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“Simulation Tobias kisses my neck.

I try to think. I have to face the fear. I have to take control of the situation and find a way to make it less frightening.

I look Simulation Tobias in the eye and say sternly, “I am not going to sleep with you in a hallucination. Okay?�

Then I grab him by his shoulders and turn us around, pushing him against the
bedpost. I feel something other than fear—a prickle in my stomach, a bubble of laughter. I press against him and kiss him, my hands wrapping around his arms. He feels strong. He feels…good.

And he’s gone.

I laugh into my hand until my face gets hot. I must be the only initiate with this fear.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks.
"I still don't understand," he says softly, "how she knew that it would work.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“Using fake feelings and relying on a trick box of artificial gadgets in order to create a simulation of desire, will not unravel the knotty puzzle to reinvent oneself. ( “Twilight of desire â€� )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

“If we are blinded by the razzle-dazzle of the limelight and can't even bring a little depth into our story, we must recognize that self-estrangement has besieged our minds, and reality has become a simulation. ("Was it all worthwhile?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. (Note: This quote is fake and does not appear in Simulacra and Simulation. I tried to delete it, but the system doesn't allow that because this quote has "too many fans" lol.)”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

“Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

“Something as superfluous as "play" is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, "Because it's fun." But that invites the next question: What is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

“It might not be immediately obvious to some readers why the ability to perform 10^85 computational operations is a big deal. So it's useful to put it in context. [I]t may take about 10^31-10^44 operations to simulate all neuronal operations that have occurred in the history of life on Earth. Alternatively, let us suppose that the computers are used to run human whole brain emulations that live rich and happy lives while interacting with one another in virtual environments. A typical estimate of the computational requirements for running one emulation is 10^18 operations per second. To run an emulation for 100 subjective years would then require some 10^27 operations. This would be mean that at least 10^58 human lives could be created in emulation even with quite conservative assumptions about the efficiency of computronium. In other words, assuming that the observable universe is void of extraterrestrial civilizations, then what hangs in the balance is at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 human lives. If we represent all the happiness experienced during one entire such life with a single teardrop of joy, then the happiness of these souls could fill and refill the Earth's oceans every second, and keep doing so for a hundred billion billion millennia. It is really important that we make sure these truly are tears of joy.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“How do we know that even the realest of realities
wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?”
― Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron 3

“Doomsday, when it came, wouldn't be a physical phenomenon; it would be an
all-inclusive erasure of simulectronic circuits.”
― Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron 3

“What? You mean the people don't know they are in a simulation?" asked Steve.
"That's right, " said Bob.
"There is a small blocking program that prevents them from taking the idea of their
world being a simulation seriously.”
― Peter Clifford Nichols, The Word of Bob: an AI Minecraft Villager

“Everything has value only when ranked against something else; everyone has value only when ranked against someone else. Every situation is win-lose, unless it is win-win—a situation where players are free to collaborate only because they seek prizes in different games. The real world appears as a video arcadia divided into many
and varied games.”
― McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

“The roads traveled more are often synonymous
to treadmill.”
― Rajesh Walecha

“Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simluation

“Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, women as the sexual scenarios, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem to only exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn’t just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“Today, America no longer has the same hegemony, no longer enjoys the same monopoly, but it is, in a sense, uncontested and uncontestable. It used to be a world power, now it has become a model (business, the market, free enterprise, performance) â€� and a universal one â€� even reaching as far as China.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America

“What is the nature of this confusing way station between birth and (usually) death accompanied by obliteration of identity we call home?

Planet, plane, simulation, hallucination, hell, heaven on
earth � The hypotheses as to this realm’s true character are as many as there are bored conspiracy theorists tapping away on crusty laptops in their parents� basements.

But what if the childishly simple answer to our
conundrum is given away in this aphorism popularized in ‘Row Row Row Your Boatâ€�: ‘Life is but a dreamâ€�?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“Are we truly awake while experiencing the tangible world around us? Or are we adrift in a dream flux of illusions, our senses hoodwinking us at every turn?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“What if the world we inhabit—with all its confounding
complexities and contradictions—is nothing more than an elaborate stage set, a grand illusion orchestrated by a poorly understood force? If this were true, how could we possibly know for certain? What signs or signals might betray the actual nature of our world and our place in it?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“A sudden sense of déjà vu, a feeling of being secretly observed, a recurring dream that seems eerily factual. What if these aren’t the misfirings of our own warped brains, random occurrences with no deeper meaning? What if they’re actually subtle hints, whispers from the multiverse urging us to question our reality?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“If we’re indeed, like Neo in THE MATRIX, “living in a dream world,â€� the inevitable questions then become: Can we wake up? If so, how do we wake up? What exactly awaits us if and when we do wake up?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“We are all just playing some stupid role in a stupid movie that we all wrote.”
― Jack Freestone

“For anyone desiring to go beyond this world’s illusory limits, the most important thing is to avoid accepting anything anyone (including yours truly) asserts as ‘factâ€� without personally testing it with an open mind â€� and heart.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“This world is nothing more or less than an intricate dance of energy, a sea of swirling possibilities where everything is constantly in flux.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“The observer effect puts our everyday perceptions and assumptions in a blender. It dictates—if we’re to be honest with ourselves, sober in our thinking, and not reactionary in our emotions—that the world we see is NOT the ultimate reality, but merely a projection of it.

From this perspective the manifest world is revealed as what Hindu mystics referred to as maya, illusion, the imaginal outpourings of minds—like children naturally playing in magical constructs that seem eminently real—simply doing what minds do.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“As we learn to appreciate the waltz of shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, we begin to grasp that the solid ‘objectsâ€� we think of as ourselves are merely illusions moving through a greater illusion.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“The world can most definitely be changed, but not by using the materialist ways we’ve been taught designed to keep us beating our heads against the walls and bars of the ‘real world.â€�

To change this designedly dysfunctional construct, which our own co-opted creative attention is actually responsible for materializing and maintaining, we must first change ourselves.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality