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On Reading That Some Physicists Posit We Are Living in a Computer Simulation

Andy 1 min read
poetry
On Reading That Some Physicists Posit We Are Living in a Computer Simulation
Illustris_Dark_Matter_and_Gas

An analysis shows there is a 50% chance that we are living in a synthetic reality – Scientific American

If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect
computer simulation, do I risk waking up

to a world in which I can’t embrace you?
I was so young when I came to feel that

death is as simple to understand as the eons
before our birth: we are not, and then we are,

and then we are not again. I’m a mystic. I
love the weight of the cosmos, how it feels

in the palm of my hand. I reach for your
hand in order to hold on to all that I wish

were eternal but stand to lose. I can’t dwell
on loss, least of all when thinking of you;

and if none of this is real, if there are
truths stranger than our brief mortality,

all the more reason to lie down together and
demand that the earth reveal what it knows—

to discover who we are when stripped of fear,
our bodies trembling at the edge of reason.

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