“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.‘For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring. (Acts 17:24-31)
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| Rene Descartes |
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE IN A SIMULATED REALITY?
For those who are acquainted with the idea that we might be living in a "simulated reality," the theory espouses that we are living a virtual world operated by a quantum computer powerful enough to make everything we "see" indistinguishable from "true" reality. This idea, that all that is seen by humans is produced from inside them by their own mind is not new. In philosophy it is called solipsism. In essence, it is the thought that this simulated world is all in the mind. Some solipsists will accept the idea that other minds exist, others deny it.
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| Hans Moravec |
"HARD" SCIENCE BECOMES SUBJECTIVE, UNTESTABLE, NON-REPEATABLE PHILOSOPHY?I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity; I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things; I shall remain obstinately attached to this idea, and if by this means it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power [i.e. suspend my judgment], and with firm
purpose avoid giving credence to any false thing, or being imposed upon by this arch deceiver, however powerful and deceptive he may be. But this task is a laborious one, and insensibly a certain lassitude leads me into the course of my ordinary life. And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow the tranquillity of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.
Descartes's question is: how can one be sure that his mind and senses are not being influenced or controlled by some evil demon (since God he supposes, being good, would not ever deceive people)? Hans Moravec sees the question as a valid one when he states:
During the last few centuries, physical science has convincingly answered so many questions about the nature of things, and so hugely increased our abilities, that many see it as the only legitimate claimant to the title of true knowledge. Other belief systems may have social utility for the groups that practice them, but ultimately they are just made-up stories. I myself am partial to such ``physical fundamentalism.''
Physical fundamentalists, however, must agree with René Descartes that the world we perceive through our senses could be an elaborate hoax. In the seventeenth century Descartes considered the possibility of an evil demon who created the illusion of an external reality by controlling all that we see and hear (and feel and smell and taste). In the twenty-first century, physical science itself, through the technology of virtual reality, will provide the means to create such illusions. Enthusiastic video gamers and other cybernauts are already strapping themselves into virtual reality goggles and body suits for brief stints in made-up worlds whose fundamental mechanisms are completely different from the quantum fields that (best evidence suggests) constitute our physical world.
Although Moravec sees the limitations of virtual reality games used now, in that people still bump into physical objects, thus reducing the realness of the simulation, he does not think that is permanent. The solution is to implant nodes into the brain thus reducing the need for physical movement at all:
The brain would be physically sustained by life-support machinery, and mentally by connections of all the peripheral nerves to an elaborate simulation of not only a surrounding world but also a body for the brain to inhabit. Brain vats might be medical stopgaps for accident victims with bodies damaged beyond repair, pending the acquisition, growth, or manufacture of a new body.
The virtual life of a brain in a vat can still be subtly perturbed by external physical, chemical, or electrical effects impinging on the vat. Even these weak ties to the physical world would fade if the brain, as well as the body, was absorbed into the simulation. If damaged or endangered parts of the brain, like the body, could be replaced with functionally equivalent simulations, some individuals could survive total physical destruction to find themselves alive as pure computer simulations in virtual worlds.Although the person living inside the simulation might eventually infer that he IS in a simulation, he would have no idea of how this was done or where he would be.
A simulated world hosting a simulated person can be a closed self-contained entity. It might exist as a program on a computer processing data quietly in some dark corner, giving no external hint of the joys and pains, successes and frustrations of the person inside. Inside the simulation events unfold according to the strict logic of the program, which defines the ``laws of physics'' of the simulation. The inhabitant might, by patient experimentation and inference, deduce some representation of the simulation laws, but not the nature or even existence of the simulating computer. The simulation's internal relationships would be the same if the program were running correctly on any of an endless variety of possible computers, slowly, quickly, intermittently, or even backwards andThis pure materialism of Moravec is clearly demonstrated when he speaks of consciousness. He sees consciousness as a purely material thing composed of atomic structure.
forwards in time, with the data stored as charges on chips, marks on a tape, or pulses in a delay line, with the simulation's numbers represented in binary, decimal, or Roman numerals, compactly or spread widely across the machine. There is no limit, in principle, on how indirect the relationship between simulation and simulated can be.
But what is consciousness? The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis. Physical science has only recently begun to address the question on its own terms, from vantage points including evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, neurobiology, and computer science.
Human consciousness may be a by-product of a brain evolved for social living. Memory, prediction and communication mechanisms, similar but distinct from those for keeping track of physical objects, evolved to classify and communicate the moods and relations of tribe members. Aggressive and submissive behaviors, for instance, just like bad and good smells, became classified into categories linked to behavioral responses and also communicable symbols. As language evolved, it became possible to tell stories about both physical and psychological events. At some point, perhaps very early in its evolution, the storytelling mechanism was turned back on the teller, and the story began to include commentary about the teller's state of mind along with the external happenings.Moravec continues to describe consciousness in purely material ways, but does not seem to see that these views become purely subjective. Thus, there is very little difference between this "science" and pure speculative philosophy.
Our consciousness may be primarily the continuous story we tell ourselves, from moment to moment, about what we did and why we did it. It is a thin, often inaccurate veneer rationalizing a mountain of unconscious processing. Not only is our consciousness-story a weak reflection of physical and brain reality, but its very existence is a purely subjective attribution. Viewed from the physical outside, the story is just a pattern of electrochemical events, probably in mainly our left cortex. A complex psychological interpretation must be invoked to translate that pattern into a meaningful tale.
From the psychological inside, the story is compelling because the psychological interpretation is an essential element of the story, its relationships enforced unconsciously by the interconnections of the storytelling neural machinery.
On the one hand, our consciousness may be an evolutionary fluke, telling an unreliable story in a far-fetched interpretation of a pattern of tiny salty squirts. On the other, our consciousness is the only reason for thinking we exist (or for thinking we think). Without it there are no beliefs, no sensations, no experience of being, no universe.
Who is doing all the perceiving and appreciating indeed? The problems that Quantum Physics has discovered should trouble materialists. As Terrance McKenna said (transcribed from video):“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth? Job 38:31-33
If our world distinguishes itself from the vast unexamined (and unexaminable) majority of possible worlds through the act of self-perception and self-appreciation, just who is doing all the perceiving and appreciating? The human mind may be up to interpreting its own functioning as conscious, so rescuing itself from meaningless zombiehood, but surely we few humans and other biota---trapped on a tiny, soggy dust speck in an obscure corner, only occasionally and dimly aware of the grossest features of our immediate surroundings and immediate past---are surely insufficient to bring meaning to the whole visible universe, full of unimagined surprises, 10^40 times as massive, 10^70 times as voluminous, and 10^10 times as long-lived as ourselves. Our present appreciative ability seems more a match for the simplicity of Saturday-morning cartoons.
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| Terrance McKenna |
...an observer is necessary for reality to exist at all...physics has always been the paradigmatic science. All sciences have physics envy. Why is that, because it's not unlikely in a physics experiment to be able to predict an experimental result to three decimal points of accuracy. That's science! You don't get that in sociology; you don't get that in psychology; you don't even get that in biology. And physics is the most mathematical of all the sciences so around the towering edifice of physics the most frightened and uncertain sciences have gathered near her skirts. So now what is physics telling us? It's saying folks, hold your horses, here it turns out the cheerful world of billiard-ball-like-atoms winging their way through Newtonian space is in for serious revision. It turns our that these particles aren't even particles, they're waves. Well no, not exactly. They're both. Well, what I actually meant to say was...and you discover the babble of mad people is what is coming out of the physics departments today. Science has collapsed. It's core has given way to contradiction. Number one, it's incomprehensible. Number two, it's self-contradictory. Number three, you can't conceptualize it, except in some enormously complicated mathematical phase space anyway...carried far enough the analysis of this stage will show you that it has no "reality" to it.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE COMPUTER SIMULATION THEORY
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| Hugh Everett III |
MULTIVERSE THEORY
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| Isaac Newton |
And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow'd that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. At least, I see nothing of Contradiction in all this.
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| Paul Davies |
For a start, how is the existence of the other universes to be tested? To be sure, all cosmologists accept that there are some regions of the universe that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes, but somewhere on the slippery slope between that and the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, credibility reaches a limit. As one slips down that slope, more and more must be accepted on faith, and less and less is open to scientific verification. Extreme multiverse explanations are therefore reminiscent of theological discussions. Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence it requires the same leap of faith.
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| Max Tegmark |
1. There is Max Tegmark's theory which contains four possible and different multiverses.
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| Brian Greene |
3. There is the M-theory which require 10-11 spacetime dimensions.
4. There is the Black-hole cosmology theory which sees our universe as the interior of a black hole existing as one of possible many universes inside a larger universe.
5. There is the Anthropic principle theory
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| D-Wave Quantum Computer |
The computer power required and the programming complexity required are totally beyond our technological abilities with now. So this simulation would have to be created by vastly superior technological alien civilization. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies does not believe we are living in a computer simulation. She explains some of her reasons:
...the first major problem with the simulation hypothesis is to consistently create all the data which we observe by any means other than the standard model and general relativity – because these are, for all we know, not compatible with the universe-as-a-computer.
Sabine Hossenfelder
Maybe you want to argue it is only you alone who is being simulated, and I am merely another part of the simulation. I’m quite sympathetic to this reincarnation of solipsism, for sometimes my best attempt of explaining the world is that it’s all an artifact of my subconscious nightmares. But the one-brain-only idea doesn’t work if you want to claim that it is likely we live in a computer simulation.
To claim it is likely we are simulated, the number of simulated conscious minds must vastly outnumber those of non-simulated minds. This means the programmer will have to create a lot of brains. Now, they could separately simulate all these brains and try to fake an environment with other brains for each, but that would be nonsensical. The computationally more efficient way to convince one brain that the other brains are “real” is to combine them in one simulation.
Then, however, you get simulated societies that, like ours, will set out to understand the laws that govern their environment to better use it. They will, in other words, do science. And now the programmer has a problem, because it must keep close track of exactly what all these artificial brains are trying to probe.
The programmer could of course just simulate the whole universe (or multiverse?) but that again doesn’t work for the simulation argument. Problem is, in this case it would have to be possible to encode a whole universe in part of another universe, and parts of the simulation would attempt to run their own simulation, and so on. This has the effect of attempting to reproduce the laws on shorter and shorter distance scales. That, too, isn’t compatible with what we know about the laws of nature. Sorry.
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| David Wolpert |
Just because the universe is computable (Lloyd says 10^120 quantum operations) does not mean it is computable in a way that is useful to us. Wolpert proves that two computers cannot mutually simulate each other, which implies that a computer cannot simulate itself. A computer cannot have enough memory to know its own state because it needs at least one more bit to make any observation from its simulation and then has to include that bit in its state. Any computer that models the exact physics of our universe would have to exist outside our observable universe.But there are some, who do NOT think the universe is a computer or that the universe or a brain can even BE computed.
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back to real-world predictions. But while this computational process can tell us what we want to know, we have taken this procedure too literally, implicitly assuming that the universe must compute itself in the same manner. Physical theories that do not follow this computational framework are deemed illogical, right from the start. But this anthropocentric assumption has steered our physical models into an impossible corner, primarily because of quantum phenomena. Meanwhile, we have not been exploring other models in which the universe is not so limited. In fact, some of these alternate models already have a well-established importance, but are thought to be mathematical tricks without physical significance. This essay argues that only by dropping our assumption that the universe is a computer can we fully develop such models, explain quantum phenomena, and understand the workings of our universe.In part 2 of this series these ideas will be compared to the biblical account of the universe. The Bible is not a science textbook, but it does make assertions about the nature of the world, man and the created world.
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