Well, 2001 is actually a happy ending, as Dave is reborn as a cosmic being. Solaris, at least in the book, is an attempt by the sentient ocean to communicate with researchers through mimics.
It's actually debatable given our capability for abstract thought and creating things like mathematics.
I think it's better to say that our minds have built in optimization for some patterns of behavior and thought but it doesn't mean we aren't "generally intelligent".
Just as if you have Turing complete language designed for accounting it doesn't mean you can actually write anything in it, even if that would be not optimal.
The point I was trying to make is that if we are indeed in a simulation, and I'm not saying that we definitely are, but if we are - one possibility to design such a simulation in a way to make it more efficient is to actually make computations depend on the observer, meaning that sorry, but in this case it would have conscious "woo" built in.
Just in the same way as that only visible from current perspective objects are being drawn on a frame of a 3D game.
Currently unobserved parts of the simulation might exist in different form.
It's okay to disagree with simulation theory, but it is a perfectly valid possibility according to everything we know.
Personally, I don't think it's the only possibility, but i think it's quite probable and should be taken seriously.
>We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies
Did we? If we're in a simulation instead of base reality, it's possible that simulation have actually created them for us when we started looking, depending on the scope and paramaters of simulaiton scenario.
In my experience learning something comes from playing with it. So allow me shameless plug: https://archive.is/xDb8o This is a Linux tutorial I wrote quite some time ago but it's still relevant, it tries to give you some hands-on overview of Linux system by having you to execute commands and understand the output.
It goal is to just go through it to familiarize yourself with different parts of the systems. There is verbose table of contents on the first page if you scroll down.
How can I better describe myself is something I'm trying to clarify for myself. I'm sure there is a place in tech world for a guy who likes to fiddle with data and monitoring which benefit the company which will hire me a lot.
I did full time jobs before, but not part time ones, not including some side projects for my friends, but I didn't specifically search for what I'm asking here, definitely not tried to search part-time position specifically tailored to my tastes.
As to job market, the industry is so big and ups and downs happened before a lot, I'm thinking it's not about the market but about my ability to find what I want. You're on point about bypassing automated screening systems, the question is, do you have some ideas how to do it in my case?