What is reality?

What is reality?

The Simulation Hypothesis: Full Program

"Are we living in a virtual reality? Is the universe emerging from an information processing system? And if so, could we ever tell? Is it possible to 'hack' the system and change reality?"

Is this "base reality"? Probably not, say some

via boingboing

The Westworld reboot and Elon Musk recently renewed interest in "base reality," the concept that one true reality exists, and everything else, including possibly this reality, is a simulation of some sort. Now some billionaires are funding the search for an escape.

From Plato's Cave to The Matrix, it's often been an intriguing question posed in art and culture, but now there's a movement afoot to research the question scientifically.

Some attribute the recent interest to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, but the provenance of the term "base reality" can be traced to Norman Spinrad's excellent essay "The Transmogrification of Philip K. Dick," in Science Fiction in the Real World.

 Spinrad was a close friend of Dick's. He wrote in 1990:

    For Phil Dick, consciousness-altering drugs like Chew-Z in PALMER ELDRITCH, mental states like Manfred's autism in MARTIAN TIME SLIP, and ersatz subjective realities as in UBIK or A MAZE OF DEATH or EYE IN THE SKY serve the same function, literarily and metaphysically. Namely to demonstrate that altered mental states however they may be created create altered realities that are as "real" as what we individually think of as "base reality," since each of our individual "base realities," far from being the absolute we like to pretend it is, is itself a unique subjective reality, arising as it does in our own unique biophysical matrix. In this perception lies either the solipsistic madness of total psychic relativity or transcendent wisdom, and the greatness of Dick as a writer, what makes him by far the greatest metaphysical novelist of all time, is that, having opened the door to this ultimate spiritual, perceptual, and metaphysical chaos, he leads us through it to true wisdom along a moral vector.

Bonus video: Musk fielding a question about base reality.

What if evolution bred reality out of us?

via NPR

Look around you. What do you see?

Other people going about their business? Rooms with tables and chairs? Nature with its sky, grass and trees?

All that stuff, it's really there, right? Even if you were to disappear right now — poof! — the rest of the world would still exist in all forms you're seeing now, right?

Or would it?

This kind of metaphysical question is something you'd expect in a good philosophy class — or maybe even a discussion of quantum physics. But most of us wouldn't expect an argument denying the reality of the objective world to come out of evolutionary biology. After all, doesn't evolution tell us we've been tuned to reality by billions of years of natural selection? It makes sense that creatures that can't tell a poisonous snake from a stick shouldn't last long and, therefore, shouldn't pass their genes on to the next generation.

That is certainly how the standard argument goes. But Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, isn't buying it.

For decades, Hoffman, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying the links between evolution, perception and intelligence (both natural and machine). Based on that body of work, he thinks we've been missing something fundamental when it comes to fundamental reality.

Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other.

Hoffman's been making a lot of news in recent months with these claims. His March 2015 TED talk went viral, gaining more than 2 million views. After a friend sent me the video, I was keen to learn more. I called Dr. Hoffman, and he graciously set aside some time for us to talk. What followed was a delightful conversation with a guy who does, indeed, have a big radical idea. At the same time, Hoffman doesn't come off as someone with an ax to grind. He seems genuinely open and truly curious. At his core, Hoffman says, he's a scientist with a theory that must either live or die by data.

So, what exactly is Hoffman's big radical idea? He begins with a precisely formulated theorem:

    "Given an arbitrary world and arbitrary fitness functions, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but that is just tuned to fitness."

So let's unpack Hoffman's theorem for a moment. To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, "fitness" is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That's what they mean by "fitness functions."

So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment's, fitness function. The second creature couldn't care less about what's really going on in reality. What Hoffman's theorem says is the fitness-tuned critter will — almost always — win the evolution game.

To see how this works, consider an example Hoffman describes in an interview with Quanta Magazine. He begins by imagining a resource like water whose real-world quantity has been objectively ordered — very little water, medium amounts of water, lots of water. According to Hoffman, most fitness functions won't be direct responses to something like this ordering. Instead they will be like bell curves. Too little water is bad (death by desiccation), but so is too much water (death by drowning). That means evolution would tune the organism's behavior so that too little and too much water would both be bad and both generate the same kind of response (perception). Only the moderate amount of water would generate a different response. As Hoffman puts it:

    " ... an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won't see any distinction between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in reality."

To test this idea, Hoffman and collaborators have run evolutionary simulations with different kinds of fitness functions — some of those tuned to reality and some having nothing to do with reality. The non-reality functions almost always win. For Hoffman, the consequences of these studies are profound. As he told me:

    "We assume the 'predicates' of perceptions — space, time, physical objects, shapes — are the right ones to describe physical reality. And this theorem says that [such] predicates are [the wrong ones] almost surely."

In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed.

Hoffman then builds something even more radical out of his broken link between objective reality and evolution. He calls it conscious realism, and it's based on the premise that "circuits of conscious agents" are what end up defining experienced reality. While there clearly is a world separate from us, Hoffman says, evolution does not give us access to that. Instead, he claims, it's our interactions as conscious agents that give shape to the reality we experience. "I can take separate observers," he told Quanta Magazine, "put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It's conscious agents all the way down."

This is a pretty head-spinning stuff. Our perceived reality has nothing to do with the world in and of itself? That's the kind of thing that's bound to piss off a whole lot of people in a whole lot of fields. I asked Hoffman about the reaction to his work. "All over the map," he replied. "I'm either a genius or an absolute stupid idiot. The emotions are pretty strong."

Indeed, criticisms both closely reasoned and otherwise can be found from a variety of sources. For myself, I find the logic in Hoffman's ideas both exciting and potentially appealing because of other philosophical biases I carry around in my head. Also, it's clear from the body of his work that Hoffman has been seriously attacking the problem from a range of angles for a while.

But the ideas are also so radical that I'm inclined to think they're wrong (as most ideas this radical tend to be). It's gonna take a lot of proof to tip the scales in my (and most others') view.

But that's as it should be. And what I really like about Donald Hoffman is his cheerful willingness to let the fur fly.

Let the games (evolutionary and otherwise) go on!

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

via Quanta:

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.

Getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience. This is the aptly named “hard problem.”

On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them — whether we are conscious humans or inanimate measuring devices. Experiment after experiment has shown — defying common sense — that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space. As the physicist John Wheeler put it, “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

So while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality. In short, all roads lead back to the observer. And that’s where you can find Hoffman — straddling the boundaries, attempting a mathematical model of the observer, trying to get at the reality behind the illusion. Quanta Magazine caught up with him to find out more. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: People often use Darwinian evolution as an argument that our perceptions accurately reflect reality. They say, “Obviously we must be latching onto reality in some way because otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. If I think I’m seeing a palm tree but it’s really a tiger, I’m in trouble.”

DONALD HOFFMAN: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

You’ve done computer simulations to show this. Can you give an example?

Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order — very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness — in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve  — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in reality.

But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?

There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

So everything we see is one big illusion?

We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally.

If snakes aren’t snakes and trains aren’t trains, what are they?

Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones. A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

How did you first become interested in these ideas?

As a teenager, I was very interested in the question “Are we machines?” My reading of the science suggested that we are. But my dad was a minister, and at church they were saying we’re not. So I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. It’s sort of an important personal question — if I’m a machine, I would like to find that out! And if I’m not, I’d like to know, what is that special magic beyond the machine? So eventually in the 1980s I went to the artificial intelligence lab at MIT and worked on machine perception. The field of vision research was enjoying a newfound success in developing mathematical models for specific visual abilities. I noticed that they seemed to share a common mathematical structure, so I thought it might be possible to write down a formal structure for observation that encompassed all of them, perhaps all possible modes of observation. I was inspired in part by Alan Turing. When he invented the Turing machine, he was trying to come up with a notion of computation, and instead of putting bells and whistles on it, he said, Let’s get the simplest, most pared down mathematical description that could possibly work. And that simple formalism is the foundation for the science of computation. So I wondered, could I provide a similarly simple formal foundation for the science of observation?

A mathematical model of consciousness.

That’s right. My intuition was, there are conscious experiences. I have pains, tastes, smells, all my sensory experiences, moods, emotions and so forth. So I’m just going to say: One part of this consciousness structure is a set of all possible experiences. When I’m having an experience, based on that experience I may want to change what I’m doing. So I need to have a collection of possible actions I can take and a decision strategy that, given my experiences, allows me to change how I’m acting. That’s the basic idea of the whole thing. I have a space X of experiences, a space G of actions, and an algorithm D that lets me choose a new action given my experiences. Then I posited a W for a world, which is also a probability space. Somehow the world affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act, I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. That’s the entire structure. Six elements. The claim is: This is the structure of consciousness. I put that out there so people have something to shoot at.

But if there’s a W, are you saying there is an external world?

Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.

The world is just other conscious agents?

I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down.

If it’s conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description of the world.

The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.

It doesn’t seem like many people in neuroscience or philosophy of mind are thinking about fundamental physics. Do you think that’s been a stumbling block for those trying to understand consciousness?

I think it has been. Not only are they ignoring the progress in fundamental physics, they are often explicit about it. They’ll say openly that quantum physics is not relevant to the aspects of brain function that are causally involved in consciousness. They are certain that it’s got to be classical properties of neural activity, which exist independent of any observers — spiking rates, connection strengths at synapses, perhaps dynamical properties as well. These are all very classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely. And then [neuroscientists] are mystified as to why they don’t make progress. They don’t avail themselves of the incredible insights and breakthroughs that physics has made. Those insights are out there for us to use, and yet my field says, “We’ll stick with Newton, thank you. We’ll stay 300 years behind in our physics.”

I suspect they’re reacting to things like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s model, where you still have a physical brain, it’s still sitting in space, but supposedly it’s performing some quantum feat. In contrast, you’re saying, “Look, quantum mechanics is telling us that we have to question the very notions of ‘physical things’ sitting in ‘space.’”

I think that’s absolutely true. The neuroscientists are saying, “We don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects — including brains — don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of.

To return to the question you started with as a teenager, are we machines?

The formal theory of conscious agents I’ve been developing is computationally universal — in that sense, it’s a machine theory. And it’s because the theory is computationally universal that I can get all of cognitive science and neural networks back out of it. Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines — in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life — my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate — that really is the ultimate nature of reality.

Leo Decaprio and the nature of reality: Crash Course Philosophy

Today Hank gains insight from that most philosophical of figures...Leonardo DiCaprio. In this episode, we’re talking about the process of philosophical discovery and questioning the relationship between appearance and reality by taking a look at Plato’s famous Myth of the Cave. All with a little help from our good pal Leo.

The Taoist Way - Alan Watts

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao Tzu

Philip K Dick reflects on his life, literature, and ideas

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Phillip K. Dick

8 Great Philosophical Questions That We'll Never Solve

via io9


Philosophy goes where hard science can't, or won't. Philosophers have a license to speculate about everything from metaphysics to morality, and this means they can shed light on some of the basic questions of existence. The bad news? These are questions that may always lay just beyond the limits of our comprehension.

Here are eight mysteries of philosophy that we'll probably never resolve.

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

 Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words. The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in awhile we're cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness, and we ask: Why is there all this stuff in the universe, and why is it governed by such exquisitely precise laws? And why should anything exist at all? We inhabit a universe with such things as spiral galaxies, the aurora borealis, and SpongeBob Squarepants. And as Sean Carroll notes, "Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously." And as for the philosophers, the best that they can come up with is the anthropic principle — the notion that our particular universe appears the way it does by virtue of our presence as observers within it — a suggestion that has an uncomfortably tautological ring to it.

2. Is our universe real?

 This the classic Cartesian question. It essentially asks, how do we know that what we see around us is the real deal, and not some grand illusion perpetuated by an unseen force (who René Descartes referred to as the hypothesized ‘evil demon')? More recently, the question has been reframed as the "brain in a vat" problem, or the Simulation Argument. And it could very well be that we're the products of an elaborate simulation. A deeper question to ask, therefore, is whether the civilization running the simulation is also in a simulation — a kind of supercomputer regression (or simulationception). Moreover, we may not be who we think we are. Assuming that the people running the simulation are also taking part in it, our true identities may be temporarily suppressed, to heighten the realness of the experience. This philosophical conundrum also forces us to re-evaluate what we mean by "real." Modal realists argue that if the universe around us seems rational (as opposed to it being dreamy, incoherent, or lawless), then we have no choice but to declare it as being real and genuine. Or maybe, as Cipher said after eating a piece of "simulated" steak in The Matrix, "Ignorance is bliss."

3. Do we have free will?

 Also called the dilemma of determinism, we do not know if our actions are controlled by a causal chain of preceding events (or by some other external influence), or if we're truly free agents making decisions of our own volition. Philosophers (and now some scientists) have been debating this for millennia, and with no apparent end in sight. If our decision making is influenced by an endless chain of causality, then determinism is true and we don't have free will. But if the opposite is true, what's called indeterminism, then our actions must be random — what some argue is still not free will. Conversely, libertarians (no, not political libertarians, those are other people), make the case for compatibilism — the idea that free will is logically compatible with deterministic views of the universe. Compounding the problem are advances in neuroscience showing that our brains make decisions before we're even conscious of them. But if we don't have free will, then why did we evolve consciousness instead of zombie-minds? Quantum mechanics makes this problem even more complicated by suggesting that we live in a universe of probability, and that determinism of any sort is impossible. And as Linas Vepstas has said, "Consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the perception of the passage of time, and indeed, the idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable. This fits well, because if the future were predetermined, then there'd be no free will, and no point in the participation of the passage of time."

4. Does God exist?

 Simply put, we cannot know if God exists or not. Both the atheists and believers are wrong in their proclamations, and the agnostics are right. True agnostics are simply being Cartesian about it, recognizing the epistemological issues involved and the limitations of human inquiry. We do not know enough about the inner workings of the universe to make any sort of grand claim about the nature of reality and whether or not a Prime Mover exists somewhere in the background. Many people defer to naturalism — the suggestion that the universe runs according to autonomous processes — but that doesn't preclude the existence of a grand designer who set the whole thing in motion (what's called deism). And as mentioned earlier, we may live in a simulation where the hacker gods control all the variables. Or perhaps the gnostics are right and powerful beings exist in some deeper reality that we're unaware of. These aren't necessarily the omniscient, omnipotent gods of the Abrahamic traditions — but they're (hypothetically) powerful beings nonetheless. Again, these aren't scientific questions per se — they're more Platonic thought experiments that force us to confront the limits of human experience and inquiry.

5. Is there life after death?

 Before everyone gets excited, this is not a suggestion that we'll all end up strumming harps on some fluffy white cloud, or find ourselves shoveling coal in the depths of Hell for eternity. Because we cannot ask the dead if there's anything on the other side, we're left guessing as to what happens next. Materialists assume that there's no life after death, but it's just that — an assumption that cannot necessarily be proven. Looking closer at the machinations of the universe (or multiverse), whether it be through a classical Newtonian/Einsteinian lens, or through the spooky filter of quantum mechanics, there's no reason to believe that we only have one shot at this thing called life. It's a question of metaphysics and the possibility that the cosmos (what Carl Sagan described as "all that is or ever was or ever will be") cycles and percolates in such a way that lives are infinitely recycled. Hans Moravec put it best when, speaking in relation to the quantum Many Worlds Interpretation, said that non-observance of the universe is impossible; we must always find ourselves alive and observing the universe in some form or another. This is highly speculative stuff, but like the God problem, is one that science cannot yet tackle, leaving it to the philosophers.

6. Can you really experience anything objectively?

 There's a difference between understanding the world objectively (or at least trying to, anyway) and experiencing it through an exclusively objective framework. This is essentially the problem of qualia — the notion that our surroundings can only be observed through the filter of our senses and the cogitations of our minds. Everything you know, everything you've touched, seen, and smelled, has been filtered through any number of physiological and cognitive processes. Subsequently, your subjective experience of the world is unique. In the classic example, the subjective appreciation of the color red may vary from person to person. The only way you could possibly know is if you were to somehow observe the universe from the "conscious lens" of another person in a sort of Being John Malkovich kind of way — not anything we're likely going to be able to accomplish at any stage of our scientific or technological development. Another way of saying all this is that the universe can only be observed through a brain (or potentially a machine mind), and by virtue of that, can only be interpreted subjectively. But given that the universe appears to be coherent and (somewhat) knowable, should we continue to assume that its true objective quality can never be observed or known? It's worth noting that much of Buddhist philosophy is predicated on this fundamental limitation (what they call emptiness), and a complete antithesis to Plato's idealism.

7. What is the best moral system?

 Essentially, we'll never truly be able to distinguish between "right" and "wrong" actions. At any given time in history, however, philosophers, theologians, and politicians will claim to have discovered the best way to evaluate human actions and establish the most righteous code of conduct. But it's never that easy. Life is far too messy and complicated for there to be anything like a universal morality or an absolutist ethics. The Golden Rule is great (the idea that you should treat others as you would like them to treat you), but it disregards moral autonomy and leaves no room for the imposition of justice (such as jailing criminals), and can even be used to justify oppression (Immanuel Kant was among its most staunchest critics). Moreover, it's a highly simplified rule of thumb that doesn't provision for more complex scenarios. For example, should the few be spared to save the many? Who has more moral worth: a human baby or a full-grown great ape? And as neuroscientists have shown, morality is not only a culturally-ingrained thing, it's also a part of our psychologies (the Trolly Problem is the best demonstration of this). At best, we can only say that morality is normative, while acknowledging that our sense of right and wrong will change over time.

8. What are numbers?

We use numbers every day, but taking a step back, what are they, really — and why do they do such a damn good job of helping us explain the universe (such as Newtonian laws)? Mathematical structures can consist of numbers, sets, groups, and points — but are they real objects, or do they simply describe relationships that necessarily exist in all structures? Plato argued that numbers were real (it doesn't matter that you can't "see" them), but formalists insisted that they were merely formal systems (well-defined constructions of abstract thought based on math). This is essentially an ontological problem, where we're left baffled about the true nature of the universe and which aspects of it are human constructs and which are truly tangible.

Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?

via Scientific American

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory by University of California, Irvine, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is garnering attention. (Google his scholarly papers and TED talk with more than 1.4 million views.) Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Hoffman's computer analogy is that physical space is like the desktop and that objects in it are like desktop icons, which are produced by the graphical user interface (GUI). Our senses, he says, form a biological user interface—a gooey GUI—between our brain and the outside world, transducing physical stimuli such as photons of light into neural impulses processed by the visual cortex as things in the environment. GUIs are useful because you don't need to know what is inside computers and brains. You just need to know how to interact with the interface well enough to accomplish your task. Adaptive function, not veridical perception, is what is important.

Hoffman's holotype is the Australian jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli. Females are large, shiny, brown and dimpled. So, too, are discarded beer bottles dubbed “stubbies,” and males will mount them until they die by heat, starvation or ants. The species was on the brink of extinction because its senses and brain were designed by natural selection not to perceive reality (it's a beer bottle, you idiot!) but to mate with anything big, brown, shiny and dimply.

To test his theory, Hoffman ran thousands of evolutionary computer simulations in which digital organisms whose perceptual systems are tuned exclusively for truth are outcompeted by those tuned solely for fitness. Because natural selection depends only on expected fitness, evolution shaped our sensory systems toward fitter behavior, not truthful representation.

ITP is well worth serious consideration and testing, but I have my doubts. First, how could a more accurate perception of reality not be adaptive? Hoffman's answer is that evolution gave us an interface to hide the underlying reality because, for example, you don't need to know how neurons create images of snakes; you just need to jump out of the way of the snake icon. But how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place? Natural selection. And why did some nonpoisonous snakes evolve to mimic poisonous species? Because predators avoid real poisonous snakes. Mimicry works only if there is an objective reality to mimic.

Hoffman has claimed that “a rock is an interface icon, not a constituent of objective reality.” But a real rock chipped into an arrow point and thrown at a four-legged meal works even if you don't know physics and calculus. Is that not veridical perception with adaptive significance?
see also:

    Health: General Anesthesia Causes No Cognitive Deficit in Infants | Mind: Scientists Study Nomophobia — Fear of Being without a Mobile Phone | Sustainability: Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago | Tech: Back to the Future, Part II Predicted Techno-Marvels of October 21, 2015

As for jewel beetles, stubbies are what ethologists call supernormal stimuli, which mimic objects that organisms evolved to respond to and elicit a stronger response in doing so, such as (for some people) silicone breast implants in women and testosterone-enhanced bodybuilding in men. Supernormal stimuli operate only because evolution designed us to respond to normal stimuli, which must be accurately portrayed by our senses to our brain to work.

Hoffman says that perception is species-specific and that we should take predators seriously but not literally. Yes, a dolphin's icon for “shark” no doubt looks different than a human's, but there really are sharks, and they really do have powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system works.

Also, computer simulations are useful for modeling how evolution might have happened, but a real-world test of ITP would be to determine if most biological sensory interfaces create icons that resemble reality or distort it. I'm betting on reality. Data will tell.

Finally, why present this problem as an either-or choice between fitness and truth? Adaptations depend in large part on a relatively accurate model of reality. The fact that science progresses toward, say, eradicating diseases and landing spacecraft on Mars must mean that our perceptions of reality are growing ever closer to the truth, even if it is with a small “t.”

Is the world real, or is it just an illusion or hallucination?

via hopesandfears.com

Is this real life? How do we know that we are not hallucinating it all? What if we're plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality simulator? Isn't the universe a giant hologram anyway? Is reality really real? What is reality?

We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the "reality" we are experiencing is "real" or not. Don't worry. You're going to be ok.

Jessica L. Nielson, Ph.D.

Department of Neurosurgery, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC)

"What is our metric for determining what is real?  That is probably different for each person. One could try and find a consensus state that most people would agree is "real" or a "hallucination" but from the recent literature using imaging techniques in people who are having a hallucinatory experience on psychedelics, it seems the brain is hyper-connected and perhaps just letting in more of the perceivable spectrum of reality.

When it comes to psychosis, things like auditory hallucinations can seem very real. Ultimately, our experiences are an interpretation of a set of electrical signals in our brains.  We do the best to condense all those signals into what we perceive to be the world around us (and within us), but who is to say that the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenics experience, or the amazing visual landscapes seen on psychedelics are not some kind of bleed through between different forms of reality? I don't think there is enough data to either confirm or deny whether what those people are experiencing is "real" or not."

Sean Carroll

Cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity, research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology

"How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don't. We can never prove that we're not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn't mean that we believe that we are.

There are two aspects to the question. The first is, "How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?" That's the worry about the holographic principle, for example -- maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.

The answer to that is that the world we see with our senses is certainly not the "fundamental" world, whatever that is. In quantum mechanics, for example, we describe the world using wave functions, not objects and forces and spacetime. The world we see emerges out of some underlying description that might look completely different.

The good news is: that's okay. It doesn't mean that the world we see is an "illusion," any more than the air around us becomes an illusion when we first realize that it's made of atoms and molecules. Just because there is an underlying reality doesn't disqualify the immediate reality from being "real." In that sense, it just doesn't matter whether the world is, for example, a hologram; our evident world is still just as real.

The other aspect is, "How do we know we're not being completely fooled?" In other words, forgetting about whether there is a deeper level of reality, how do we know whether the world we see represents reality at all? How do we know, for example, that our memories of the past are accurate? Maybe we are just brains living in vats, or maybe the whole universe was created last Thursday.

We can never rule out such scenarios on the basis of experimental science. They are conceivably true! But so what? Believing in them doesn't help us understand any features of our universe, and puts us in a position where we have no right to rely on anything that we did think is true. There is, in short, no actual evidence for any of these hyper-skeptical scenarios. In that case, there's not too much reason to worry about them.

The smart thing to do is to take reality as basically real, and work hard to develop the best scientific theories we can muster in order to describe it."

Fredrick Barrett

Instructor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

"With psychedelics or "classical (serotonergic) hallucinogens", individuals can often distinguish between perceptual disturbances, visualized experiences (it feels as if I was in another place, or I had traveled to another time, but I realized my physical body was still "here"), and whatever is happening "outside" in the "real" world. However, in psychosis (for instance, in the midst of a psychotic break in a person who has schizophrenia), hallucinations are quite clearly defined as something that an individual believes is real, persistent, and seemingly independent and autonomous in the world.

The "hallucinations" of schizophrenia and psychosis are accepted as real, and individuals with schizophrenia often do not have insight into the nature of their hallucinations as being "not real" to the rest of us. This highlights a bit of a misnomer in the name of the drug class "hallucinogens", in that the experiences with these compounds are not taken as consensual reality in the same way that psychotic hallucinations are taken as "real".

How or Why can we tell the difference between reality and what is perceived during the acute effects of psychedelics? I'm not sure science has definitively answered that question ... but I think it may have to do with access to the insight that you've consumed a substance that can have these effects. It also may have to do with the transient effect of many perceptual disturbances and visualizations that can occur with hallucinogens. Maybe if the subjective effects of hallucinogens acted more like every-day perceptions (i.e. they weren't so extraordinary) or if they were more fixed or persistent (i.e. they didn't shift, warp, or morph so often) they would seem more real to the individual experiencing them."

George Musser Jr

Contributing editor for Scientific American magazine, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2014–2015, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory and Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time--and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything

"The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is ​constructed​ out of more fundamental building blocks. "Real" is sometimes taken to mean "fundamental", but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.

The closest we come in science to "real" or "objective" is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it - in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point ("frame-independent" or "gauge-invariant", in the jargon). For instance, I'm ​not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels "left" and "right" depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.

Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions. An illusion, after all, is entirely real - it is the ​interpretation of the illusion that can lead us astray. If I see a smooth blue patch in the desert, I might misinterpret the blue patch as an oasis, but that doesn’t mean my impression isn't real. I'm seeing something real - not an oasis, but a refracted image of the sky. So, even if we're all just projections of a computer simulation, like The Matrix, the simulation itself has a structure that gives it a kind of reality, and it is ​our​ reality, the one we need to be able to navigate. (The philosopher Robert Nozick had a famous argument along these lines.)"

Karl Friston

Institute of Neurology, University College London, Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director, Fellow of the Royal Society

"First, you pose an extremely interesting question about how do we know we are hallucinating. Strictly speaking, one never has insight into a true hallucination, if one does, these are generally referred to as pseudo-hallucinations, which are not unrelated to illusions. The very distinction between illusions and hallucinations is itself fascinating. This is because it suggests we have the capacity to represent our own representations – or representational validity. This speaks to all sorts of deep philosophical issues; for example, auto epistemic closure (in the sense of Thomas Metzinger), metacognition, self-awareness, lucid dreaming and so on.

The very fact that we can infer are perceptual influences are false speaks to a hierarchical composition of mind and perception; in which not only do we have perceptual influences but also inferences about those inferences (CF metacognition). The implications for self awareness are clear. This is why people like Allan Hobson are so fascinated by lucid dreaming. This provides a wonderful test bed to compare situations in which dream reality is perceived as real and when one becomes aware of the fact that it is a dream. Neurobiologically, this seems to rest on frontal lobe activity, suggesting, again, a hierarchical aspect to our fantastic organ (i.e. the brain – that generates fantasies that are checked against reality).

The usual notion that perception is just hallucination grounded by sensations is somewhat subverted by the fact that we can, on occasions, know that our perceptual inference is false."

Rich Oglesby

Creator and editor of Prosthetic Knowledge

"There is a well known phrase: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” (often associated with media theorist Marshall McLuhan, although it was actually a quote from Father John Culkin, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York). This makes sense from an anthropological perspective - to put it crudely, whilst early humans evolved the ability to speak, the controlled sounds and utterances gained meaning to each other through localized consensus. Fast forward to the twentieth century and industrial nations, one can discover technologies that we can recognize their purpose yet have differences to our own, depending on our cultures and others - for example, the differences with electricial sockets or which side of the road you drive from one country to another. This was noted in William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition which he labelled 'mirror-world'. Technology alsocan become taken for granted and familiar over time unless we find ourselves taken out of our habituated situation - nothing so easily reminds ourselves of change as a power cut, taking us back a couple of centuries.

In the past twenty years or so in the industrial world, the biggest impact on our experiences has been from the field of computing. While many focus on the internet as the biggest game changer, it neglects developments and permutations which other computing tech has reached - how the computer monitor tech has crossed over into television displays, graphics cards have altered how we work with colours transforming Pantone, photography and printing, sound cards and music sequencers, mp3 and Flac. Personal computing technologies have radically changed the way we make, define and experience the world we exist in. To describe the last twenty years, the best term I can think of is the Recon-Naissance, combining the terms reconaissance (the practise of gathering, formulating or expressing information) and renaissance (both 'rebirth' and revival of interest), it is the widespread outcome of ideas and production of post-WW2 investment in computational and telecommunication technologies. The Renaissance Man polymath has been replaced with the Renaissance Machine - the personal computer. The same PC could be used by scientist or businessperson, coder or student, in the office or in the warehouse, in the studio or in the bedroom. This has been most advantageous to the modern creative.

With the development of the smartphone ten years ago, modern computing became pocketable. With it, computing components became smaller. Due to commercial popularity, upgrade cycles changed from a year and a half to just one. Information creation and reception became domesticated. It became mainstream and more conveniently portable. Music, photography and video could be captured and seen on the same device, replacing the personal media player and the portable camera. Life could be documented and experienced 'en plein Hertz'.

But the developments of the smartphone benefitted a once neglected but now up-and-coming field: Virtual Reality. With small displays and accelerometers now refined and cheaper, and gave the opportunity to start ups to produce a new experiences with a new computing medium. Initially produced to complement video games, other startups are producing other narratives, such as 360 documentaries, animations and first person tools for creativity and design. Whilst the consumer implementation of these ideas are not truly available yet, the technology is being used by scientists, architects, artists and gamers with current developer builds. It would appear how we engage and relate with information will change again - the Recon-Naissance is still going strong."

Brad Burge

Director of Communications and Marketing: MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

"These aren't really scientific questions per se though they are fascinating and valuable to think about. I think it comes down to our definitions of both "hallucination" and "reality"—to what extent is any experience we have really "real"? That may be one the main things that hallucinations teach us, regardless of whether they're caused by drugs, neurological conditions, or intense meditation: to trust in our own experience, while always remembering that our experience is always our own."

Strange Physics: Is reality a grand illusion?

You know the saying, “things are rarely what they seem”? The phrase is meant to encourage us to examine the way in which we view the people, and the world, around us. In fact, this phrase applies to the very laws of nature.

As we know, due to the finite speed that light travels in an almost-perfect vacuum, we are incapable of seeing things in “real time.” We see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, the Sun eight minutes ago, Proxima Centauri (the closest star to our solar system) as it was more than four years ago, and the Andromeda galaxy (our closest galactic neighbor) as it was more than 2.5 million years ago.
In essence, astronomy is “miraculous” in the sense that, just by  looking out into the night sky, we are traveling through time. In the same way, observers in other parts of our galaxy could look at Earth’s development over the course of our evolutionary timeline, and they would see the Earth as it appeared hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago (depending on which part of the galaxy they live in and how far they are from Earth).

The same phenomenon allows us to study the universe as it appeared mere hundreds of millions of years after the big bang occurred—The most distant sources of light that were emitted from the first generation of stars and galaxies, which sprang up around 13.4 billion years ago.

We Only See a Fraction of Our Surroundings:

Something else that limits our perception of the universe is our inability to see light in all of its various forms. Light—which has properties of particles and waves—is just like the universe in that it is an expression of energy. Albeit, an extraordinarily unique expression of it. Most obvious to us is light at optical wavelengths. Then there is light at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.

Astonishingly, our Sun only emits about 44% of its total electromagnetic radiation at optical wavelengths, the rest of its emissions come in frequencies invisible to the naked eye (but their true nature can be discerned using special tools and filters, like what we have on our telescopes).
Things of this nature are most obvious at large distances, but they are also applicable in our day-to-day lives as well, though the effects are not nearly as extreme or noticeable. Don’t believe me? Let’s participate in a little thought experiment:

First, close your eyes and extend both of your index fingers (though, unless you can see through your eyelids, you should probably read  the rest before doing this….which may defeat the purpose, but ah well). After you’ve done that, take one of your fingers and touch your nose. With the other finger, touch your knee or ankle. Repeat this a few times (even better, have someone else do it), and you should be able to feel your fingers touching your nose and ankle simultaneously. Think about this for a second…the nerve signal from your ankle had to travel much farther (about twenty times over) to get to your brain than the signal from your nose did, but it feels simultaneous, doesn’t it?

Basically—and this is trippy—we aren’t sure if the ankle and the nose were truly touched at the same time, or if they were touched at slightly different moments, and the brain reassembled asynchronous signals, which led to the sensory information being put together at the exact same time.

There was actually an experiment done on this very subject (see the diagram below) where scientists had a group of volunteers press a button that would cause a light to flash after a small delay. After several rounds of this, they found that the volunteers were seeing the flash only milliseconds after they pushed the button, as the brain steadily “edited” the delay as it continued to get use to it—suggesting that our brains modify sensory information in different ways. Inevitably, some researchers conclude that our consciousness may exist in the past to some degree…similar to a few second delay.

Now, let’s tie some of this together… if you were to stick your hand straight in front of your face, you will not see a present image of it. Instead, it will be delayed over the course of a few milliseconds due to the constraints of Einstein’s theory of special relativity (given the time that it takes light to illuminate your hand, and the biological processes we must undergo before our brain can register stimulus). In addition, we must also factor in the speed of nerves traveling to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, where visual information is sorted through and the “speed of thought,” which is largely different from person to person.

In conclusion, many things on a micro and macroscale are directly influenced from our perspective due to a myriad of variables placed on us by the laws of physics and our anatomy itself. There is the reflection and refraction of light scattered in our atmosphere, the observer effect witnessed with subatomic particles, light at various frequencies, and even the properties of time itself, or time dilation more specifically, whose effects can be seen on our satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and the event horizons of black holes. All of this brings up an interesting philosophical question… Are we really observing reality, or can we only see into the past—glimpse the world as it was a nanosecond ago? Are we, in a sense, time travelers?

What are your thoughts?

From http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/the-reality-of-perception/

"Is this life real?" - Aeon Magazine

 By Matthew Francis, Aeon magazine

Philosophers and physicists say we might be living in a computer simulation, but how can we tell? And does it matter?

Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the reality we experience is just part of the program.

Modern computer technology is extremely sophisticated, and with the advent of quantum computing, it’s likely to become more so. With these more powerful machines, we’ll be able to perform large-scale simulations of more complex physical systems, including, possibly, complete living organisms, maybe even humans. But why stop there?

The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. A pair of philosophers recently argued that if we accept the eventual complexity of computer hardware, it’s quite probable we’re already part of an ‘ancestor simulation’, a virtual recreation of humanity’s past. Meanwhile, a trio of nuclear physicists has proposed a way to test this hypothesis, based on the notion that every scientific programme makes simplifying assumptions. If we live in a simulation, the thinking goes, we might be able to use experiments to detect these assumptions.

However, both of these perspectives, logical and empirical, leave open the possibility that we could be living in a simulation without being able to tell the difference. Indeed, the results of the proposed simulation experiment could potentially be explained without us living in a simulated world. And so, the question remains: is there a way to know whether we live a simulated life or not?

At some point in the future, humans as we know ourselves will cease to exist. Whether we become extinct with no evolutionary descendants, or leave one or more post-human species as our inheritance, we humans will eventually be gone. But if we do leave futuristic descendants, those descendants might be quite interested in creating ancestor simulations, virtual universes populated by conscious humans. And if the technology to craft such simulations was sufficiently popular, they could proliferate so widely that the first-person experience of such simulations would outnumber the first-person experiences of humans who have actually existed in fundamental reality.

This presents an interesting problem if you happen to find yourself having a first-person conscious experience: how do you know whether you are one of the original humans, or an ancestor simulation, especially when there are many more of the latter? The philosopher Nick Bostrom has provided a framework for thinking about this problem. He argues that we have to conclude one of three things is true. Either humans or human-like species become extinct before they achieve simulation-producing technology, or ‘post-human’ civilisations have little interest in making or using this technology, or we ourselves are probably part of a simulation. I say probably because, all things being equal, the odds would be greater that a conscious experience is a simulated experience. There would just be way more of them around if the other two conditions (extinction or lack of interest) fail.

Bostrom is certainly not the first to examine the possibility that our perceived reality is virtual, though the proposed nature of the simulator varies a lot. In addition to philosophical and scientific ruminations, the idea that human consciousness is simulated is a staple of science fiction. In the movie trilogy beginning with The Matrix (1999), the world we know is a computer simulation to keep humans’ brains busy while their body chemistry was harvested for energy. In The Matrix, humans experience the world as avatars in a fully immersive virtual reality environment. However, the simulation was sufficiently flawed that some prepared minds could see its glitches, and people from the ‘real world’ could hack into the Matrix.

Bostrom’s idea is somewhat different: in his picture of things, the whole Universe is a simulation, not just humanity. Every aspect of human life is part of the code, including our minds and interactions with the non-sentient parts of the program. However, Bostrom recognises that a complete emulation of reality on every level is likely to be impractical, even for powerful computing systems. Just as our scientific simulations involve levels of abstraction where excess detail isn’t required, simulations would probably make use of certain rules and assumptions, so that not every detail would have to be simulated. These would come into play when we performed experiments: for example, ‘when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, [the simulation] could fill in sufficient detail in the [appropriate domain of the simulation] on an as-needed basis,’ Bostrom writes in the paper ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’ (2003). That way, the program wouldn’t need to track every particle or galaxy in every detail, but when those data are called for, enough of the cosmos is in the program to provide a completely consistent reality. Even humans need not be emulated in every detail at all times; our subjective awareness of ‘self’ varies depending on circumstances. Unlike Linus in the cartoon strip Peanuts, we are not always aware of our tongues, so the simulation need not keep the ‘tongue’ subroutines operating in the foreground.

    It could be the case that one planetary civilisation is all that can be simulated, without running into computational capacity issues

Beyond these philosophical implications, the simulation hypothesis could help answer some scientific problems. Since Earth-like planets are not terribly rare, it’s possible enough civilisations have arisen in the Universe that they would be able to communicate or travel between stars. Yet we have not seen any so far, leaving us to wonder: where are the aliens? However, if we live in a simulation, aliens might simply not be part of the program. In fact, it could be the case that one planetary civilisation is all that can be simulated, without running into computational capacity issues.

Similarly, the failure of physicists to find unified theories of all the forces could be due to an inadequacy in the simulation. The simulation hypothesis could even resolve the ‘fine-tuning’ problem: that the parameters of our Universe allow for life, but changing them might result in a lifeless cosmos. A simulated Universe could be designed for the eventual rise of life, or alternatively could be the outcome of a successful experiment in which many possible parameters were tested before life was possible. Cosmologists perform similar (albeit simpler) simulations now to see how likely our particular cosmos is from random starting conditions.

Bostrom goes a step further in his simulation argument: ‘Should any error [in the program] occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the experiment in a way that avoids the problem.’ However, if the simulation in which we live has real-time error correction, it’s troubling from several points of view. Indeed, it could potentially throw the whole enterprise of science into question. What would prevent the simulator from changing the laws of physics on a whim, to test parameters or simply to mess with our heads? In that scheme, the programmer becomes a capricious and possibly malicious god, whose presence can never be detected.

While Bostrom is interested primarily in showing that we’re more likely than not to dwell in a simulation, scientists who confront this problem have a different set of questions to answer. The primary contrast derives from the fact that science is concerned with what can be tested by experiment or observation. And, as it turns out, there are a few things we can infer from any simulation we might inhabit.

First, if we live in a simulation, it obeys a set of well-defined laws, and any dynamic changes to those laws are relatively small. That’s based on the overwhelming success of the scientific approach over centuries. In fact, the simulation hypothesis has some potential explanatory power: the reason our Universe obeys relatively simple laws is because it was programmed to do so. As for changes the simulator makes as the program runs, that was one proposed solution to the ‘faster-than-light’ neutrino results from 2011: the program contained an error, and we measured something based on that error, and the bug was subsequently fixed. (There’s currently no reason to think the faster-than-light result was real, since the anomaly has a prosaic explanation, requiring no dramatic alternative ideas.)

    The truth of the matter might be that we dwell in a simulation but, like the existence of an impersonal god, this fact has no bearing on how we conduct our lives

However, there’s nothing in this cosmic lawfulness to tell us whether we’re in a simulation or not. If the program is good enough with no obvious ‘Easter eggs’ or hidden messages left by its designers, then any experiment we perform will return the same results whether we’re in a simulated cosmos or not. In this scenario, there’s no way we can ever tell we’re in a virtual world, no matter how convincing our favourite philosophers are on the matter. The big-T Truth of the matter might be that we dwell in a simulation but, like the existence of an impersonal god, this fact has no bearing on how we conduct our lives.

We should also consider the possibility that we live in a simulation, but that the laws governing it are different to those of the world of the programmers. After all, scientists generate models all the time that don’t correspond directly to the real world but help refine our theories. And if such a simulation is an imperfect emulation, there might be places where the computer code shows its presence. If the Universe is a numerical simulation similar to those run by modern nuclear physicists, then there might be a point where the program’s necessary simplifications are at odds with the predictions of fundamental physics.

Consider atomic nuclei, which are made of protons and neutrons that are themselves made of quarks. The whole mess requires understanding the nuclear strong force that binds everything together, but the complex interactions have no consistent treatment of the kind for free particles such as electrons. However, it’s often difficult for physicists to calculate interactions between more than two particles at a time, especially at the high energies involved inside nuclei.

Instead of allowing them to move just anywhere, nuclear physicists act as though the particles reside on a three-dimensional lattice, like atoms in a solid crystal. Because energy increases as the quarks get closer together, forcing them to stay apart by a fixed distance keeps the numbers manageable — and still reproduces the behaviours we see experimentally. This type of numerical calculation is known as lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD).

While the simplifying principle in LQCD is the only consistent way they’ve figured out how to describe quarks, it violates the principle of relativity as set out by Albert Einstein. Spacetime in relativity is a continuum, with no special directions defined. On the other hand, a lattice such as the one in LQCD has special points and special directions (along the connections between the nodes). If high-energy collisions such as those produced by cosmic rays exhibited behaviour more like LQCD than like the predictions of relativity, it could be a sign we’re in a simulation where the programmers cut the same corners as modern nuclear physicists do.

Silas Beane and colleagues at the University of Bonn in Germany considered other testable deviations along these lines (including some anomalous behaviour by the electron’s heavier cousin, the muon). However, there are several possible ways their scheme won’t work. Whoever wrote the simulation might not use the same type of code nuclear physicists do, meaning that the predicted deviations won’t show up. The deviation might also happen at such high energies that we won’t discover them in the foreseeable future. Lastly, spacetime might behave like a lattice for reasons other than living in a simulation, a possibility seriously considered by a number of physicists.

In fairness, Beane, Davoudi and Savage, the nuclear physicists who proposed a way to test the simulation hypothesis, know all this, and it would be a mistake to think that this is the focus of their life work. If you look at Beane’s bibliography page on the INSPIRE repository (the high energy physics information system), you’ll see that this paper is the only one he has yet written on the subject; the rest involve standard LQCD research. While I’m sure he and his colleagues take the cosmic simulation work they did seriously, they’re likely typical of most researchers: they might find these questions interesting, but they won’t devote their lives to investigating the answers.

Partly that’s pragmatic: you can get funds for working within the standard paradigms of modern physics, but it’s harder to pay for research into what could be construed as open-ended philosophical questions. However, the problem itself is far too slippery to offer a tangible pay-off. Despite the impression one can often receive from reading popular science accounts, there’s little chance of success in devoting your life to the biggest questions about life, the Universe, and everything. The reason major breakthroughs (like the quantum mechanics revolution of the 1920s) are rare is because they’re hard. Science is mostly incremental progress, and that’s not a bad thing, even if it might seem unglamorous.

The difficulty with probing into the cosmos-as-simulation is finding the right scientific questions to ask: the ones that lead to testable consequences. In a hypothetical simulated Universe where the program manager can step in and fix problems in real time, we might not be able to distinguish between a real cosmos and an emulated one. The same applies to a simulation without any detectable imperfections. Even a compelling philosophical argument in favour of us living inside a computer program seems empty if we can’t obtain experimental evidence to back it up.

Do we live in a simulation? My gut feeling is no, and not just because I don’t want to believe in the existence of an intelligence who is either indifferent or who programmes beings to suffer needlessly. (Why not simulate a paradise?)

The power of science often lies in its generalisations, its abstractions, and even its simplifications. Simulating an entire Universe with sufficient detail to include conscious minds will be complex, even if the fundamental rules underlying the program are simple. It seems needlessly baroque to programme something as complicated as that, when you can learn just as much from something simpler.

However, those are intuitive musings, which might or might not prove valid. A better refuge is empiricism, unromantic as it is. From a scientific point of view, if we cannot distinguish between a simulated and real Universe, then the question of living in a simulation is moot: this reality is ours, and it’s all we have.

Philip K. Dick On Fine-Tuning Your B.S.-Meter To Spot "Pseudo-Realities"

How can you tell what's real, in a world where huge industries, governments and religions are all trying to force-feed you manufactured realities? Philip K. Dick sums up the challenges of detecting reality in a world that resembles Disneyland, in this great 1978 quote.

    It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question "What is reality?", to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly.

    But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it's all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And—cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

    So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

    Of course, I would say this, because I live near Disneyland, and they are always adding new rides and destroying old ones. Disneyland is an evolving organism. For years they had the Lincoln Simulacrum, like Lincoln himself, was only a temporary form which matter and energy take and then lose. The same is true of each of us, like it or not.

See the full essay "How to build a universe that doesn't fall apart two days later" here:

 http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm

An Interview with David Bohm

David Joseph Bohm FRS (December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) was an American theoretical physicist who contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, philosophy of mind, and neuropsychology. He is considered to be one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century.

Bohm advanced the view that the old Cartesian model of reality (that there were two interacting kinds of substance - mental and physical) was limited, in the light of developments in quantum physics. He developed in detail a mathematical and physical theory of implicate and explicate order to complement it. He also believed that the working of the brain, at the cellular level, obeyed the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought was distributed and non-localised in the way that quantum entities do not readily fit into our conventional model of space and time.

Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this his epistemology mirrored his ontological viewpoint.[5] Due to his youthful Communist affiliations, Bohm was targeted during the McCarthy era, leading him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian, then a British, citizen.

His main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...

The Probability That You Are Dreaming Right Now? 1 in 10.

by Maria Popova

Navigating the maze of dream-decisions, dream-consequences, and the invariable world of experiences.

The fabric and nature of reality has long been the subject of science, philosophy, media propaganda, and even entertainment, in films like Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes) (remade in 2001 as Vanilla Sky). In Reality: A Very Short Introduction (public library) from Oxford University Press, philosophy professor and metaphysics researcher Jan Westerhoff explores the enormously difficult, yet enormously alluring question of what is really real. Among the book’s most fascinating mind-benders is this passage on the probability — the jarringly high probability, if all the math and hypotheticals check out — that you are dreaming right now:

    "Contemplating the possibility that you are dreaming right now is certainly very perplexing. You might think that it is also exceedingly unlikely, something in the same ballpark as hitting the jackpot in a lottery or suddenly dropping dead. There are various things that are theoretically possible, even though their probability is very low (such as a monkey randomly hitting on a typewriter writing out the complete works of Shakespeare, or the sudden disappearance of objects to an effect called ‘quantum tunnelling’). If you don’t worry that this book might suddenly disappear from your hand due to some bizarre quantum effect, why worry that you might be dreaming right now?

    The reason why you should worry is that the chances of you dreaming at this very moment are far, far greater. Let’s do a quick calculation. We optimistically assume that you get eight hours of sleep a night, which leaves sixteen hours during which you are awake. Sleep researchers have found out that there is a strong correlation between dreaming and being in so-called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. REM sleep is characterized by rapid movement of the eyeballs; the brain is highly active, its electric activity resembles that of a waking brain, but the sleeper is more difficult to wake than during slow-wave or non-REM sleep. We know that between 20% and 25% of our sleep is REM sleep. Taking the lower value and assuming that you always and only dream during REM sleep, this gives us 1.6 hours of dreaming every night. As there are therefore 1.6 hours of dream consciousness for every 16 hours of waking consciousness, this means that your chance of dreaming at any given moment is 1 in 10. This quite a high probability — for comparison: the chance of winning the jackpot of a typical lottery is about 1 in 14 millions (this means that if you bought a ticket every week, you will have one win on average every 250,000 years); the chance of the author of this book dying in an accident within the next year is somewhat less than 1 in 2,500.

    So there is a significant chance of you dreaming right now. But does it matter? To be sure, we can’t exclude the possibility that this is all a dream, but as long as it continues, it will not make the slightest difference to how we lead our lives. Even if the £5 note in my pocket is just dream-money, and the strawberry cake I buy with it is only a dream-cake, I can still have the sensation of eating the strawberry cake as a result, and what more can I want? Even if I am dreaming right now, I will still be able to plan my life, cause will follow effect, and actions will have consequences. Of course, these consequences will just be dream-consequences, but given that we have assumed earlier that I would not be able to tell ‘from the inside’ whether I am dreaming or not, why should I worry about this? The world of experiences is still the same, and this is all that counts, after all."

Perhaps Susan Sontag was right, after all, when she grimly observed that “[the] intellectual is a refugee from experience.”

How do you know you exist?

How do you know you’re real? Is existence all just a big dream? Has some mad scientist duped us into simply believing that we exist? James Zucker investigates all of these questions (and more) in this mind-boggling tribute to René Descartes’s "Meditations on First Philosophy."