New Book release date for Aces and Eights by our own Katie Robbins

Our very own Kate Robbins, who is a frequent contributor here (Jesus's Kidney being her most recent), has just informed us that her new book, Aces and Eights has a release date of November 1, 2025 from Multimodomedia Press.

Described as a work of experimental fiction, the book follows Dean Rosen on "a journey of redemption in an increasingly uncertain world after having spent many years in prison."

A Box of Rain contributor, Robert Berke (The REAL Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster) had the opportunity to read an advance copy. He described the book as "incredibly unusual writing, funny, quirky, and entirely rewarding. Definitely can't wait to discuss it with someone."

Preorders are available now on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/4n4NRaK

Who knew?!

Phish performs... Avinu Malkeinu ?!

Just like in shul, except for the lights, the musical instruments, and the huge crowd.

Thought for the weekend

"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do."
-Jerry Garcia

Listen to the open blessings of life

A Thought For Shabbat:

This week we read a very gripping description of the curses that Moshe promises the retribution if we stray from the path of G-d.

The narrative is gripping and a brief sweep across the horizon of Jewish history tells us that tragically those warnings have been proven manifold...

But is that all there is to it?

...Dovber, a young child not even Bar Mitzva, would sit in Shul every week and listen to his father, the renowned Baal Hatanya (whose Birthday is today) read the Torah.

One year, on this Shabbat of the reading of the "curses", his father was out of town and one of the other rabbis in the community read it in his place.

As the reader began the customary undertone lamenting the tragedies that would befall the Jewish People, little Dovber, a bright child with an astute mind but equally emotional sensitivity suddenly felt nausea and by the time the reading was over he had taken ill.

(So much so, two weeks later on Yom Kippur there was discussion whether he would even be able to fast)

When he had already recovered one of his friends asked him why he suddenly became so emotionally overwhelmed hearing the curses if in fact he had already heard them read a number of times?

"When my father reads" explained Dovber, "I hear blessings."

The Baal HaTanya read the same Biblical premonitions that we do, but he only saw and heard blessings.

No, he wasn't G-d forbid delusional or theoretical.

He was a realist as much as any of us - but he looked beyond the headlines.

Yes, even if you didn't invest your life's saving in Lehman Brother's no one is having it easy - and not just financially.

These are trying times for G-d's children the world over - in so many ways...

And yet, my inner sense tells me that we can still hear blessings.

They may not be in the headlines - but the Baal HaTanya taught us that even the hardships of the Torah are only a layer, a surface, a cover - waiting to be peeled away to expose the true blessings inside.

Far be it from me to preach to another that their suffering isn't real and painful.

But I can pass on the message that there's more to the story - don't just read the headlines, even of your own life.

Listen to the open blessings of life - which we still do have - be it a ray of sunshine, a rush of fresh air, a moment with a close friend, a child's smile, or just the fact that we're still alive.

And soon we'll please G-d see those blessings in our headlines.

Wishing you a Shabbat or listening to the blessings - even in the headlines,

Rabbi Avi and Dena Rabin

Compare this to "Am I Just a Figment of Someone's Imagination"

Are We Trapped in God's Video Game?

10.15.2007 Discover Magazine

Probably not. And no, he's not looking at your underwear.

by Jaron Lanier

There are certain questions about virtual reality (VR) that I’ve been asked a few times a day, every day, for over a quarter century. The e-mails still come in, from a kid in Korea or a grandmother in Australia: Will VR ever get so good that we will no longer be able to tell it’s VR? Is it possible we are already living in VR? Recently even The New York Times got into the act, interpreting an argument from philosopher Nick Bostrom to mean that “it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”

When these questions come up, I usually try to redirect the inquirer’s attention to the world of actual VR research, because that topic is richer than most people realize. But readers of this column know I am as friendly as can be to weird speculations, and it is interesting to think about the metaphysical side of virtual reality.

The concept of “VR so good you can’t tell” can mean different things. It might mean that a person who started off in natural reality can be fooled by a simulation, or it might mean that a being who was created as part of a simulation can become conscious.

Let’s consider the second possibility. Can consciousness arise inside a computer simulation? As it happens, I’m that rare creature, a cybernetic daredevil who is usually a dualist: I get thrills from figuring out how to make computer programs reproduce tricks the brain can do, and yet I often believe consciousness is something special that cannot be simulated like other phenomena. Suppose I’m wrong, though, and a simulated character can become conscious. Could it know it is living in a simulation?

Robotics researcher Hans Moravec originated the argument that we are probably already living in VR: If it is possible to build virtual realities sophisticated enough to give rise to sentient residents, it’s likely there would be many such VRs. After all, once we built the first car or the first laptop computer, millions upon millions more followed. (And even if humanity never builds superlative VR machines, some alien civilization somewhere will do it, if it is possible.) If you are a self-aware creature, then, there are two possibilities: You live in natural reality, or you live in one of these super-VRs. Since there is only one of the former and a lot of the latter, the chances are quite strong that you, and indeed all of us, are living in a simulated world.

Although this pseudostatistical style of reasoning doesn’t prove anything, it does say something about the relative likelihood of a particular metaphysical truth. That may seem like a strange way to think, but an even stranger development, to my mind, is that recent results may give us empirical evidence about whether we are living in a simulation. If you believe that thinking about metaphysics in a pseudostatistical way is sensible, then these results make it seem much less likely that we’re living in a VR than it did back when people first started asking me those questions.

When Moravec first made his case back in the 1980s, the popular way of thinking was that there is one and only one natural reality. These days, that answer is becoming less popular all the time, because of a seemingly unrelated field: quantum computation.

Experiments over the past decade show that quantum computers (which process information using the quantum states of particles rather than transistors) really can work. And as it happens, one interpretation of quantum mechanics that used to be somewhat obscure has suddenly become popular because it’s better adapted for explaining quantum computation, at least to human brains.

I’m speaking, of course, of the many worlds interpretation. In this view, each world has a copy of your quantum computer, and they all run at once; that’s why they outperform regular computers that can function in only one reality. When you get an answer out, it’s the same thing as discovering which of the many worlds you are in.

The rising fortunes of the many worlds interpretation seem to have emboldened champions of other ideas about multiple realities. Some string theorists now talk about a “landscape” of realities in which physics is different in each reality. Cosmologist Max Tegmark and the late philosopher David Lewis have offered yet other ways of thinking about many realities instead of one.

You might object that even if there are a large number of realities, there still ought to be many more VRs, because each reality could have many VRs inside it. But that’s not so. Many of the multiple-realities theories suggest an unbounded number of worlds, and if the number of realities can be infinite, then there can’t be more VRs than realities; infinity is as many as there can be. Even if there are only a finite number of realities, there is no guarantee that each reality would host VRs. Virtual realities take up time, energy, and space—and a given reality has limited supplies of those things. All of this suggests that VRs are unlikely to be more common than natural realities.

+++

Of course, this whole discussion begs the question of what we mean when we distinguish a VR from a natural reality. If a simulation is perfect in every way, it is by definition indistinguishable from the thing it simulates. So there must be some difference between a natural reality and a virtual one, or else there’s nothing virtual about it. Maybe the VR is self-evidently low resolution. The ones we can build today certainly are! But that’s not the only possible difference.

The usual sort of difference that people are interested in is the existence of an entity that can look into the lives of players in the VR, a powerful player who is usually but not necessarily hidden. It’s similar to believing in a god. The rhetoric of VR thought experiments often plays up this angle. Some people imagine this creature as a pimply nerd in the sky who is running a cosmic copy of The Sims, who are us. Perhaps with that image in mind, one woman commented to me that she worried that this being might be able to see whether her underwear was clean on a given day.

A pimply video-game-playing kid is an especially unlikely “god” ruling over our reality.

Strangely enough, there are some recent empirical results that may influence whether we should believe in this underwear-­obsessed dude. Before I describe them, though, I need to introduce the idea of a spectrum of possible gods, running from wimpy to omnipotent. All the supernatural beings of religion and science fiction fit somewhere on the spectrum.

The very wimpiest god can hypothetically see into our world but can’t do anything at all to interact with us in any way, in any world—including hypothetical afterlives. As far as we’re concerned, it’s meaningless to think of this god as one who exists. The second-wimpiest god might be able to perform just a trick or two that seem supernatural to us, but underwear spying is just one trick of many, and therefore unlikely.

Paradoxically, pseudostatistical reasoning suggests that the most omnipotent god won’t notice your underwear, either. Such a god can see and manipulate all possible versions of you and your world (including your wearing clean, filthy, or no underwear at all). If there is something special enough about your underwear to merit notice, there’s another version of you in another reality wearing even more special underwear. The Top God is infinitely less likely to focus on the particular pair of underwear you are wearing today than you are likely to focus on a particular grain of sand on a beach. He is just as moot as the weakest god.

So as far as underwear spying goes, it’s only those gods in the middle of the spectrum who should concern us. A god who spies would do so, presumably, only if he (or she for that matter) experiences surprise at the unveiling of the future and is able to see into only a narrow range of realities. The Greek gods were like this.

The empirical results that influence how we might think about God-as-video-game-player are the successful demonstrations of quantum cryptography, in which a sender and receiver can be assured that no natural observer has eavesdropped on a message. This system works because a component of the message is ruined by quantum effects as soon as it is read. For a god to eavesdrop on a quantum cryptography session and then cover his tracks, would, as it happens, require near omnipotence. When the first quantum cryptography experiments were done, I felt a little relieved and sad at the same time, because we then knew that one kind of potential exotic or supernatural form of life that might have been watching us either did not exist or wasn’t paying attention.

Continuing the pseudostatistical arguments, a god that can exist only within a narrow portion of the spectrum of possible gods is less likely than a god that can exist over a larger portion of the spectrum. The game-playing kid feels the squeeze from both ends. He has to be both weak enough to be able to focus on a particular pair of underwear and strong enough to be able to cover his tracks after eavesdropping on a quantum cryptography session—or else be willing not to peek at any messages we decide to keep secret.

That probably—no guarantees—places him within a razor-thin niche on a wide spectrum of possible gods. So I can’t swear that we’re not living in a simulation, but I can offer some assurance: A pimply virtual reality operator is an especially unlikely god.

Am I just a Figment of Someone's Imagination?

B"H

Tevet 15, 5768 * December 24, 2007

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T H E F R E E M A N F I L E S
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Am I just a Figment of Someone's Imagination?
By Tzvi Freeman
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To the ancient sage of Israel and pride of Latin America, the chief rabbi of the outskirts of certain parts of suburban Guadalajara and director of the Guadalajaran Mind-Body Spa,

Dear Guad,

Ever since I was a small child hooked on The Cartoon Channel, I've had this nagging, ominous sense that I'm no more than a figment of some nutty animator's imagination. I've gone for psychiatric help about this, but they generally start giggling nervously as I begin my description of the phenomenon, eventually exploding into full-blown laughter. What do you recommend to help me overcome this pathology?

--F. Igment

Dear Figment,

First we need to examine just how ludicrous this thought really is. Since it's not exactly the most comfortable perspective on life, we're better off breaking it down analytically to take an objective perspective.

What are the properties of imaginary characters?

1) Imaginary characters can go poof without notice.

You're in the middle of a 24 bit color, 3D audio daydream, when, without notice, someone places his hand on your shoulder and asks, "You doing okay?

"Yeah, uh sure, uh just daydreamin'."

"Tell me about it. Maybe we can sell it to Pixar."

"Um, well…"—and for the life of you, you can't recall a thing.

You know there were characters in that daydream. You know there was drama. But now it's all gone, as though they never existed. Well, in fact, they didn't, did they?

Sure, those characters may come back some day to haunt you. But they're not really the same characters. They are no more than products of unresolved inner turmoil, passions and boredom. The character himself only lives for the duration of the daydream, and then is gone forever, for in truth he never really was.

So if you are a figment of someone's imagination, that would imply that not only could you also disappear into oblivion in less than a moment—you, along with your friends, toys and dramas of life—but that your entire reality doesn't really exist to begin with.

You still want to continue with this? Okay, let's examine a little further:

2) Imaginary characters are intangible.

Actually, I don't know how true this is. You see the characters of your daydreams because the same dynamics are happening in your brain as occur when you see objects that are "out there." You hear them the same way, as well. So, if it's a deep dream, what's to stop you from smelling, tasting and touching them, as well.

Touch, after all, is just another sensation, only that it has an additional haptic quality that other senses don't have. That is, as you sense with touch, unlike with sight or hearing, you are also manipulating the object that you are touching.

Now, when you imagine something, you imagine it within space and time. Space implies that each object occupies a unique space and must be manipulated to move from that space. So, if it's to be a hi-res daydream, there will have to be some of that haptic palpability to it.

Think too much about this and your ganglia start tingling. Yes, the world feels so real. It can be hard as rock—nothing imaginary about that hard concrete floor you're standing on. At least, you hope so. How could imagination turn out so solid?

Think again: What's so solid about it? Only the fact that you don't slip through it. And why not? Only because the electromagnetic and nuclear forces that organize the particles of that concrete floor conflict with the parallel forces organizing the particles of your body. And what are those forces? Nothing more than a set of rules. What are rules? Intelligence.

Turns out that all there is behind the tangibility of our universe is concentrated, very consistent intelligence. Or call it a great imagination.

So, assuming the someone who is imagining has a real powerful imagination, the fact that we are tangible is not sufficient evidence to prove that we are not his/her/its cerebral artifacts.

Nevertheless, before we conclude that we very well might be tangible figments of someone's imagination, there are a few more properties to discuss:

3) Imaginary characters are not self-aware.

Yes, it is very difficult to imagine a character who is self-aware. Even when we deal with other human beings who (appear to) live outside of our imagination, we often barely acknowledge that they are just as self-aware as ourselves. Countless philosifizers have grasped in futility for a proof that anyone is self-aware other than the one doing the philosifizing.

But let's go back to our hypothesis that the someone imagining us has a much superior imagination than our own. The human mind, according to those who use the thing to study itself, can only imagine about 7 (give or take 2) discrete objects at once. Our universe contains around 10 to the 80th power of subatomic particles, structured within complex forms and dynamics. Yes, that takes some imagination.

I relate this to the time I was building electronic games using a graphic object model (called MOM—Metropolis Object Model. Great tool with lots of promise. Bought up by Quark in the early 90s and shelved). We drew objects on the screen, then dropped behaviors and properties into them, tweaked the parameters, and watched them interact. Two objects was a manageable proposition. Three objects already harried the mind. When you got to five or six, your brain was sizzling like a fried wiener. After juggling their complexity for a good 16 hours straight, all it took was for some smart aleck to walk in the room and ask, "How are you today?" and you would break down in tears, crying, "I've just lost the whole thing!"

That was hard. But I'll tell you something even harder, and that is to contain within your mind the feelings and perspectives of other people you are living with. Meaning, to be able to feel both how they feel and how you feel at once. As large a mind as MOM demanded from me, we demand from our Moms even more.

So if this imagination imagining us can also imagine this entire universe, what's to say it can't get out of itself and feel things from a couple of billion other perspectives as well—thereby endowing us all with self-consciousness. It takes a large mind to do that, but it's not unimaginable.

Still, there's something even more real about us than our own self-awareness. Something that makes us feel the ultimate, unimaginable I am:

4) Imaginary characters are not free to choose their own script.

Now here's a tough one. As much as we could try, how on earth could we imagine a character who exercises his/her/its own autonomy? I certainly can't program one—no matter how complex a random function I use, ultimately, my character will be predictable. How could my mind create an unpredictable character?

So here a little computer science might come in useful: Predictability is the product of rational numbers. That's because any logarithm that uses rational numbers can be resolved. A rational number is one that can be written as a ratio (1/2, 3/4, 128,398,743/3,483,473,164).

But then there are the irrational numbers. Those are numbers such as pi or the square root of two. When you try to write one of these numbers out, you get something like 1.414213562373… —meaning that you need an infinite number of placeholders to store this number. Problem is, we don't know how to build a computer with infinite storage. Even if we wire all those 10 to the 80th power particles of the universe to become one enormous computer (hey, who says they aren't already?), we still would be short of infinite.

It would be nice to just ignore these irascibles, but here's the clincher: There are infinitely more irrational numbers than rational numbers[1] What that means is that infinitely more of our world cannot be described on a finite computer than can be.[2]

Which means that even the universe itself can't compute what it's going to do next. Because even though it's a finite universe, it can only be measured by an infinite device. And if you can't store those numbers, you can't accurately predict anything.

So you'll be a little off, right? I mean, what's a few picoseconds or picometers here or there?

This is where chaocomplexity kicks in: When working with a system of just two factors, a little inaccuracy won't matter too much. You'll need to go through many, many iterations of your algorithm before it's noticeable. Increase that to three factors, things start getting out of whack exponentially faster. When you get to real-world complex systems, like the weather, the ecology, and my laundry, predictability lies only within a very small range of time and a very wide range of precision. When you talk about systems as complex as the human brain, predictability is out the window.

So this could explain how we human beings could still be figments of someone's imagination while remaining entirely unpredictable. You see, if this imagination was just very big, bigger than ours to the point that it could contain this mega-mega-big universe, it would still be limited to imagining a predictable universe. However, if it is an infinite imagination, then it could also handle irrational numbers. In which case, it could generate unpredictable beings.

Unpredictable + Self-Conscious = Free Choice.

Bingo, we have a formula for free-choice figments.


Ask a Friendly Kabbalist

All the above may leave you feeling a little uncomfortable about your status in reality. You may be asking, "Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?"

Well they have. They're called Kabbalists. Here are the words of one of the foremost Kabbalists, Rabbi Moses Cordovero, in his magnum opus, Pardes Rimonim (The Pomegranate Orchard)[3]:

The prophet says, "For His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways."[4]

Meaning that a person's thoughts have no real effect. He can imagine conjuring something into existence, but his thoughts accomplish nothing. He can fantasize and visualize the form of this thing he wishes to materialize, but his thoughts are futile. He must actually do something to make his thoughts real.

We see that for us, nothing is complete until an event occurs. Potentialities are not real—nothing is real until it has actually happened. The actual is everything. It is reality and without it there is nothing.

This is not the case with the "King of kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He," who causes being and generates existence. As soon as it has arisen in His will to isify[5] and to emanate the holy and pure emanation, immediately it is emanated and formed within Himself without any change in Him, heaven forbid. It is nothing more than an entity that unites with Him to the degree that there is no distinction between the emanation and the Emanator at all. They are entirely one.

What Rabbi Cordovero is saying is that with a single thought, G-d calls all into being. And if He would cease to think about us for a moment? Here's another quote from our same sagacious Kabbalist:

This is why we say[6], "And You vivify all of them." Our teachers of blessed memory interpreted this as, "And you is-ify all of them." But they also stood by the simple meaning of "You vivify all of them."—because it is all one idea: Since He is-ified them and brought them into existence out of nothing, the current must continue flowing and all of them continue drawing their vitality from Him. And since He is continually vivifying them, it turns out that He is is-ifying them at all times and at every moment and in every event. So you see that vivifying and is-ifying is really one thing.

Along the same lines, we can understand the words from the daily prayers, "And in His goodness He renews each day, continuously, the first act of Creation." This is talking about the current that flows to vivify them, to sustain them and to set all their properties. So that if, heaven forbid, you could imagine the withdrawal of His current from them—they would terminate immediately. This is all they are: projections of the mystery of His light. It is the current of a stream that is never interrupted but renews itself constantly, like the waters of a river that renew every moment.

In the words of Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, citing a teaching of the Baal Shem Tov:

If the letters of the ten utterances by which the earth was created during the six days of creation were to depart from it for just an instant, G-d forbid, it would revert to void and absolute nothingness— exactly like before the six days of creation.

Poof! We never were. In fact, as far as we can tell, it may have just occurred just now. Maybe He forgot about us for a moment and we ceased existing. Then He started up the daydream again, and here we are again. Prove me wrong.


Redemption

Okay, one last step. We've left for last the most pertinent question, perhaps the only truly relevant question: So what? So I'm not as real as I thought I was. But within my limited little world, as I see it, I am real. So who cares what some supermind is thinking out there? How does it affect the price of coffee and the schedule in my TV Guide?

Actually, there wouldn't be much use for this whole exercise if it weren't for one more detail: You see, this Infinite Mind that is imagining you right now is not satisfied with a one-way daydream. Daydreams can sweep you away for a moment or two, but they fail to engage the all of you. This Infinite Mind is into interactive play. Interactivity is where you get all of the person into the show.

So He stoops down into His own grand daydream and says to us little critters, "Hey, guys, what do you think of this universe I imagined up? Look at those sub-atomic particles whizzing around within every piece of matter, those bio-factory cells that power every diverse form of life, those universal patterns that resonate throughout the entire cosmos. Awesome stuff, right? So, hey, you want a piece of the action?"

Now who wouldn't want a piece of the action? So He goes on:

"Well, guess what? You may have noticed that there's some unfinished business around this place. A few details kind of out of synch. Some of it can look real messy, too. But there's potential there. Well, that's what I left over for you guys. And just to make sure you get it right, I'm sending you a Torah with some enlightened teachers, like Moses and his buddies, so you can get into my way of thinking about things."

"And if you have any problems, I've got an open door—just talk to me and almost anything can be solved."

So are we figments of Someone's imagination? Looks like it. Until that point when we are liberated, when we enter into a relationship with the Infinite Mind that imagines us. At that point, we leave fantasy and unite with the Ultimate Reality. We become real.


Footnotes:
1. Yes, there are an infinite number of rational numbers, even between any two points, such as 1 and 2. But Georg Cantor has already proven that irrational numbers are infinitely more infinite.
2. For a more complete presentation of this issue than I am able to present here, see Chapter One of Paul Davies' The Matter Myth.
3. Shaar Hatzachtzachos, Chapter 3.
4. Isaiah 55:8.
5. "bring into being" is too awkward. In Hebrew: m'haveh—the causative participle of the verb to be.
6. Nechemia 9:6; c.f. the prayer liturgy.


- Rabbi Tzvi Freeman heads Chabad.org's Ask The Rabbi team, and is a senior member of the Chabad.org editorial team. He is the author of a number of highly original renditions of Kabbalah and Chassidic teaching, including the universally acclaimed "Bringing Heaven Down to Earth." To order Tzvi's books click here: http://www.chabad.org/240099 .

- To view this article on the Web, or to post a comment, please click here: http://www.chabad.org/615042 .