RE: Are We Living In A Simulation?

Like I said, we have woefully inadequate brains - if that's even relevant - to understanding the universe. We're lucky to be able to tie shoes.

You wanna know something weird about pricked fingers? When I was a kid in Alaska the beach was my main playground. We lived right on it. At really high tides the water would lap up against the basement door, and if that happened to coincide with a storm, the basement would flood. Once a fair sized log actually bashed the basement door open, and after the storm subsided Dad had to cut it up with a chainsaw to be able the shut the door again.

The beach was all large boulders, from the size of an easy chair, to the size of a small car, and in some places there were outcroppings of basaltic bedrock, like the cabins and decks of ships proudly rising up above the lesser rocks around them. Lot's of tidepools. For fun we would catch the little fish in the tidepools, tiny sculpins from an inch to several inches long. We came up with all sorts of ways to catch them, from little harpoon guns made with clothespins, matchsticks, and sewing needles, to tiny little fishing rods with thread strings to which bait was attached, to the good 'ol snatch with a bare hand. That last was the most challenging, because these sculpins had absolutely amazing burst speed, and reaction time that was ridiculously daunting, so that was my favorite. I was always trying to best the best, as it were, to be faster than these faster little fish.

The bait we used to attract them lived all over the rocks at low tide: the small snail-like limpets, like the Chinese hats from cartoons, and in fact that's what we called them. Chinese hats. I learned to quickly remove the limpets from the rocks they were on, which was almost as challenging as catching the sculpins, because they could suck down tight to the rocks very quickly and did (which is why there were any limpets at all, because most everything wanted to eat them, so if they were slow to suck tight to the rock, they were something's lunch), and I also learned how to scoop them out of their shells with a flick of my thumb, like flipping a coin.

One day I was going sculpin fishing and got a nice limpet. I scooped it from it's shell with my thumb. To my surprise the shell shattered. It must have been weak or something. Well, I had the bait, so I dropped it into a likely spot in a little tidal pond and lurked over it with my ready hand, like a heron or an egret poises still above the water, waiting to stab down and catch their dinner, as I awaited my prey. As I lurked motionless, I saw a drop hit the water below my hand. That was odd, because it wasn't raining, and I hadn't gotten wet. The drop was inexplicable.

I turned my hand and looked at it intently. I saw my thumb was bleeding profusely, the razor sharp conchoidal fracture of the hard shell had sliced deep into the pad of my thumb so easily I hadn't even felt the pressure of it pushing through the meat of my thumb. I hadn't felt it at all, despite I was deeply cut and bleeding.

But I suddenly felt it then! As soon as I saw I was bleeding, the sharp, burning pain of the cut was very much noticed. It really hurt! Now, I was only eight but I instantly realized that the pain of the wound was entirely in my mind, that it was only because I could see that I was cut that it hurt at all, as it hadn't hurt at all until I saw it. I tried to not hurt from the cut.

No such mastery of my mind was potential to me. Now that I saw the cut, I hurt - a lot - and no matter that I knew the pain was all in my mind, I couldn't not hurt by any mental mastery of my mind. I ran back to the house, clutching my oozing thumb hard enough to slow the blood loss like a tourniquet of fear, crying, for Mom to kiss it and make the pain stop by putting a bandage on it. And that's exactly what happened (I don't recall the kiss, which would have been kinda gross, because it was bleeding pretty good). The bandage substantially reduced the pain, and after a bit I could even ignore it.

All these sensations and realizations made considerable impression on my young mind, and have informed me ever since. I am convinced to this day that explains why people shot in the head multiple times never even felt it, because they didn't see it, and other such unseen, unnoticed injuries were similarly not painful. I was also convinced that a spiritual guru could decide to not feel pain, but that such mastery of my mind was something I hadn't achieved, and never expected to, because such self mastery was like wishing I could fly and flying.

I did attain a degree of self control though. I didn't have to cry when I got injured and could maintain my composure well enough to handle cleaning and dressing a wound, and whatever extraction or such that needed to be done. But wounds didn't not hurt, and I still reckoned it should be within my power to control whether they did or not. Lacking that self mastery is an indictment of my competence as a rational being, to my mind. In the decades since then I have occasionally again been injured without noticing it while I was busy doing some work or other, only spotting the injuries later. Sometimes those injuries never did hurt, because by the time I noticed them they were scabbed over, but I don't account that as that zen mastery I thought was potential as a child, because injuries generally quit hurting after a while. It just demonstrated that sometimes having nerves isn't enough to get the signal that we've been injured, and sometimes, for whatever reason, we need to notice we've been injured to feel it.

Kinda sad still about not being a zen master spiritual guru. I disappoint me. I console myself that at least I can restrain my composure during injurious events and act rationally when between rocks and hard places while I extricate myself instead of just thrashing about like a fish on a hook. Even Paul Atreides felt the pain of the Gom Jabbar, after all, and only needed to not pull his hand back in order to be considered human. At least I am human.