Cruising down the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon, I noticed a high red sandstone rock formation that I realize is actually a badly weathered statue of a buddha, in peaceful meditation looking over the water. I thought of the character of that buddha, happily observing the passage of time, and by mere observation, bringing reality into existence.

And I thought of the endless network of buddhas, making a single buddha mind, far across the endless reaches of distant space and between every atom, just there observing the passage of time, and I thought of the debt that we owe them, holding up the bedrock existence of our world, merely observing and making no judgements.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

At present, people are uploading millions of photos to the net, and experimental software is trolling through this material, reconstructing a 3 dimensional models of recognizable buildings and landmarks. For example, by looking at thousands of pictures the Taj Mahal and analyzing them, the software can come up with a 3 d model of the structure.

People and organizations install webcams; those views are also on the net.

Computers and electronics becomes cheaper and smaller and tend to ubiquitous. CPUs become more powerful, memory and storage become larger and faster.

Even without the possible appearance of nanobots, we soon may have a crude and limited electronic form of the distributed buddhas, observing parts the world, and recording events. They can’t observe every event, like the buddha. But to limited human perception, the illusion will be strong.

What is different from buddha, and the cyberspace model of the world? Buddha is embedded in the fabric of reality. A cyberspace model of reality isn’t the same as reality, whereas the buddha-mind emanates from reality itself — it is an intrinsic property of reality.

Could an isomorphism between the two exist? Could a cyberspace model of reality map every aspect of reality? It’s possible I suppose, but hard to imagine, like those mathematical proofs that a particular infinitely complex set of cuts can reduce a sphere to a set of pieces that can be reassembled into a sphere twice the size.

TBC…​