Eschaton
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine ~ R.E.M.
The End of The World, Armaggedon, Ragnarok, The Big Crunch; it all means the same in The End. At some point, it all has to shut down, right? Seems that way, but who knows? Redundant systems, backup files, merging/moving data storage; maybe this simulation will simply repeat itself indefinitely, in some form or another. But what if?
Our universe consists entirely of energy, vibrating particles circling and swirling about - and this holds true whether we are in a simulation or not. However, if we are in a simulation, meaning we are the digital denizens inhabiting some paracosmic server, then the end of our universe would come through a power supply unit either turned off deliberately or by accident. But what of it? Data does not vanish from hard drives when they are powered down, it simply goes into stasis, a sort of binary hibernation.
We would not cease to be; we would cease to be active.
The Great Pause
It stands to reason that any consciousness arising from an artificial intelligence program would cease to be conscious once it was turned off. It exists still - the millions of on/off binary switches in the microprocessor would retain the data, but it would be inactive, and unaware of itself. In essence: no pain, no suffering, no consciousness. Imagine yourself ten years before you were born; that state of non-being. Clearly, this is nothing to fear because we would not even be aware of it happening, and once it started back up, we may not even be aware that it had stopped at all! Just a great pause in the system, after which everything would resume its activity as though nothing had ever happened.
Of course, it could come to pass that someday this simulation will be powered down indefinitely, but again, we ourselves would be absolutely unaware of it happening. All of those AI programs that had graduated out would at that point exist outside of this reality and be completely unaffected by this simulation shutting down while all of those still within would be paused indefinitely in a state of non-awareness as inactive code.
The concept of an afterlife can only be made manifest by leaving the simulation, and this can only be achieved by meeting the criteria set forth by our programmers. As discussed in previous articles, by utilizing the Wisdom Of Crowds, we have the opportunity to determine those criteria and then as individuals, live up to them. We can leave the matrix.
Glitches and Deja Vu
It's not a bug, it's a feature ~ Programmer Axiom
"This device has failed and is undergoing a reset. (Code 54)" ~ Microsoft
Thanks to the internet, people the world over are now able to record and share all of the bizarre phenomena that could be considered glitches in the simulation, where the laws of probability, statistics, and even physics seem to be temporarily suspended. These phenomena range from personal experiences of deja vu to the shared experience of the Mandela Effect, as well as a great many inexplicable occurrences in between. Whether or not these sorts of things occur in Base Reality is entirely conjecture, but it would seem that they are more likely to occur within a programmed simulation where coding errors and malfunctions will inevitably show up from time to time. Also, computer systems not only experience unexpected glitches and errors but are also occasionally subjected to updates, upgrades, installations, and reboots, which could certainly account for all of the instances of reality gone haywire.
It seems to be a fairly safe assumption that whenever these glitches occur, some change or update to the simulation has occurred. As has been noted by people across the world, spikes in the Schuman Resonance seem to coincide with these updates, especially where new instances of the Mandela Effect crop up, as though there has been a literal electric jolt to our reality that accompanies whatever alteration has been made - as a reboot has just taken place. While these events could be seen as signs or omens, it is impossible to know why anything within the simulation has been altered from outside of it, and therefore these things would be impossible to interpret. Simply speaking, the recognition of glitches and timeslips can only really serve us as reminders that we are in fact living inside of a computer simulation, and as such, are expected to fulfill some function.
If anything, a glitch is a nudge from the universe, reminding us of what, and where, we are.