Reality, Simulation and Time

Every now and then I seem to manage to write something that makes some kind of sense and also seems rather well put...those times are too few and far between. A friend posted something about a theory about our universe being a simulation. This sort of thing is quite fashionable, of course, and versions stretch between post-modern theory to crazed conspiracies from people who took the Matrix films a bit too seriously. 

Another post was concerning time being an illusion. I am aware that the physicist Julian Barbour has called time a "well-founded illusion" which points out that to call time an illusion does not even remotely do away with time (an interview with Barbour records that he arrived for the interview late!) but the nature of time, and of reality, are, nevertheless in question.

Needless to say, I don't have the answers, but I have been asking some of the questions for sometime. Anyway, here was my response, which I think with this bit of contextual explanation, stands alone quite...not badly...

 "The thing is, except for the nutters who believe we are in the Matrix, run by shape-shifting lizards (who, oddly enough, turn out to be Jewish) while inside the hollow earth, when we are told that time is an illusion or similar, we have to attend carefully what that really means.

At some level, EVERYTHING is an illusion because we see it at a particular scale and according to our sense organs and the way our brain interprets the data.

In the case of time, it simply can't be dismissed as an illusion because it is both real and a number of illusions, depending on what you are referring to.

The imposition of quantitative time as qualitative time is the tyranny and that is what capitalism does. The revolt against clock time doesn't destroy time, but can liberate us into genuinely lived, qualitative time."

Here's another perspective:

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2022/02/25/truth-isnt-always-the-best-option-comic/

WHAT CAN BE DONE IN 2023?

 Regard this as an informal enquiry, as a stimulus to thought and action. In 2023 we are only one year away from the centenary of the publication of The Manifesto of Surrealism. For various people surrealism is a great success, an abject failure, a revolutionary project run into the sandbanks of art, an art or a literary movement, a continuing revolution beneath the surface of life. Most definitions see surrealism from one corner only, so, for art historians, who often seem to dominate the recording and interpretation of surrealism, see it as an art movement, still relevant or not, depending on their personal agenda, and so on. Very often, what the scholars write about has very little to do with anything surrealism has ever been or indeed is. 

Surrealists have always defined surrealism as beyond art and literature, also beyond politics and philosophy, although it has been active in all these realms. Many current surrealists do seem content to paint and write and play some games and I don't want to dismiss these activities, it would be hypocritical for me when I have very happily rediscovered painting in the last couple of years, and wouldn't even categorise much of what I produce as 'surrealist' at present. (But I hope I can say "watch this space...").

 I am deliberately trying not to over-formulate my questions at this point, but I hope I'm clear that I don't want us to be helpless at this critical time, a time in which we may perhaps already be doomed, given that governments and corporations are recklessly slow in acknowledging the environmental crisis, the political crises everywhere around us and are in any case complicit to varying extents with the worst aspects of these factors. Disaster Capitalism may destroy us all.

So my question is, what should and can surrealists be doing at this present time that is not simply making pictures and writing poems? What can we do that might make some impact on the world? Can we justify not trying to make that impact at a time when the far right threaten the world to a greater extent than any time since the 1940s?