Along the way I was required to take some philosophy classes. This eventually became a second love of mine and I ended up minoring in the subject. The very first philosopher that grabbed my attention was Rene Descartes. It was his deep questioning of the illusion of reality that drew me in. This guy lived in the 1600's and he was on to things that modern day philosophers (aka theoretical physicists) are still grappling with 500 years later and trying to prove true or untrue. And it was his continual quest to find out the truth of reality that left us with the great phrase "I think, therefore I am." He definitely drew from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. What philosopher doesn't? But he lived two millennium later and could present questions that seemed more relevant to me while I was young and in college. I later became more fond of the big three, the SPA boys, but Descartes was my first crush.
This video segment below is broken down into two parts. The part that I want to discuss is the second part of the video that begins about the 6:35 mark. Rich Terrell demonstrates a version of Young's experiment (double slit) which is always cool to see. But what really catches my attention is the odds at which he places the chances of reality being a simulation.
When I first came across the Nick Bostrom piece that presented the Simulation Argument in 2003 I found it interesting. However, the thing that most intrigued me was the likelihood (20%) Bostrom gave to the simulation part of his hypothesis. This is how Bostrom broke it down:
"A technologically mature "posthuman" civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:
- The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
- The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
- The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."
Not to talk down to any of you, but here is what he's saying in my words:
He basically starts by presenting several hypotheses that we should all pretty much agree on.
1. We go extinct before we could create simulations with sentient beings.
2. We don't go extinct, we can create simulations with sentient beings, and we choose not to run these programs.
3. We don't go extinct, we can create simulations with sentient beings, and we do so.
Now, obviously, the first objection to hearing this would be to attack the notion that we inevitably discover how to create sentient beings. For me that's not an obstacle at all. Scientists have been trying to merge the mathematics of the macro universe with the mathematics of the micro universe for quite some time. We can make the formulas work for all of the biggest things in existence. Something a thousand times the size of our sun does exactly what we think it should do according to the mathematics of it all. However, these same formulas don't hold true when we examine the smallest things in existence.
This is currently a huge problem for us, we can't figure it out. However, we are aware that in the very near future computers will surpass us when it comes to "thinking" power. Not only will they overtake us in this department, they will do it with exponential magnitude. I love trying to present a way to look at things so they can sink in and make sense from a different perspective. So imagine the exact moment when computers become "smarter" than us and picture a photo finish horse race at Santa Anita. We examine the photo and there we see it, computers beat humans by just a nose in a super tight finish. Now imagine there is another camera 100 yards further down the track from the finish line. Also imagine the "horses" continue to travel at the same speed they crossed the finish line. When the second photo is taken of the human "horses" crossing in front of the 100 yards further camera the computer horse would be finished with a race in New York, Paris, back to Santa Anita again, and will be on Mars getting ready to start another race. This really wasn't drawn to scale but was merely intended to help grasp how much smarter computers are going to be in a very short time. My point is they're going to be much smarter (able to perform more functions) than we can imagine.
If (and I concede the if) reality is just a mathematical formula it will be solved, that I'm very sure of. When it's solved the notion of creating sentient beings doesn't seem that complicated to me. If everything in the universe operates under some mathematical formula then we are no different, no matter how complex that formula might be. I'm not talking about being able to create another human being and bring it into our existence. I'm talking about us, with the help of computers we created that are incredibly smart, being able to create a thing inside a simulation that believes it is alive or feels like it is alive. Have you witnessed the Tupac simulation at Coachella? You can't imagine that something in the future could create a simulation that looks completely real and then fuse your brain into that simulation and fool you into believing you have mass?
I tried to find a clip of just the segment I want you to watch but was unsuccessful. However, I did find the episode. The part I need you to watch starts at the 5:30 mark and isn't very long.
The most striking thing about this, and there are several things to ponder, is the fact you can't "think" it away. After this happens to you once (the knife stabbing the dummy legs and you experiencing no pain) you figure out what's happening. You are in a paid experiment and might have even known those were dummy legs and not yours. They probably even told you they are going to subject you to some bizarre stuff but you'll always be safe no matter what it seems. Even with all of this, when the same experiment is performed again the brain still anticipates and prepares for the knife. In just a very brief amount of time the brain became fused to the false reality.
I've seen this same team do several of these experiments and even posted one on my Facebook wall a while back. They hooked up a person to the exact same device and had him stand up. He thought he was seeing what was all around him through the camera but they had him in another room that looked the same. They do some things, like they did in the clip I shared, that trick the brain into buying into the false reality. Then the gotcha moment occurs when they have the guy walk up behind himself. It's obviously another person wearing the camera and standing behind the guy but that's not at all how it feels to the guy. The people that take place in this experiment all describe the feeling as an outer body experience. They are looking at themselves but don't feel like that body, that shell that carries around the ghost in the machine, is them. They feel like they are the thoughts, that exist in an unknown plane, suspended behind their body. It doesn't matter if they figure it out or if it's explained to them, they still feel apart from their body when it's happening. They can't "think" the feeling away.
Our brain works very hard to make sense of reality in a way which keeps us plugging along. It doesn't care in the slightest what that reality is, it is just running all of the formulas in every situation and trying to give you the best odds of success in your every endeavor, from the most trivial to the most meaningful of events. Happenings that occur with a frequency four, five, six deviations in the Bell Curve of what we would expect to see become impossibilities and miracles to us, our brain doesn't waste its limited resources on pointless mathematics. This, I contend, is evidenced in our true inability to grasp the concepts of large numbers. We use terms like a "million", "billion", and "trillion", but in reality they're all a "gazillion" to us.
However, very soon the evolution of computing power will create machines that will have the resources to invest in exploration into areas of reality that have stayed outside our grasp. As great as some minds have been over the last couple of thousand years, they had no way to explore their brilliant thoughts like the scientists of the near future will be able to do. Things that we simply attribute to chance, say the flip of a coin, could conceivably be predicted with one hundred percent accuracy. If we, or something like a computer, had every single piece of information (the complete formula) then it could be known if a heads or a tails was coming based on all of the factors that go into the coin landing on a particular side on a particular toss on a particular hemisphere on a particular continent in a particular country in a particular state in a particular city in a particular residence that was chilled by a particular swamp cooler on a day that a particular temperature happened to be 88.67526541655655 degrees and was tossed by a guy with his off hand and he had recently sprained his wrist and the rug the coin was going to land on was made in China and consisted of 968,000,247 to the xyz power of ten atoms . I only left out about a gazillion other factors that would be needed to know that but my point is the same, if something was able to know all of the ingredients then it would certainly be possible to be a better predictor.
And even though we've been told we're special and it feels like we're special, we're just a very complicated (or so it seems) formula. If computers can figure out that formula then they will be able to replicate it. Even if our replication isn't exactly a clone of our existence, it could create things that sense things the way humans do (often times incorrectly). The computer could trick the things into believing they have physical properties very easily. So think about that, it doesn't have to create a physical sentient being at all. It simply has to run a program and have that program become aware of itself and the rest is history. If the computer was capable of figuring out the formula to everything and creating a simulation of our reality, then it most certainly could trick the sentient being inside the program into thinking it existed in a physical plane. This is why I showed the second video, to show how quickly our brain can be fooled into accepting a reality that doesn't exist. It can even be fooled into feeling sensations that don't exist in that reality. It's nothing more than the "brain in a vat" scenario but the answer to whether or not it could be pulled off isn't that far away.
When Bostrom came out with his Simulation Argument he gave it a 20 percent chance we were currently living in a simulation. Over time what has perplexed me the most about this argument is how it couldn't be a 99.99 percent of likelihood. I dismissed his piece when I first read it and now find myself unable to shake the idea that we almost have to live in a simulation. We are on the verge, even if we are still just shy and even if we actually fail and never figure it out, of being able to solve a long standing question about the nature of reality. If reality is a formula none of the "why's", "what's",or "how's" that boggle our minds will be answered. Why were we created most likely won't come along with formula (perhaps as a prize I suppose but that seems wishful thinking). Nor will the who created us along with everything else question be answered. What happens to us when we cease to exist will more than likely still remain a mystery. I could easily envision a day where science can actually prove they know the formula to everything and religion accepting it as fact and simply exclaiming "that's how God designed it". And that would seem a plausible response to me. If something did create it then it would be a god for all intents and purposes. It might not be some one's exact god they claim to know everything about, but nonetheless it would be the Creator and it might possibly possess all of the powers we currently grant our creator.
If we lived in a simulation we would never be able to find "the beginning" and we would never be able to find "the end", they would always be outside our reach. We would never be able to know what reality outside of our reality is unless the outside reality passed on that information. It's really not much different than imaging a place like Heaven that exists in another dimension and belongs to the Creator. We currently accept the fact that we can't even begin to comprehend the knowledge of our modern day deities so why would it be any different if we were a simulation? We currently attribute the power of knowing our every thought, being able to alter the course of our reality, determining what happens to us when we die to our creator. We would just accept whatever created us is beyond our comprehension as we currently do. And I would suspect everyone would still believe in the same creator they believe in at the moment even if we had a formula that explained the nature of reality. I know it seems like a pretty far out their idea to some, probably most, but we already live with the belief that our reality is bizarre, we're just used to the bizarre things we believe so they don't seem so odd. Whatever reality happens to be, don't we already know that it is stranger than we can imagine?
When I play a video game online with my friends we are all at our homes. We log into a site that connects us to a server, a shared virtual reality for us. The site obviously runs a program that generates this world but it's really just a bunch of 0's and 1's. The reality we happen to join is a war zone with buildings and towers and vehicles and soldiers. What I see on my screen is what my avatar, my little cartoon character, in the games sees in his field of vision. Same is true of my buddy's screen, he sees through his characters eyes. If I'm on one side of the battlefield and he is on the other and look at the same object, say the largest building, it looks different to us. He is seeing it from his virtual reality location and me from mine. But we all know the map doesn't always exist everywhere, it only exists where we need it to, the space we occupy and area in which we look. If I'm looking one direction there isn't really anything behind me, the program doesn't generate it just for fun. It would be a huge waste of resources and would be far more costly. Instead it provides us the bare minimum and that is all we need. Oddly enough, this is much like what we find when we try to observe the quantum world.
I shared the first video because Terrell does a good job of explaining the Simulation Argument and shows a variant of Young's Experiment. But also because Terrell thinks the odds of our reality being a simulation are a lot closer to what I think the odds are, 300 million to 1 against the fact that we aren't living in one. I'm not exactly sure how he derives that exact number but his thinking is exactly like mine. The universe has been in existence for almost 14 billion years and we are within ten, twenty, fifty, hell - even a thousand years of being able to create a reality for a being and allowing for the conditions for it to become aware of its existence. Even if we come up just short, the odds of us simply being on the cusp of having this knowledge is in the astronomical numbers against.
Then the question shifts to this, if we have reached this point were we the first sentient beings to do it? Again, the mathematics of it suggest it would be nearly impossible for us to be the first. As soon as the first sentient thing was able to create a simulation that was able to create a simulation within itself the infinite loop of regression was created. It's like looking into a mirror with another mirror placed on the opposite wall creating a tunnel of realities that go far beyond our senses.
If we knew the formula for everything and could replicate it, surely we could cure cancer couldn't we? Would we know why people "flip out" and inflict pain onto others and create terror and chaos in friendly movie theaters? Would we feel the need to wage war against our brothers with such passion and frequency, fighting over space in our simulation? Would we understand our diets better and how to best supply rest and energy to our bodies? Would we understand the exact chemical makeup of what we call "love" or "happiness"?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions but I do know that asking them and seriously entertaining them until they can be ruled out is very important. Whatever the "truth" of reality may be, it has to be discovered without bias. We have to strive to search it out, wherever it unveils itself, and take it for what it is and work with it in whatever way possible. To do anything less would be an insult and a let down to our ancestors, that happen to be people from the future.
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