magic

As Above, So Blow
benjamin harubin 2016
image manipulation series

what is subjectivity vs. objectivity, and what is science, exactly?
to what degree can we be objective?
if everything that we know is in our heads, is there such a thing?
well, a well-developed ToM (Theory of Mind) strongly persuades us that if others can reach the same conclusions as we, then that indicates we are on to an objective truth.
so...  consensus is an indicator of objectivity.
repeatability...  and a common tongue.  

but many have pointed out that there may be many un-examined assumptions underlying scientific truths (not to mention the herd mentality (ok, i won't)).
there are always underlying assumptions or biases, many of them pre-verbal, due to the structure of our type of consciousness as developed over billions of years.
we as a species can never have a truly objective science.

only god can know everything.

whether you believe in H*M or not, the idea is still resonant as absolute perfection or knowability, still informing the hardest science of physics, i.e., if you can understand matter at the smallest of scales, you can predict the fate of the universe.  Plato in a Can.  better let him out, then. 

VISUALIZATION

maybe we aren't so special, but dance we must

Bome 17
benjamin harubin 2021
 collage in silico (.jpg)

call it a visualization- a visual model of a set of vortices- a channel for solar photons and jumping electrons- a set of instructions for a chlorophyll molecule- that is what you are and you are also a floater interfering with another's visualization- and inside that there is another set of reasons that unpredictably give rise to what is and reasons why what is must be so.

Think About It

 

Think About It

"If at All"
benjamin harubin 2021
electronic composite

a shrine, a picture on the wall

when you pass, every day at a certain time

think about it 

it is whatever it is that's troubling you, my child

it is a nice, clear day

it is a more comprehensive thought than whatever it is that you are thinking about now

contemplate the context: a context warning, a context blessing, a survey of available resources

it is the World

it is the Ocean

it is the Universe

it is God

it is the Brain

it is your Brain

ok, go

i dreamt that i watched the news

I was dreaming when i wrote this, but my memory of the dream remains fragmentary. Nevertheless, I am certain these following fragments are correctly recalled.  What does it mean?

i watched the history show

i saw how the story unfolded

it changed over the hour

remnant ambient
benjamin harubin 2021
corel photo paint file

the more i thought about it

it came over wires

we waved and waved

it didn't make sense 

until we grabbed the handle or 

the hook came down

activate the bundle

bundle of nerves

that signaled accordance

grabbed us by the handle

(that's how they get you)

but you can wiggle the knobs

you can wiggle the room a little

for interesting effects

a room you didn't know was there

more room in the dream

the dream dream dream

dream of night

dream of sight

dream of the serious world

(as you go to your day job)

past present future are

modes resonances

all right there

[now? there.]

accessible by feeling

memories- retracings of retracings

palimpsest of generations of generations

neural and glial since the soft bang

and subsequent decanting

always writing

monks in cells of cells

building painting

conquering collapsing

building new building new

i had impostor syndrome

IN A DREAM, LOL

 

...

FAKE NEWS

just looking through the unpublished drafts of this blog and noticed this one.  thought i'd dust off this one from a few years ago and give a quick varnish and publish it today.  it'd help me to continue posting on this blog if you gave a comment of any sort here so i know there's someone out there.

& FAKE MEM0Ri3z

There's been fake news as long as there have been humans. Longer, actually. Any language conveys information and information doesn't care about truth. It only cares about usefulness, whether it be to sender or receiver, both or a third party (such as the alien brain-sucking parasites known to science as the species Felis catus).   

Since the mainstream adoption of Fake News, there is the understanding that there are now Fake Markets, and apparently, Fake Knowledge. 

just remember all news is in tension or compression with some or all other news and serves the structural integrity of the PLANETARY WEB (!)

Echoes of the Past

...processed, compressed, retrieved from storage, emulated and hyperlinked. 

(The Anti-Timeist Agenda- part one)

"Predeceased"
benjamin harubin 2017
collage in silico

What is time?
Does it flow from a single source, read by the needle of consciousness, and pass into the oubliette of the past?
Are we standing in a river, never the same water again,
or are we floating down it on our way to the Death Sea?
Such is an insistence on this instant, this instant, while the past and the future are merely thinkings of things; memories and fantasies.  
But have some faith!
Do birds stop flying when you're not looking at them?

Imagine you're trapped in a giant eyeball, perhaps in nice tiny cabin atop an observation tower in the middle.
Light flows in through the pupil towards you- this is the flow of time, at the speed of light.
You can see that there are other openings, releasing dark sounds or gases or dust, each with their own rates, each intersecting and interfering with the others.  
Time is Plural.  
There are as many time streams as you care to notice, converging on your cabin, falling to the bottom, getting squashed, rotting and then getting sucked up by these other holes...  
Sometimes what goes in comes back out, echoed, but processed, compressed, retrieved from storage, emulated and hyperlinked. 
Never mind the moles.  

All in an instant.
Because you're just imagining this, right?
...And what are you?
The tick tock of a single clock assigned the task of coordinating the streams?
Or are you just standing too close to the cabin clock?
This convergence, this single clock is an illusion, however.  
It is a patch, a picture, a useful idea we call now, invented when first was uttered then.
The function of TIME is to extract useful information from multiple TIMES.
It's the TWiSM: the Timey-Wimey Spaghetti Matrix

Tectonics

Nugrug
benjamin harubin 2017
collage

Some say they believe in God and others say they don't or that they don't know.  
I say that human experience between all individuals is non-trivially similar in this regard.
Instead of God you might say Nature or the Government or the Past.
That is, there is some all-powerful force that is outside of you.
In all cases, there are unquestioned bases and unanalyzed assumptions, whether they be materialistic, theistic, animistic or etc.
Confronted with the ineffable vastness of conscious experience, 
we extract images, which extrapolated and reiterated, 
gain greater and greater weight and complexity 
to the point where now can say for certain what happened  
at 1 × 10^-42 seconds after the creation of the universe 
or how many angels can dance on the head of a fly's eye.  
We use these images to effect change in our experiences; 
to produce positive outcomes. 
We use these models to predict experience.
All of them are potentially useful, 
even as fragments folded again and again back into the ineffable vastness, 
resurfacing billions of years later, still influencing the collective structure.  






୫፥ງ

In Defense of "Art"

Any defense of monuments commemorating Confederate asshats citing the value of "Art" or "History" is completely bogus.  There are no such neutral or objective things.  History is fabricated by the winners, duh (albeit maybe "inspired by" actual events, or maybe not).  History is an art, and serves the needs of the state ("state" used in the broadest sense of the dominant power structures).  


Conversely, history and art can serve the needs of those who wish to fight the power; to right wrongs; to change the power structure and see justice done for the marginalized.  Hence we have revisionist history: re-writing the narrative to include that which has been glossed over in the urge to propagandize victory.  Thus we have such works as Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States".  But i don't think that this revisionism is destructive of the country; indeed it is a part of the country's (and the world's) process of growing up.  It is the process of coming to a new understanding and empathy for all of humanity.  

Artists have always been about this; telling truth to power.  Most of what we now recognize as the avant-garde in modern art was meant as a slap in the face to "the establishment".  Think Francisco De Goya.  The reason we know about many of these artists over their contemporaries is that they shook things up.  Think Edouard Manet, spoiled rich brat though he was, insulted the piss out of the comfortable propriety of the ruling class.  

 
All good art involves destruction.  The clutter of insidious complacent symbols of state oppression need to be periodically recontextualized and repurposed.  Our contemporary history of art is a series of rebellions; either reflections of (or initiators of) great social, technological, or political change, much of it ultimately judged to be for the better.  

Those people defacing and tearing down statues are artists as much as Picasso or Banksy.  They're making cultural statements.  Deal with it.  Is nothing sacred?  All art is culture.  Culture is a dialog.  Art is fungible; part of a conversation.  The conversation is the way that humanity grows.  The old school will try to preserve their (illusory) entitlements and prevent this kind of change, but, as always, they're on the wrong side of history.   

Where will it stop?  OMG!  I hate to tell you but it's never going to stop.  One day we will be flying the flag of the United Federation of Planets.
Should Washington's Big Dick Monument be torn down?  No, but maybe crown it with a Pussy Hat to balance the forces.  Or better yet, crown it with a Jimmy Hat, to prevent the further propagation of War Babies.  

I agree that we shouldn't forget history.  Don't melt down all these offensive memorials, some of them need to go into special FAIL Museums and Gardens of Shame, so people can remember the idiocy.  Ultimately they will be just considered kitsch, when they have been robbed of their force.  

Some say that these things are just a part of the charm of "the Old South" and a part of "heritage".  REALLY?  So, you're ok with big box stores and the destruction of neighborhoods, but you want to preserve some crappy statue of some treasonous slaver dipshit??

Walk Down the Aisle

close your eyes.

"Object Five"
benjamin harubin 2017
in silico collage

there is a voice inside.
there's a voice of clarity and sense
that cannot be properly remembered
because of how insane it is 
measured by the ruler of our outside lives.

the voice wants to come out.
i am the interpreter for the alien,
if you are wondering how a light-years-distant being
can speak in such an odd, yet rooted vernacular.

they scold us from either side of the aisle
and we are distracted willy and nilly;
yanked along- the stuffed animal's paw is stuck in the leash, clipped to the dog, who barely notices in it's romp.
and the hall is only rented anyway.

they shout Liberal and Conservative, 
Socialist and Capitalist,
Hope and Fear.
and when they got you locked
you can't see the complexity.
you can't see the stunning fractal beauty of this system of worlds.

they shout from either side of the aisle
but you can walk.
you can walk down the aisle
you can walk up the aisle.
walk up to the front
and speak.
now open them.

WE ARE AS PLANTS TO THEM

benjamin harubin 2010
human plant communion
poster

IF, as the dominant scientific paradigms of evolution and astrophysics relate, there are some billion habitable planets in our island galaxy alone and evolution has proceeded for billions of years,  then it is almost a certainty that there exist beings in our space that are millions or billions of years more advanced than us hoomans in intelligence.  In fact there would be hierarchies of beings, just as we see within ourselves a hierarchy of biological orders: systems, organs, cells, organelles and molecules.
Just so as a single cell can exist as an individual living thing, given the right environment, we can exist as individual beings supposedly alone standing on the Erth.

What is the difference between having faith in a near certain probability of extra-terrestrial intelligent entities and having faith in a supreme being and a whole succession of prophets and angels and such?

They are both similar, related activities of the creative, dreaming brain.

We would be as plants to them, to grow and to reap.

And anyway, diehards, even IF Erth is the only place in the cosmos with intelligence, or even life, you've got to wonder where all this intricate organization comes from, and choke just a little on the Anthropic Principle.
You've got to ask why the orders of organization should arbitrarily stop at our level.
And where do all these ideas come from (when in several isolated attics around the planet, people are inventing light bulbs simultaneously)?

What big Face is emerging from bioslime book?

We are as plants to them.

See what i did there?

How about a religion for the Post Ironic Age:  a fake religion, an agnostic gnosticism, a humanist mystery rite?   Oh wait...   You can't stop the Dream.

Axions and Chameleons

"Web of Flies"
benjamin harubin 2016
digital superimpositioning

We have found a new particle.
>possibly is dark matter.
>possibly is gravity.
We have named the particle.
We are protecting the particle.
The particle is ours.  
We trapped, measured it, weighed it
and put it in a box, with a guard cat.
The guard cat shields against fields that surround the particle.
Once the particle interacts with its field, it vanishes.  
So we must be very careful because conceptually we cannot have a particle and a wave at the same time!
The cat shield is made of a dense metamaterial of woven conceptrons.
Above all, WE are not the subject.  

The subject IS we.
Or should i say was.
Then it became the object.

Does science have a problem with objectivity, its holy grail? 
All the confusion of description could just be a language problem.
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
All suppositions, theories, particles, words, pictures, dreams, visions, angels and demons are composed of code.
Most of it is unexamined biomachine code. 
Starbaby blinks.
Twice. 

You Can't Tell People What to Think

this text is kind of a way of consoling scolding those progressives who are surprised, scared or depressed by the Tuesday tally.

"The Elephant IS the Room"
benjamin harubin 2016
a mashup

if you read the comments on the losing side, you'll find many examples of  'the failure on our part to engage with others in a meaningful way'.
this failure is blamed on individual failure as well as the nature of social media itself and the actors who send their robot fleets on the high media sea.
and yes it's all true.
...and it's true that there's gonna be a/another actor in the whitehouse.
whether or not there's a Man behind the man behind the man,
or a secret cabal.

but whatever.  there's still this feeling of insecurity.
it doesn't really make much functional difference what the actual mechanisms of state are.
i for one am not a proponent of 'conspiracy theories' in the sense of a discrete body of people who are pulling all the strings.

but there are interests...  forces...  groups...  bodies.

science tells us that our social structure is built on top of our individual biology, and that our biology is built upon chemistry,
the way that chemical interactions are built upon the laws of physics.
in other words, politics, power and the state are extensions of who we are as a species, currently.
they are as much biological in nature as our hair.
and also like hair, there are gaps in our understanding of them.
indeed, legally corporations are people i hear.
are they not men?
so i don't see the election as hiring one idiot over another, but as more of a compass direction indicator; a meme war; just the pulse of the drivers of state.

clearly there are forces at work that are beyond anyone's comprehension.
combined with artificial agents, this is a complex system indeed.
if you have any scientific bent, then see that our technologies are also an extension of our biological brains,
so we can cut to the chase and just proclaim that we don't understand ourselves.  

here philosophy can merge with science.
the resurgence of references to Karl Marx and Marxism is interesting.
although you may agree that the applications of the his theories have been disasters, his was an early attempt to wed rationality and science to human economic behavior.
since then, information scientists and evolutionary biologists have added their studies.
maybe what we need is even more rationality.  more consilience.

what would a new rational approach to economics or politics look like.
it's up to us to create it.

what kind of experiment can we as scientists run?
and i say 'scientists' in quotes because we DO have an agenda; there is a built-in bias: that is, some kind of concern for human welfare, or at least our own welfare.
but before you start screaming about advanced social engineering nightmare dystopias, realize that
a: we already have one, and
b: the engineering is by itself not the issue, whether it is used asymmetrically against others or voluntarily to help all humans is.

so we're all more like creative technologists insomuch as we interact socially.

but marxism, or anti-capitalism as understood is not the solution.
to somehow ban the acquisition of wealth is to deny certain biological traits,
and hence is doomed to failure.
and clearly Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' has theoretical validity.
if we can just balance the table and keep the damn thing running!

socialism and capitalism don't actually exist!

what kind of experiments can we as creative technologists run?

what does medicine do we it can't run fully rigorous experiments as in other sciences?  it runs trials.  and that is what political people are doing.  governments are trials, flourishing or collapsing under their own weight.

so much media focus has been set on the presidential election, where your voice is heard (probably) but is very tiny.
whereas an individual's immediate sphere probably contains many more avenues of action, local though they may be.  the world doesn't really depend solely on one big shit show.

what matters are individual actions, inasmuch as we can act.

in the micropolitical sphere of our everyday lives, it's up to us to construct alternate modes of action- to solve our dilemmas in creative ways.
if you surrender to fear in your immediate thoughts and actions, you are helping to spread that meme.

while i acknowledge that a destructive attack (virtual or physical) on 'the enemy' has its purpose,
there is a limit to it's effectiveness, as we have seen.
but for those who have to fight, be positive and fight smart.

wait, instead of creative technologists, we should emulate horticulturalists,
and grow better social and economic structures, on whatever scale,
through patience, love and understanding.
and paying attention to what works.
what's so funny about that?

the responsibility rests where it always has, and not in some all encompassing "choice" that will take care of everything once and for all.

the experimental opportunity that lies before us is on a unique scale, because of internetivity.
it is voluntary, and it is of the crowd and of the individual person.
our jobs should be to create successful models of human interaction that can serve as meme germs.  every time you even talk to someone of a different class or viewpoint than you, you are creating new structures.
it is in this way perhaps that THE MACHINE can be steered more towards human benefit and long term survival.

because You Can't Tell People What to Think.

but cheer up,
keep your eyes open,
no fear.
and fight the good fight.
rock on

Dem Robots Ain't Gonna Buy Your Crap

OR WILL THEY?

"Dem Robots Ain't Gonna Buy Your Crap"

benjamin harubin 2016

electronic collage

"...more than half of humanity as yet exists in miserable poverty, prematurely doomed, unless we alter our comprehensive physical circumstances. It is certainly no solution to evict the poor, replacing their squalid housing with much more expensive buildings which the original tenants can’t afford to reoccupy. Our society adopts many such superficial palliatives. Because yesterday’s negatives are moved out of sight from their familiar locations many persons are willing to pretend to themselves that the problems have been solved. I feel that one of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness."
     -R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth


Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.
     -REVIEW: Buckminster Fuller’s 1928 Ideas & Integrities

That’s because you forgot that your workers are also consumers. As you’ve pushed wages downward, you’ve also squeezed your customers so tight they can hardly afford to buy what you have to sell.

      -Robert Reich, An Open Letter to the Republican Establishment

Lord Turner argues that countries facing the predicament of onerous debts, low interest rates, and slow growth should consider a radical but alluringly simple option: create more money and hand it out to people.
       -John Cassidy, the New Yorker


Bandar thinks that a digitally preoccupied society will come to appreciate the pure and distinct pleasure of making things you can touch. “I’ve always wanted to usher in a new era of technology where robots do our bidding,” Bandar said. “If you have better batteries, better robotics, more dexterous manipulation, then it’s not a far stretch to say robots do most of the work. So what do we do? Play? Draw? Actually talk to each other again?”       -A World Without Work, DEREK THOMPSON

Rapid technological improvements have created unforeseen societal chaos and this change is just starting to pick up speed. Our economic operating system—the “program” at the heart of Capitalism itself—is deliriously out of control. The economy no longer serves the human race, just a tiny elite sliver of it. The rest of us, whether we realize it or not, to a certain extent toil on their behalf.

      -CAPITALISM’S OPERATING SYSTEM HAS GONE OFF THE RAILS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF

This time it’s Karl Marx, not Groucho, who comes to mind with the idea of giving people a universal basic income (UBI). This is raised as a possible remedy to any misery caused by rising unemployment from job automation.

       -What to do when machines take our jobs? Give everyone free money for doing nothing

primum movens the thing in itself the mother of all causations

"there are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

-Donald Rumsfeld

adjusting parameters
benjamin harubin 2015
(digital manipulation)

what if one of the unknown unknowns turns out to be that one of the known unknowns isn't really unknown?   

or
you don't really know how much unknown there is in this known area of unknown,
so much so that it affects all the known knowns, unknown unknowns, and the other known unknowns.

what if
one of the unknown unknowns is the degree to which our table of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns is a useful categorization that reflects some kind of workable reality?

hmmm?

thank you rum for meme pie in face.

but now you got me all dissonanced about the word known.  
known known known known? 
klown?
klone?
knoun?

alright back to the serious.

so we have the search for what determines all this stuff,  
the quest for the theory of everything.  
ultimately it's the Big Bang 
(is the Big Bang one of the known knowns or known unknowns?)

or is everything just is?  (and everything causes everything else).

does it violate the Second Law to have everything cause everything else?

like,
the energy has to come from somewhere and go in one direction in time and get progressively more diffuse.

brain in vat says any given sensation or "thing" is connected by a trilliondyplex web of interactions- 
what gives with this question?-  
although it concedes that there are some processes that appear to operate at a higher frequency than others.

but then, 
what of the Anthropic Paradox?  
why is everything from Planck's Constant to the molecular structure of water ice just right to enable the existence of critters that can ask these questions?

one is tempted to invoke a creator, a Primum Movens, a mother of all causations.

others just shrug and watch the show.  
shut up and watch the show.  

throw that beat in the garbage can.  drop it in the oubliette.  
too bad Screamin' Hawking ruined the infinity of the cosmic Black Hole by making them leaky.  
it's bad enough the BB started from infinity without having an infinitely sucky suck hole to worry about.   
no help for it but to ask the aliens, i guess.  

brain in vat says there's NOTHING in the blind spot.  
you're pointing at that ONE seam?!  
it's evidence of computational processes at work.  
what do we want?
we want information… information… information.

i ask brain in vat what how it scratches when it gets an itch. 























  

the growing concern about death

Like an individual, society also ages, and as it (all connected earth human society) ages; as the civilization process continues, greater resources are directed at improving and extending human life and preventing death. 

Crazy City
benjamin harubin 2015
digital media

...and more vocal become the civilized voices that deplore violence and preventable injuries. also warfare becomes surreal.  the first world increasingly recognizes the value of trained human soldiers and so is more reluctant to lose them.  such reality was used against the USA by the Vietnamese.  and the actual killing is increasingly done by employing devices that operate at a safe distance.  this society is like a baby waking up and realizing its existence and thence its mortality.   all the tantrums won't do no good except for the fear-porno mongers.  we are the world humans.  the osmotic pressure is too high- all humans are in the same room now.  all your walls are porous as fuck, or will come down.  
cheer up little space egg, the Space Sperms are coming!

TECHNOLOGY ON A HUMAN

CORDYCEPS FRUIT BODY
LIKE TECHNOLOGY ON A HUMAN
benjamin harubin 2016
(.jpg)
click for higher

as science and philosophy advance (and yes it is advancing, at least as far as we will ever be able to tell, at least as far as this local planet is concerned),  so technology does.

turns out Skinner, BF could only think in terms of a box for the geometry of his behavior modification devices, or that the human subject had to be inside of the enclosure.

but we are actually living inside of bubbles.  
but box-like bubbles.  
but the paradigm has changed.  
but we still think we are living in 1999.

you don't actually have to eliminate all signals outside of what you deem to be beneficial ones, 
you just have to make sure that your inputs dominate the traffic.  
        buy most of the radio stations.
    that way, all these weeds become nutrition for the disinformation machine.  

you don't have to put people in a box if they will willingly stare into a little box.  
     but the box is simply a window on the concave spherical surface of a bubble.    

I am he as you are he as you are me as the fungus connects our brains together,

           pimple on a boltzmann brain-ass.

how?  any way it can.  because it can.  who is outside the bubble looking in?
                                                                          who is to judge?
because
                  it
                                   came 
                                       in 
                                            a dream
                                                         and then
                                                                      it wasn't 
                                                                                                     a dream
                  and
               the 
                            memory
                                                                 got re-written 

                again

                 and 

                again.

just like the plasmatic electrofungus wants.

Memory Palace GUI

want a better OS?  virtual office, just saying.  now that we got decent graphics and those goggles and stuff.  now all we need are reliable robots to tell us where exactly on the floor did we throw the McMahon account.  

"objectous"
benjamin harubin 2016
electronic media

where are the controls for this thing?   
life II storage-  build your private kingdom/bedroom. 

don't let your data fall into the wrong hands.  
buy insurance.  
encode into DNA and sow the little von neumanns. 

like prove that the aliens aren't here.  
or that we are not, in fact, the extaterrestials, giorgio. can any you coneheads?
the cloud is a pastiche, a palimpsest of geologic stratification with degradation 
and transformation, burial and retrieval.
but the current state of information flow is not omni omni.  or even beer.
  
so, does information ever get lost- 
forever in a black hole, 
or will it hawkingly radiate,
chaotic patterns emerging like hot minerals from a mid ocean vent plume, 
fed on by ravenous crawlers and spiders and vac bots, 
which in turn eventually provide food for information scientists. 

millions fragments of chats survive in icechunks, 
in fragmented rock.
but we are yet nowhere near actually cloning that dinosaur 
let alone the mammoth.
nay, 
even,
the uncertainty of history (and knowledge) is increasing, 
increasingly at a greater rate.
do we know who we are and where we've been?

blur the line between fact and fantasy cause now gaming is top biz.
-and the media modulates the matrix. 

so, we don't can't really prove our point.  
we make it up as we go along.  naive, i know.'/

to be all scientific and shit, you gotta be very organized; rigorous, even.  files.  
organized by you  
in your memory palace  
where there's a door behind a cabinet in the attic that you haven't seen in a long long time   and it leads to unused wings that you never knew were there.  

Grab Power Lines

(Onomatopontology)

(sounds like winning theory)

"Contact Binary (Plexified)"
benjamin harubin 2016
microprocessed paste-up image (.mpui)

can you prove that the universe exists outside of your own skull (if you own a skull)?

how could you tell whether or not this was true?
at whatever level of complexity the simulation is.
everything we know is thanks to our senses, 
but there are also innate feelings of (in)appropriateness
(as to what the nature of reality is, beit rational or faith based).

...because "you" are a part of the machinery, 
biological or artificial as it may be.  
you are a part of the master program; 

part of the total game package,
necessarily because each universe must exchange information with all of itself, 
otherwise parts will pinch off (into new universes?) 
and no longer be part of this universe.  

but black holes do evaporate.  
and we learn new things all the time- 
izzat the leakage from another universe?  
a higher plane?  
izzat god or the intelligent life principle that guides the cosmos?  
or leakage?  
how could you tell?  
don't you also have to prove that we are NOT living in a simulation?
also prove there is no "life principle" or "antientropic force", let alone "higher intelligent influences" .  no i mean really like prove it or shut up.  i know you may feel one way or another, but that and a cellphone will get you around the city. 

and all those things we talk about such as god, the devil, 
objective reality, scientific facts, other people, etc,
are a part of you whatever you is, 
sprites in the connectome. 
 

that's the godlike responsibility you gots.    
is this all just, seriously, just a non topic, yawn.  
aren't you left with pretty much the same thayng?  
just sayng.

so those feelings of (projected, long term, sustainable?) appropriateness-
are those the learning new things leakage-y Great Dispersor  of all cool shit?