Is The Physical Realm Analogous To A Simulated Reality?

VladtheDestroyer said:

That's a good point. But if we were only physical beings, then wouldn't that mean we would only be judged by our physical abilities?

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Maybe "physical" and "spiritual" are not the only things to consider. "Emotional" comes to mind. I guess I'm not too sure what one means when applying the term "spiritual" to humans. If God is spirit, then what is He that we are also? Are we being as His image a 3d representation of a 4d (or more) being, and thus we comprise so 3/4th's of what God is? Or are we flesh, and not spirit, since "spirit" is used for the thing we are not, sometimes?

Idolater said:

It's interesting to think about how angels experience the physical realm but I think it's more interesting to think about what angels know about what we're thinking and experiencing in our own minds. I mean if they have superhuman observational powers re the physical realm (which is what you're pointing to), then what does that entail about their ability to almost directly intuit what we're silently thinking about or planning to do? They see things only lie detector polygraph machines or EKG machines or NMR machines can see, along with what we all can see.

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It could be that the technology exists one day that will allow us similar observation powers. I have recently read that we can actually look at someones brain and tell if he is a musician. I think that is fascinating.

In 2019 what was called a landmark study involving fMRI image reconstruction was published in PLoS Computational Biology. https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006633 Deep Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity

We have actually had the ability to reconstruct images like this since I think 2010 or so. It was alway hyped as "mind reading" but back then it only worked when the image one looked at also exist in machine that was decoding the image. But the technology in 2019 gave us the ability to just have someone imagine a particular rudimentary shape, and in certain instances the machine was able to decode these images quite well I think, based on high resolution fMRI scans. Some say they can do it today in real time, when before it might have took an hour or so.

From the paper:


Red square. Green + sign. Blue X

Not perfect, but not that bad either.

Derf said:

Maybe "physical" and "spiritual" are not the only things to consider. "Emotional" comes to mind. I guess I'm not too sure what one means when applying the term "spiritual" to humans. If God is spirit, then what is He that we are also? Are we being as His image a 3d representation of a 4d (or more) being, and thus we comprise so 3/4th's of what God is? Or are we flesh, and not spirit, since "spirit" is used for the thing we are not, sometimes?

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Well it seems emotional should fall under the spiritual category. I think most of us would agree that the spiritual parts of us are just the parts that are not made of matter?? But what exactly do we mean by "not made of matter"? Does it mean not made of atoms or something smaller, like neutrons or electrons? What about light? I don't think it is an easy question.