Is reality a computer simulation ?
This idea has been evolving for a long time (mostly since computers were invented) and I just watched Elon ‘Ironman’ Musk answer that he thought reality is almost definitely a computer simulation.
I’m not so sure as he is & I think there’s a bit more to delve into, deeper in the recesses of our collective psychology. I am quite sure however, that whatever the answer to reality is, it’s a bit more subtle and majestic than a Linux server based reality, on a really big Qubit Xbox, ughhh.
Here’s the link below which includes the video on the Independent’s website. So you can have a look for yourself. Apparently, those oh so philosophical folks at Bank America wrote a report for their clients ? suggesting that there’s a high probability we do live in a ‘THE MATRIX’ style computer simulation.
Sounds to me like they’re getting ready to, ‘pull the wool over the eyes of gullible investors and inadvertently lose their money accidentally on purpose’, in a computer simulation, loss of data incident ! :~wink).
I can’t actually think of a solid reason they would write a report like that but it sets up an odd proposition. They may as well have said, The Universe is perched on an Elephants back, standing on a turtle. ( it’s turtles, all the way down.)
For me the clue is in Elon’s last comment.. (which I’m badly paraphrasing here).. “let’s hope we are, cos’ either we’re in a simulation or civilisation will come to an end” so there you go, either we’re a computer simulation or we’re finished. That to me, is just too lazy.
The simulation theory seems a natural extension of a very human 21st Century existential fear. One of the Titans of the current technocracy like Elon would surely be an interesting psychological study in itself and might give us some insight as to why he’s so sure. He lives in a virtual world already. One which is fabricated, synthetic (and mostly of his own making). The simulation theory sounds very much like the idea of Nirvana, Paradise or Heaven, except it’s invoked by technology and is present in the here and now, not the ever-after, how very contemporary !
It’s quasi religious in it’s attitude and as all belief systems which rely on greater powers to make decision, they tend to have a similar flavour; basically, we’re not responsible for the bad things which happen / we make happen / happen to us, etc.. zzz In this case-scenario, we still have the free will, just that the creator / creation process has been neatly dovetailed into a nice box. Then we ask, who made the box? It’s so boring already
However, I could ‘imagine’ that we do live in a simulation. (I like to think I have a certain, if limited amount of imaginative powers and the premise that we’re only limited by the powers of our imaginations, is also appealing.
There are tantalising clues in science relating to the Holographic Universe; something akin to error correcting hidden deep in equations relating to quantum theory. Computer simulation experiments of a 2D Universe, which easily hold up as viable when reality is holographically projected in 3D, apparently ;) ~I’m not a scientist, so can’t tell you if these ‘experiments’ / equations have much worth but I am intrigued with Quantum oddness.
At the very end of the Carl Sagan book ‘Contact’; a novelised version of the non fiction book and popular TV series, a riddle is offered to humanity. Deep down in the decimal points of pi, there is a coded pictogram of a square in a circle, or the other way round, which offers the idea that mathematics has a hallmark, ‘was ‘designed’. We discovered maths, we didn’t really invent 1–2–3 ! it was always there, a probable universal language. So maybe the error correcting codes do mean something which we can’t yet grasp.
The Matrix did hit a nerve when it came out. A whole generation feeling that something wasn’t quite right; that it all felt a bit ‘wrong’. That we were ‘waiting to wake up’. In the 90’s, people were indeed waking up to the fact that all of the institutions which we instinctively (no choice really) put our trust in, were beginning to be shown to be corrupt at all levels and there was often nothing anyone could do about it, from politicians, to law enforcement, the judiciary, corporations.. and so on.
The omnipotent and omnipresent ‘programs’ in The Matrix were intentionally written and described as faceless, corporate, intel, security, military, men in black types with unfettered access to everything, everywhere. They were listening and watching for movements, waiting for the transgressive flesh and blood humans to make their next bold move. Of course, it was a valuable subplot to the central idea and in this screenplay, very effective, if not too subtle.
The super surveillance idea carried by the Matrix program characters was borne out quite fully, (eventually) post ‘The Snowden’ revelations in all of it’s glowing colours.
While I thought The Matrix Trilogy at the time had some great science fiction ideas, like all good sci-fi, it’s political at it’s heart. The genre always has used metaphor for the here and now, the just around the corner. It almost always contains a conspiracy; a thriller, a stark warning of unseen truths. Almost always a ‘what if’ caveat written to the future, supposed to guide ethics and moral decisions, especially around the themes of technology and power.
If we take it literally to be true as a concept, perhaps we miss the warnings.
Kind of concluding here, but not really. Although it may be possible that we do in fact, live in a computer simulation which is so real that it’s indistinguishable from reality.. (which is slightly ridiculous, because how would we really know what reality tastes like anyway?) It’s similar to the way Mouse in The Matrix asks, “how do the machines know what tasty wheat tastes like” when eating the cereal gloop which sustains the crew. He wonders about how the palate of The Matrix simulation may have got some things wrong, “which is why chicken tastes like everything !
here’s the clip for of Mouse exploring how the computer simulation might get things like flavours a bit wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1EcrD5IyxM
We have digressed.. I don’t agree with Elon’s ‘it’s 1 in billions that we’re not living in a simulation of our own reality’. It’s a bit of a cop out I feel and belies a simple denial of both of ourselves; the individual self & the collective self.
The world is real, whether we imagine so or not is kind of irrelevant, it is all we’ve got to work with & it’s definitely not a computer game written by EA Sports Universal division. It’s our collective lives, our history and our future and it’s inhabited by many other creatures who unfortunately depend on our clarity of thinking in order to survive, as oblivious to our intentions as could be possible, and not always oblivious to us either. (Think Orang Utans watching their homelands burn to become palm oil plantations.)
We really are on the brink of a major man made extinction, equivalent or worse to some of the major extinctions of the last billion years and with potentially even worse to come from climate change. It is our collective fault. Not you and me personally in the ‘big sense’. We are part of it in our personal consumption & lifestyle choice but I’m more inclined to lay blame for the actions and lack of action by the ‘major stakeholders’ in society who have not taken us in a very sustainable direction. Mainly because of game currency (sorry, I meant money) and their own short sighted self interest.
Think petrochemicals, agriculture, energy, food — a political, corporate elite playing their own game of simulated reality with us as game pieces, while they live in their own sealed off world of hospitality, five star plus resorts and helicopter views of the little people. When the days comes, (famous quote by someone) — “when they realise you can’t eat money” .. you get the idea !
Global warming and pollution threaten to ruin the future for almost everyone and everything, everywhere, maybe ending up with planet Earth as a dying world, devoid of life or worse, consigned to a fate like Venus, hot, cloudy.. noxious, immense pressures, forget it.. what a waste of processing power that would be for the server hosting Earth life Version 3.141592..
Millions of people live in abject poverty today and other lifeforms happily existing for millions of years, now hang in the balance of a spreadsheet on someone’s desk, on the other side of the world, while a few humans (and their animal pets) have personal wealth, privilege of existence & resources beyond the imaginations of most ordinary people, for the time being: i.e, they have access to their very own personalised, virtual cheat sheet.
I do actually quite like the idea that the Whole Universe could be 2 dimensional and we’re experiencing a holographic 3D projection of it. It’s neat, compact and a very efficient explanation for The Universe (just a discreet blip in a box, instead of an ever accelerating, mind boggling, expanding infinity of subatomic particles of which we know hardly anything and can only really guess what they’re up to at any given point.)
As a concept, it renders the seemingly indescribable effects of life, consciousness, the visible and sometimes painful consequences of cause & effect; decisions made in one way time arrow which can never be reversed, quite easily digestible by it’s potential finiteness, (ergot, invoking the religious principle of ‘not our fault boss’ is somewhat appealing to the lower echelons of the mind.)
It also would simply explain away a lot of anomalies that we can’t really reliably account for (yet), like time slips, synchronistic events and things like telepathy, precognition, seeing future events in our dreams. ( which takes us full circle to The Matrix idea. All the paranormal and universally observed, experienced ‘glitches’ explained away, because we’re all just ghosts in a machine.
I think the answers to the riddles of reality, which we will eventually work out is probably more to do with dimensions we can’t yet see or feel.
There are probably lots of them, 10 for brevity or 26 according to string theorists, or perhaps much, much more than that.
We can’t really imagine other dimensions very well because we’re stuck in X,Y,Z + 1 way time flow, but when we dream and when we lucidly do so, our world does seem indeed limited only by our imaginations. We can fly, time is plastic. we can walk through the air. we can literally dream up a whole intersecting multidimensional experience of our own choosing. So in time maybe we’ll come back to the hologram idea as a ‘technology induced’ simplistic model to describe a much busier Universe which we couldn’t see
because we couldn’t measure it.
The failure to address the holes in our understanding of deeper reality and the apparent glitches are surely due to this potent mix of one part lack of sensitive equipment and 2 equal parts of the willing & stubborn, steadfast nature of mainstream science which continues to live / operate within a rigid, Victorian-esque world of material reductive glibness, (we material scientists have got an / or the answer for everything, so you non scientists be quiet, , which is fair enough, but rigid nonetheless. Progress is often made by flexible genius type minds, discoveries sometimes made by mistake or a whim; a fluff of inspiration in a daydream or night dream. Benzene, relativity, penicillin, vaccines, for the big examples.
Anyone who thinks differently or dares to imagine outside the current paradigm can easily be poked back in, including those invoking the hologram.
I’m the first person to applaud the enlightenment movement of the 18th Century as a necessary way to kill off the stranglehold of religion as the answer to everything. In the process it led science to kill off many ideas around spirituality (in the Western tradition) and even open mindedness. You wondered why meditation, mindfulness and yoga were so popular in today’s digital ocean of abstract information.
Who knows what all of the answers to reality are ? Nobody, not even the modern philosophers. The whole panoply of odd stuff including UFO’s, crypto-beasts, and apparitions is experienced by many people in ‘some kind of way’, which seems like ‘reality’, but is not yet sufficiently explained by science to make sense to everybody — unlike gravity for example, which we kind of go.. “oh yeah, I can see now how that works”, Black Holes, excepted. Thanks Prof. Hawking.
In this respect at least Elon Musk has a fertile imagination and thinks somewhere alongside the outer edge of the proverbial box with hyperloop transport, space travel and electric cars for all. The box we supposedly / might all live in on someone’s shelf tucked away in a distant dimension.. (A flatland we live in already, indeed.)
On the whole, I’m inclined to think that the computer simulation idea is a bit of dishonest idea, reflecting current ideas about how we see and think about ourselves in relation to machines and our sometimes unhealthy relationship with technology and it’s effects of ‘progress’ on the ‘real’ world’.
I can’t help but see many facets of our weaknesses reflected in quite a glaring & obvious human philosophy of invoking the ‘higher power’ and taking no responsibility for our actions, particularly in regards to our unending dichotomy of thought and often moral indifference over actions which as individual citizens, we have no say in; like war, famine, degradation of the environment.
For humankind to really advance and secure a place for future generations of life, including the ancient phyla in addition to ourselves, we have to get past this slightly infantile stage of our collective psychology, own up to a few home truths about our history as a species; ‘the decimator’ and start acting like proper grown ups beings.. which I doubt is going to happen anytime soon !
We are part of a huge ecosystem. I’ve said this line before.. Insects do all the hard work, bacteria and fungi, are the unsung heroes of the world, the protozoa work tirelessly churning out what we need, while we congratulate ourselves for singing and dancing on TV .
