Within my information feed there’s a lot of talk about the multiverse, alternate realities, the nature of consciousness, and quantum perception simulations. In that context the following thoughts came to me. Sensible or not, I ask, where’s the picture?
A man has an idea for something that he wants to paint. He thinks it over, plans it out and eventually, he paints the picture.
After admiring his work, he takes out his cell phone and snaps a photo of the painting. He then sends the photo to a friend. Where’s the picture?
To the friend the picture is in his cell phone. That’s not really the case, of course, because the real picture is actually a painting that sits on an easel in the artist’s studio. He can show it to other people and they can admire it pretty much like they would if they were looking at the original painting. However, if it ever came up for discussion, everybody would agree that what they were looking at was a representation of the picture. Not the picture itself. You might say that it is a simulation.
Yet it can also be argued that even the painting which sits on an easel is just a representation of what was in the artist’s mind. Before he got out his paints and brushes. That mental image could be considered the original. The artist then set upon the challenge of recreating, or copying that image from his mind to the canvass.
I’m not an artist because I’m not very good at painting or drawing what I might be thinking about. An artist can be inspired to paint a picture that came into their mind. From this way of thinking, the arrangement of paints, colors, and shapes on the canvass can be thought of as a simulation.
So where’s the picture? Is it on your phone or my computer? Is it on the canvass or is it in the artist’s consciousness? If it is in the artist’s consciousness, did it just appear there or did it come from somewhere else?
