Are WE the simulators of the universe?
At the time of this writing, ‘What Is Reality’ has garnered around 3.3 million views on YouTube. By contrast, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s, “We Might Be Living in Higher Dimensions…” is currently at 4.9 million. It’s safe to say that the theory put forward by Quantum Gravity Research has reached the public eye, but what is to be gained by actually reading one of their scientific papers? Captivated by their holistic model of the universe, I decided to answer that question for myself — and I failed…
…at least initially…
It was a good three years ago that I discovered their video containing their claims to be trailing behind a new theory of everything (TOE). It was early days in my physical science studies and my brain hadn’t yet been sharpened by the lifestyle choices that I made thereafter. I attempted to read some of their papers, becoming quickly dismayed by the profuse jargon and intricate mathematics.
Teleporting to their website many years later, I found a link to the paper titled, “The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” and, helped by its simplicity and my recent grounding in solid state physics, I managed to put together this article vaguely summarizing their alleged scientific accomplishments.
So what is it? Caution — it’s a lot.
No, seriously, if what they claim is true then we have a whole load of fresh science coming our way. The magnitude of ways that Quantum Gravity Research (QGR) appear to be connecting previously unconnected branches of science is incredible. ‘Theories of Everything’ as they are dubbed, tend to include unification of Quantum Mechanics with Gravitation, but QGR have announced that they’re going to tackle both consciousness and the origin of the fundamental physical constants as well. Oh, and black hole physics.
The basic premise is that the universe is fundamentally digital. They call their theory a ‘digital physics’ theory, or relate it to them, stating that at the very core of our existence is binary information. If that sounds familiar to you, you’ve probably read Nick Bostrom’s paper on the ‘Simulation Hypothesis’ — Quantum Gravity Research have also read it, and they think it’s old news.
From this supposed digital physical reality comes a dizzying plethora of complexity, varying degrees of complexity in fact, which they call ‘strata’. The interesting thing about their theory? The strata don’t follow a linear hierarchy, they don’t even obey time, they circle around and around, one thing causing another in what they term ‘strange loops’ (which, by the way, is not a new term, they make reference to its original use case in the paper).
In order to clarify the surreality, their idea is like your mother giving birth to you, for you to then give birth to your mother, and on and on — ad infinitum. In fact, the theory is called ‘self-simulation hypothesis’ because they don’t believe that the universe started anywhere. They believe that the dynamic behaviour of the binary digits that signify our reality is giving rise to the phenomenon we call ‘time’, and they roughly provide an explanation for the arrow of time by asserting that it’s to do with the increasing degrees of complexity of information. Have you ever observed one of those videos of fractal generation? Imagine looping one of those fractals around so that the beginning links up to the end — that’s kind of what they’re getting at.
You may be able to see already that this is a monist theory of the universe. They believe that everything can be abstracted to one thing — information. To me, that makes perfect sense (or at least, it does when I ignore the existential onslaught that ensues when pondering reality at that level). I agree wholeheartedly that reality should be monistic, because I don’t believe that one thing can affect another unless it is fundamentally made of the same thing. I’m all for their digital monism idea.
Of course, this leads to the consequence that consciousness is fundamentally information as well as everything else. Yep, your consciousness is just a specific kind of pattern in the fractally motivated universe that QGR are trying to uncover. The patterns, by the way, are a special type of pattern, unlike what most people would consider a pattern at all — they’re a quasicrystalline pattern.
Don’t worry if you can’t wrap your head around quasicrystals, there are probably only a few thousand people in the world who properly can. Roger Penrose is the most reputable pioneer of the quasicrystal field of knowledge, and last year he jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics for his research into General Relativity.
From what I know about quasicrystals, they are similar to crystals in that their parts are ordered and could continue to fill space infinitely, with the key difference being that they aren’t translationally symmetrical. They can be rotationally symmetrical though, and in fact many of them obey the ludicrous five-fold symmetry that isn’t normally found in crystals.
These quasicrystalline strutures, according to the research group, can be generated from projecting beautiful Mathematical structures onto different surfaces (or rather, into different dimensions). By studying gauge theories (physical theories that help to govern how subatomic particles behave), Quantum Gravity Research believe that they can determine which Mathematical structures are required to form the projections that the quasicrystals will emerge from — this is pretty much my favourite part of the theory.
Their reasoning for making these connections is quite simply that the universe must be maximally efficient. This sounds like a larger leap than it is though, because even if the universe did appear to be inefficient, at its core it would still be composed of basic operations — these operations kind of have to be maximally efficient due to the mere fact that they are the elementary building blocks of our universe.
Following on from this ‘principle of efficient language’, the QGR team have advised that there would be some (relatively) simple geometrical structure underpinning reality, and by attempting to find this structure, they have constructed a very interesting and involving theory of everything.
As the theory stipulates that consciousness emerges on a universal level and that the maximum amount of consciousness that can exist in the universe is the universe itself, the theorists make careful deliberation to not attach their hypothesis to any spiritual or godly ideas. They clarify that their theory is not spiritual, in that they comment on the nature of physicality and attempt to explain otherwise ‘spiritual’ phenomena, and they clarify that they are not talking about God, since ‘God’ refers to a ‘creator’, of which their universe has none.
That being said, media footage of the (non-profit) research institution’s director, Klee Irwin, shows that he is a believer of “remote viewing”, claiming that both he and his then-nine-year-old daughter have had experiences of this nature. Additionally, it is expressed in their publication that dreaming is a form of consciousness-driven simulation, to which heavy appraisal is given for the ability of human brains to generate such physically accurate realities.
Personally, I’m not decided on whether or not I think that the simulation in question would be consciousness-generated (as QGR put it), or simply consciousness-observed. Nor am I decided on whether or not consciousness is actually required to collapse the wave function in quantum mechanics. In the end, perhaps it comes down to the definition of consciousness, but it is clear that there is a relationship, however, and I fully condone their investigations into the nature of consciousness.
There are some technicalities in their paper that I won’t go into, partly because some are laborious and partly because I don’t understand most of them, but I will quickly cover them for the sake of painting a clear picture:
- There is a trivalent graph network underpinning some of reality, that somehow (this is the part I don’t understand), emerges from the dynamics of binary processes at the fundamental scale.
- In their model, space is of finite possibilities, meaning there is a limit to how the information in the universe can be configured.
- Humans have the ability to organize some of the quasicrystals by determining the ‘random walk’ of the quasiparticles within them (a gift bestowed upon us by the consciousness that preceded us).
- The geometry at the heart of nature is regular, and was postulated a long time ago (think platonic solids).
- The Fibonacci numbers and irrational numbers are integral to QGR’s calculations.
- Some analogies between quasicrystals and topological quantum computers can be made (something about local decoherence and a global qubit or superposition state?)
- Honestly, they lost me so hard when discussing ‘probability lensed boxes’ and ‘Fn/Fm columns’ — At least it’s something to look into!
The conglomeration of sacred statistics and universal concepts is a tall order. The ambition of the group can be construed as far-fetched or unrealistic by some, but what if there were predictions that could be tested empirically? There are an obvious few that would support their statements. Firstly, the team mention that, as in Nick Bostrom’s simulation paper, the discovery of an anisotropic distribution of cosmic rays would lend credence to the idea that we are in a simulation. Anisotropic means that rays are observed to have different properties when measured across different directions (think doppler shift), though I’ll leave it to the theoretical scientists to reason why this would have anything to do with a simulation.
The other, arguably more interesting endeavour is proving the E8 Lie Algebra relation to the standard model: that would be a great revolution. It’s worth noting that the E8 Lie Algebra relation is the brainchild of Garrett Lisi, a researcher who published the paper, ‘An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything’ and which provides some of the foundation for the study of Quantum Gravity Research. His ideas are inventive, elegant, and sadly criticised. Lisi faces an ongoing struggle with some of the holes in his theory, but is adamant that it is the best candidate for a ‘theory of everything’ that we have at present time. Proving the existence of certain fundamental particles would invalidate his theory, hence rendering the self-simulation hypothesis less probable.
If their theory is correct, it will lead to a great understanding of consciousness, and perhaps give rise to the possibility of atemporal communication and more wonderous technologies. It is probably wishful thinking for any breakthrough to be made in the immediate future, but their theory does seem to come packed with a lot of intuitive sensibility.
Thank you for reading!
This post was a guest post. For the original, check out my website: Unique Philosophy
