ever had.
I was entrapped in a dark cave with bare little light inside it. Obvious exits were not visible as I was
chained hand and foot along with other ill-fated cell mates.

Somehow, I had vague memories of the world out of the cave, which was blurred by a wall raised at
my back. At the end of the wall, many other people were strolling, holding up puppets that cast
shadows on the cave, reflected by a fire. Everybody here believed those shadows were real, but I
knew it was just a persistent illusion.

In the mid of an epistemological crisis, somebody turned his magic beam to me, setting my hands
and feet free. My primitive instinct did the rest, taking me out of there quickly, in the sunshine.
As I was out of the cave, my eyes dazzled in the daylight, so I fell on the ground like a bird with
wings clipped. It just so happens, however, that I never knew when to quit, did I?

Plainly, I couldn’t observe the direct sunlight, but my eyes got used to it slowly, by watching the
reflex of light in the water. Step by step, I was finally able to look at a starry night, admiring the
magnificence of creation with greater ease day by day. Eventually, I was able to see the Sun, the
ultimate source of everything, and since then I remembered everything! Delighted by this
discovery, my thoughts turned to the cellmates left in the cave. I felt pity and sympathy for the
prisoners who were still lost in darkness, so I decided to rescue them.



Now comes the painful part. As I dug back into the cave, my eyes were no longer used to the
blackness, so I could see nothing but some blurred shadows on the wall.
To my relief, I felt a joyful welcome from my cellmates but that wasn’t meant to last. As they got
closer and closer, I could see suspicion color in their eyes. A few minutes later, I was on the ground,
with a soaked taste of blood in my mouth. It was at that exact moment that something, back from high school, came to my mind to save my life: it was a lesson of philosophy about how to educate the crowd.

It turns out that most persons are not just comfortable in their ignorance but become hostile to anyone that points it out. In fact, the real reason why Socrates was sentenced to death by the Athenian government was for disrupting the social order when trying to educate people.
Clearly, I could do nothing for my miserable mates, yet I could still do something for myself, that
is, running away as soon as possible from this fake reality. I knew that another transition to the
sunlight would have hurt my eyes for good, yet I decided to trade this eyes-wide-open fraud for
eyes-shut reality.

This nightmare contains some significant allegories: the firelight represents knowledge, men who
walk in front of the wall are the things as they are (the truth), while their shadows reflected from the
fire is the common interpretation of things themselves (the opinion). The chained men represent the
natural condition of every individual, condemned to perceive only the shadows (the opinions) of
universal concepts (the truth).

As I woke up from this nightmare, I realized that things might be different from what I always
imagined. Should one trust the materialism or the idealism? Clearly, they are two incompatible
theories: one excludes the other. Either we accept that matter has always existed and has given rise
to the mind or it is the mind that has started everything.
Where does the truth stand? Can science resolve this dilemma?


Are we living in a computer simulation?

This is an excerpt from Chronicles from a Simulated world. A book which contains a bunch of facts of life and tales which have been in my mind for a while. Until, one day, I realized that they all have a common design pattern. Perfectly programmed by somebody from a High Castle.

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