What if the reason we land on Earth with amnesia is that learning, itself, is the greatest pleasure to be had here? If we landed knowing everything, that would ruin the fun.
Or what if learning how to learn, the metaskill, is the main point? That nothing we learn here applies elsewhere, other than the ability to get better and better at living generally in all contexts?
What if the universe really is an unsupervised playground, and all is allowed? What if our minds create our realities, directly and immediately, in all realities except the physical universe? What if it is a incomprehensibly slippery ice, so slick that you cannot learn to skate on it?
What if the physical universe is a massive triumph, created by a team of creators many eons ago, as a solution to this problem, which they also faced? No God, but what amount to gods, working together, some more intelligently than others? What if some sections of this universe were created by committee, as David Hume–half in earnest, half in jest–once suggested?
And I wonder: what if the universe, in its first iteration, WAS purely material? All matter and form flowed through, from beginning to end, in a purely mechanistic manner, precisely of the billiard ball sort that Einstein hoped to recover from a physics which had killed his Spinozan God.
BUT, at some point, disembodied spirits–spirits who did not KNOW what a body was–stumbled on this universe from another, and realized they could inhabit–IN TIME, no less, which was also a new form of awareness and following representable concept–the robots, the mechanistic things, we call human beings (and squid-like intelligences on a distant planet, and conscious gases on another), and change them, alter them, move them.
And what if these beings, now confined to this universe, can occupy any being from any point from the beginning to the end (with the failed experimental Tralfamadorian hyperdrive, of course), and experience what they experience, and change that experience, such that the future changes, and all futures have their relative pasts changed? What if our mechanistic universe is being altered continually in both directions?
Here is the point I will make: most people lack the imagination to realize that all religions may be mostly or even completely wrong. “Science”, certainly–understood here as the default assumptions of hard headed, inconsistent, dogmatic, and unimaginative drones, by and large but not universally–is wrong.
All options are on the table. The task is to use REAL science to start figuring out what is REALLY happening–if for example, what is happening depends on what we think is happening, or can imagine happening–in an interesting way. That would be a good use of everyone’s time and lives.