Just choose a suffix: -blowing, -boggling, -bending. Then put "mind" or maybe even your mind in front of it. Now think about life choices - from the daily ones, part of your routine to the more strategic ones. How could you possibly believe that you have a choice in life, if all choices have been predefined already? Sure, you don't know that, but someone does. That someone maybe God, destiny, or whatever you want to call it. For the purpose of this article it is going to be The Matrix.
So just like a computer program, humans operate on preconceived if's and else's and try's and catch's. Making a specific choice today does not mean that an alternative one is not possible. I would not want to go as deep as parallel realities and quantum physics. My argument is that all choices a person can potentially make have already been laid out. You just pick a path, but remain unaware of the other paths.
I recently watched The Matrix again. Every time I watch it again, I open my mind to many of the subtleties this movie has and its many metaphors. If you are ever going to watch it again, watch with your mind - just look beyond the visual effects.
So the last time I watched it, I thought that life is full of paradoxes. For example, think about the Earth. Amid billions of stars and gaxies, amid a hostile vacuum of space, we have our beautiful planet Earth. It has just the right amount of hydrogen and oxygen to have created and continuously sustain life. What are the odds for that? To put things into perspective - the number of stars in the observable unvierse is more than all the grains of sand on planet Earth. So far there are is no scientific evidence that any of these planetary systems, gravitating around those stars have been inhabited.
So if the Earth is unique, among all the stars, galaxies and universes, and there are no rational alliens, I could argue that reality has been simulated. In terms of all probability concerning our daily life this would mean that everything we do, decide and act upon has been programmed well before it comes up as a thought.
to be continued...