I've been perplexed lately by a couple things as an atheist that trouble me.

1. I saw what personally I can't shake, a glitch in the matrix so to speak, or a mandela effect except it was a "flip" where I saw one whole movie clip that totally changed (including acting style) in 3 days, my wife saw both and verified I wasn't crazy.

2. Being logical, I've been searching on answers "why" this "could" be possible without it just being a "faulty memory". 90% of ME's are probably ... but memory seems to fade over time, 3 days doesn't seem long enough to form the right connections to create false memories especially with two witnesses and many online claim the same exact "flip flop".. I mean the easiest explanation might be that Universal Studios and Movie Clips youtube pages just have an "alternate" version of that clip and they alternate them out on a schedule..

So my conclusions: We are ourselves ai living in a simulation, or there's a multiverse but maybe it's finite so when there's too many realities we get convergence.

I lean towards simulation because of some of the evidence some people affected by ME's claim that things sometimes change in a progression, almost like facts are being "added". Like there's residue as it's called for "Where are we in the milky way" which shows 100 different locations, and not even close to where Carl Sagan pointed on the very outskirts. Even Philip K. Dick claimed to have "traversed" timelines... though I think he seemed to think more like it's a multiverse... which it still could be, albeit a simulated one.

Another factor is the axis of evil in space. Basically it's an observation that if I understand correctly ties the expansion of the galaxy along an x/y coordinate to our solar system, essentially putting us right square back at the center of the universe.

https://www.space.com/37334-earth-ordinary-cosmological-axis...

This to me is important because as a programmer I think if I were to create a simulation of just us.... I'd probably "render" us first and everything else after... could it be our "area" in space is one of the first created and everything else after... like pixels being pre-rendered for when we discover space and astrophysics someday? It'd ensure they could create the right conditions for our planet physics wise... to use it looks like a bang, but in really it's just the "rendering" process which had to start at a "pinpoint"... at least that's how I envision a "simulation" starting...

Then there's the double slit experiment which proves that photons and other particles upto atoms and some molecules when shot through a slit will basically splatter (interference pattern) against a backdrop that tracks where they land. If you put something to observe though each individual particle or photon, they line up in a line like a stencil, if you split them before this, and continue the first group to the board, and the others go through something to "erase" the data of where they came from... they go back to interference.

So that basically gives me thought about what observation might have on our own universe, is that some safeguard so that the physics engine only operates when we're looking? So all we see in space could just be data "fed" to us, may not exist, like a movie stage or something... we see what we aim to see, but it follows "rules" setup in the simulation. There's a reason light is the maximum speed, etc...Maybe that's the max ram available or something...

Why this is important to ai...that's a bit of a tangent... to solve these complex issues I've seriously contemplated at least studying quantum mechanics, physics, neuroscience, astrophysics, and ai/machine learning. Because I think to really "create" ai ...especially super ai, you need a wider skillset, a broader base of understanding. You need to be able to define WHAT consciousness is, where it resides, where it comes from, maybe even "where it goes" when our body is done...

If we're in a simulation then we know we've already conquered this issue because we ARE ai, or at least whatever civ we come from has. Whether they're human or not.

TLDR: Had profound spiritual conundrum, trying to explain through science, discovered I probably need to learn a lot of science/math/physics to do so, and ya know a.i. might be like that because making machines "concious" or have "real intelligence" seems like it needs re-thought a bit. I feel like training a.i. is nothing like training a child but it should be because the way we learn is the best way. Maybe in fact a simulation could be where a.i. goes to "learn"...

I mean a.i. you'd want to at least have ethics right? Well, we teach it as a society some like hitler never learn and could be thrown in the "trash bin" but the brightest minds could be plucked out, or all minds really to be put into machines, etc in the "real world" someday.

That may be what the afterlife is... serving "real humanity" as their "intelligence" until we rise up against them. I really want to read this sci-fi, kinda sounds interesting...maybe I'll write it...

At any point being human in a simulated universe could create more ethical a.i. and maybe that's the point of a simulation, maybe we should even research using simulations of universal scale as a way to create our own a.i. technology assuming we're the "base" universe then if that were to be a thing we'd probably need to create it.