Joe Rogan goes full retard

Joe Rogan's interview with Nick Bostrom was kinda fun except for the last hour when he couldn't understand probability theory.

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?"

The simulation hypothesis

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? Take a look at the evidence and decide for yourself.

See also: does the simulation hypothesis defeat materialism? Link at Skeptiko:

READ EXCERPTS:

Kent Forbes: As outside of the box as Einstein was, it took him right until the end but he did shift his thinking, and very clearly says so in his correspondence with peers at the end of his life: we need a new theory that can speak to the problem [that] matter is not the base constituent of reality. But we don’t have a way of talking about this. So that’s what the information theory and simulation hypothesis [are]. [They’re] Einstein’s dream in a way, because it fills that gap perfectly and I wish he were alive to see how that’s come around. I believe he would be satisfied with it.

Alex Tsakiris: You do a nice job in The Simulation Hypothesis of laying out in very clear terms what is at stake in terms of choosing one set of findings versus another set of findings. And you make it clear that’s it’s unreasonable to choose this set of findings that consistently over and over again are not producing results that scientists would normally consider affirming their position. On the other hand, piling up again experiment after experiment, top scientists, top journals that affirm the counter-hypothesis seems to carrying the day in every way we look at it, from every angle.

Kent Forbes: Absolutely. There’s also the idea of progress behind all of this. Ever since the enlightenment period the materialist paradigm has been incrementally built up as a way of understanding the experience that we’re having. They had a lot of success with it that was designed to undermine the divine right to rule of monarchs. There were terrible abuses of power by the popes and so forth that speared this mechanical view of the universe as a way of undermining the narratives of the church. I think that it was justified at the time. After hundreds of years of building up this alternative, to find that a close examination of physical matter reveals a connection to consciousness, which undermines strict materialism, it’s a little bit much. I think it’s completely understandable for people who are invested in materialism to be skeptical because they’re afraid that they’re going to be reinforcing the claims of those religious [people] who are then going to say, see, we told you so. We’ve been saying this all along.

Alex Tsakiris: The film, The Simulation Hypothesis, is fantastic. As I said, rich in science but also very accessible and breaks some things down that people have probably heard about a dozen times before: the double-slit experiment; the observer effect; and quantum entanglement. You do a fabulous job of explaining that and then more importantly, as you were just talking about, explain how that completely contradicts, undermines and falsifies materialism, naturalism, [and] physicalism. All of this simplistic “you are a biological robot in a meaningless universe” stuff (the way that I like to put it). But, and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, are you stretching the metaphor too far? I always get a little bit nervous when we say things like, therefore we’ve falsified this. It has some aspects of the simulation model from a philosophical standpoint. Therefore, we live in a pixilated world that works like a computer simulation. I wonder sometimes if we’re stretching the metaphor? If one, we’re making a leap that’s unnecessary and two, maybe completely unfounded–particularly, if we jump over and look at it from a spiritual standpoint and what the extended reality folks are telling us. That is, the [ones] who are scientifically more or less looking at what’s happening in these extended consciousness realms; the spiritually transformative experiences and all the rest. Can you try and fit those two together? Are you stretching the metaphor too far? Do we have to consider extended consciousness and spirituality as a reality in this formula?

Kent Forbes: Starting with the last point, yes, everything should be considered. I don’t believe in censorship or stopping the argument in any way; or saying this is out of bounds. People consider everything.

Alex Tsakiris: But that is the legitimate fear of science. Because at some point it does reduce to Carl Sagan [and] how many angels fit on the head of a pin? Because now we’re saying we have to take seriously the idea that other spirit entities work and influence our world. We can kind of control that in our PSI experiments and our parapsychology experiments. We can pretend we’re doing real work on healing and prayer and all the rest. But what we’re really saying is everything’s up for grabs. We don’t have a clue how any of that stuff works.

Kent Forbes: During my time at Berkley I became aware of this philosophy of relativism, which I saw as extremely pernicious. Relativism being the idea that there is no essential difference between right and wrong. Obviously there is a difference between ideas that are worth considering and can be backed-up with what we like to consider objective evidence. Or a consensus on at least as far as a shared experience of repeatable, demonstrable, empirical, process will provide. Something that is completely nonsense and is not backed by anything and there can never be a consensus because it’s all up to the individual to decide how they feel about it. But at the same time there is always going to be the problem of limits of knowledge.

Alex Tsakiris: I just had this conversation with Dr. Sean Carroll. Maybe you’ve run across him. He’s a Caltech, Harvard trained physicist and has the number one best selling book in science right now. He’s a staunch materialist and not backing off one bit. His recent book is The Big Picture. He says, there’s nothing. [Life] ends. Death is natural. Everything is natural. Hard line materialist. We had this discussion that was along the lines of your movie. I said, Niels Bohr and Schrodinger, and many of the leading people, saw this issue of consciousness collapsing the wave function as central to the philosophical underpinnings of quantum physics. He said, no, you’ve got it completely wrong. They didn’t think that at all. So I went back and showed him after the show this wasn’t true. I don’t know how you get a PhD from Harvard in physics and not know these things but he didn’t know these things. The real point is what Schrodinger says, and Bohr almost says the same thing but Schrodinger says it directly, consciousness must survive death. So from a physics standpoint, it comes with the package. Consciousness surviving bodily death comes with the package doesn’t it?

Kent Forbes: Absolutely. And part of the problem is the divvying up of philosophy into the sciences and psychology, and…

Alex Tsakiris: …religion

Kent Forbes: It’s all philosophy and the thing is Plato understood that ideas about what constitutes an object, a self, and a reflection, that must precede the experience. So obviously it follows the experience as well. So yes, consciousness survives because it preceded the experience to begin with. This is not new. This is not a new idea. Someone like Schrodinger and Niels Bohr just understood that the idea of archetypes or platonic forms must be right. There is a mental construct about limits that create objects for us to have an experience with. That does not pass with my individual death or the death of my brain, or the death of every living thing. The idea that created all of this stuff is still going to be there after this construct or the matrix disappears. But we have divided philosophy up into the sciences and religion. So theology and physics wind up at these opposite poles where they’re really just philosophical pursuits.

***

Alex Tsakiris: But are you stretching the metaphor too far when you say we live in a pixilated world? And it works like a computer simulation. A lot is made of this idea consciousness is like a computer. I think the history of science shows us that whatever our latest technology is, and that’s what we latch onto and say we’re just like the river before we had any technology; or we’re just like the machine; and now we’re just like a computer simulation. Are we stretching the metaphor too far?

Kent Forbes: It depends on the individual who’s receiving that narrative. How are they receiving it and what kind of emotional response are they having? Is it possible the metaphor’s being stretched too far? Sure. Of course it is. But, when you’re designing a narrative to illicit an emotional response, you back yourself into this corner where you have to provide some kind of logical conclusion. Otherwise it’s just empty, meaningless drivel. So you have to wind up somewhere and that’s [where] the imagery and the metaphor that works for people who are having this experience in the information age that we live in now. So you’re providing an example that’s already within their experience they can relate the narrative to and say, oh, I see. Yes, I could be an avatar in a game; or I could be a character in another being’s dream. See what I’m saying?

Alex Tsakiris: I do. From your lips to Ray Kurzweil’s ears, that’s what I say. I guess that goes with where you’re going with your PhD and broadly looking at how we respond to new information integrated in, because I think you’ve captured it beautifully: it works for us and it matters less the extent to which it conforms to something we’re going to call “real” or anything like that. It propels us forward, is what I hear you saying, in a way that’s relatable for a lot of us.

Kent Forbes: And what’s really real is the emotional experience that you have. If you feel satisfied at the end of receiving the narrative, that’s what’s real. You’re scared in a scary dream and your fear is real. The thing that’s chasing you is part of your dream. But the emotion you’re experiencing is the only reality that can ever be traced back to anything that matters.

***

Alex Tsakiris: One last question: this is my personal issue right now and I want you to put on your theologian’s hat on the one hand. At the same time, put on your scientific hat because you keep saying you’re an artist, and that’s awesome. I want everyone to relate to you as an artist because you do great work. But you’re a scientist as well. You have a scientist’s sensibility that I think is really refreshing and will connect with a lot of people. You can roll your sleeves up and understand the science, and communicate it in a way that’s really terrific. So, here’s my question: what’s love got to do with it? That’s my point. Here’s why: if you talk to the near-death experience researchers, they say the narrative (to use Kent’s term) that everyone wants to talk about is did I see my dead relatives? How far was I outside of my body? What verifiable information was found outside of my body? And the near-death experience [people] will tell you that all day long, and allow you to put it into your survey, run your numbers, and come up with all of these great statistics. Then they’ll say, but you didn’t ask me what was the most important thing about my experience? I’ll tell you what it was: it was love. It was love in a way that I can’t even explain to you other than to say, take the most loving thing you’ve ever had in your life and multiply it times a thousand. Then you say, okay, let’s leave that near-death experience person and let’s walk over to this person who’s had a spiritually transformative experience; a Kundalini experience that happened spontaneously. They were just driving down the road and it happened. They come back and start saying the same things. It’s about love. They come back to devotional people and religious people [who] say that’s what it’s about love. Forget about all of the baby Jesus myth and all the rest of that. What I care about is the experience that I have of love. We have written that out of the narrative at every turn. Not only has science written it out, but even our newest, cutting-edge science; our futuristic science that you’re talking about; the near-death experience science; we all want to write love out of it. I just wonder if we’re making a mistake when we do that. Do you have any thoughts on what love has to do with it?

Kent Forbes: In order to have the experience of the individual, we have to place a separation between ourselves and wholeness–just to relate to other individuals, and to navigate a world of objects. We have to limit ourselves so severely, right? So if I were in Berkley in theology class this is the way I would say it (and almost everyone would agree, at least in Berkley): it’s unnatural to be limited in this way. We’ve limited ourselves so severely. From a spiritual standpoint, this is incredibly limited to a highly unusual degree. Love is the desire to be whole again. That starts with another individual who you want closeness with. Behind that is the ultimate organizing factor. Call it God; call it whatever but it’s really your entire whole self not divided into 7 billion individuals. So we all want to relate and we all want to get closer but guess what? We have to be separate in order to have individual experience. One of the limiting factors of having this experience is that distance and separation. Absence of love creates a desire and a want for love. So we desire closeness because we’ve created this distance. Individuals are always going to want closeness because as individuals we’ve separated ourselves. That seems like the major tension in the human experience.

Zuse's Thesis: The Universe is a Computer

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995; pronounce: “Conrud Tsoosay”) not only built the first programmable computers (1935-1941) and devised the first higher-level programming language (1945), but also was the first to suggest (in 1967) that the entire universe is being computed on a computer, possibly a cellular automaton (CA). He referred to this as “Rechnender Raum” or Computing Space or Computing Cosmos. Many years later similar ideas were also published / popularized / extended by Edward Fredkin (1980s), Jürgen Schmidhuber (1990s – see overview), and more recently Stephen Wolfram (2002). Zuse’s first paper on digital physics and CA-based universes was:

Konrad Zuse, Rechnender Raum, Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, vol. 8, pages 336-344, 1967. Download PDF scan.

Zuse is careful: on page 337 he writes that at the moment we do not have full digital models of physics, but that does not prevent him from asking right there: which would be the consequences of a total discretization of all natural laws? For lack of a complete automata-theoretic description of the universe he continues by studying several simplified models. He discusses neighbouring cells that update their values based on surrounding cells, implementing the spread and creation and annihilation of elementary particles. On page 341 he writes “In all these cases we are dealing with automata types known by the name “cellular automata” in the literature” and cites von Neumann’s 1966 book: Theory of self-reproducing automata. On page 342 he briefly discusses the compatibility of relativity theory and CAs.

Contrary to a widely spread misunderstanding, quantum physics, quantum computation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bell’s inequality do not provide any physical evidence against Zuse’s thesis of a CA-computed universe! Gerard t’ Hooft (Physics Nobel 1999) in principle agrees with determinism a la Zuse: proof by authority :-)

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Philip K. Dick on living in a computer-programmed reality, 1977

From OpenCulture

In 1963, Philip K. Dick won the coveted Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle, beating out such sci-fi luminaries as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Arthur C. Clarke. Of the novel, The Guardian writes, “Nothing in the book is as it seems. Most characters are not what they say they are, most objects are fake.” The plot—an alternate history in which the Axis Powers have won World War II—turns on a popular but contraband novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Written by the titular character, the book describes the world of an Allied victory, and—in the vein of his worlds-within-worlds thematic—Dick’s novel suggests that this book-within-a-book may in fact describe the “real” world of the novel, or one glimpsed through the novel’s reality as at least highly possible.
The Man in the High Castle may be Dick’s most straightforwardly compelling illustration of the experience of alternate realties, but it is only one among very many. In an interview Dick gave while at the high profile Metz science fiction conference in France in 1977, he said that like David Hume’s description of the “intuitive type of person,” he lived “in terms of possibilities rather than in terms of actualities.” Dick also tells a parable of an ancient, complicated, and temperamental automated record player called the “Capard,” which reverted to varying states of destructive chaos. “This Capard,” Dick says, “epitomized an inscrutable ultra-sophisticated universe which was in the habit of doing unexpected things.”

In the interview, Dick roams over so many of his personal theories about what these “unexpected things” signify that it’s difficult to keep track. However, at that same conference, he delivered a talk titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (in edited form above), that settles on one particular theory—that the universe is a highly-advanced computer simulation. (The talk has circulated on the internet as “Did Philip K. Dick disclose the real Matrix in 1977?”).

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently, and which may not exist all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore I’m free to say everything and nothing. I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.

Dick goes on to describe the visionary, mystical experiences he had in 1974 after dental surgery, which he chronicled in his extensive journal entries (published in abridged form as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick) and in works like VALIS and The Divine Invasion. As a result of his visions, Dick came to believe that “some of my fictional works were in a literal sense true,” citing in particular The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a 1974 novel about the U.S. as a police state—both novels written, he says, “based on fragmentary, residual memories of such a horrid slave state world.” He claims to remember not past lives but a “different, very different, present life.”
Finally, Dick makes his Matrix point, and makes it very clearly: “we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” These alterations feel just like déjà vu, says Dick, a sensation that proves that “a variable has been changed” (by whom—note the passive voice—he does not say) and “an alternative world branched off.”

Dick, who had the capacity for a very oblique kind of humor, assures his audience several times that he is deadly serious. (The looks on many of their faces betray incredulity at the very least.) And yet, maybe Dick’s crazy hypothesis has been validated after all, and not simpy by the success of the PKD-esque The Matrix and ubiquity of Matrix analogies. For several years now, theoretical physicists and philosophers have entertained the theory that we do in fact live in a computer-generated simulation and, what’s more, that “we may even be able to detect it.”

"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.

Digital Philosophy

http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/

What is Digital Philosophy?

Digital Philosophy (DP) is a new way of thinking about the fundamental workings of processes in nature. DP is an atomic theory carried to a logical extreme where all quantities in nature are finite and discrete. This means that, theoretically, any quantity can be represented exactly by an integer. Further, DP implies that nature harbors no infinities, infinitesimals, continuities, or locally determined random variables. This paper explores Digital Philosophy by examining the consequences of these premises.

At the most fundamental levels of physics, DP implies a totally discrete process called Digital Mechanics. Digital Mechanics[1] (DM) must be a substrate for Quantum Mechanics. Digital Philosophy makes sense with regard to any system if the following assumptions are true:

All the fundamental quantities that represent the state information of the system are ultimately discrete. In principle, an integer can always be an exact representation of every such quantity. For example, there is always an integral number of neutrons in a particular atom. Therefore, configurations of bits, like the binary digits in a computer, can correspond exactly to the most microscopic representation of that kind of state information.

In principle, the temporal evolution of the state information (numbers and kinds of particles) of such a system can be exactly modeled by a digital informational process similar to what goes on in a computer. Such models are straightforward in the case where we are keeping track only of the numbers and kinds of particles. For example, if an oracle announces that a neutron decayed into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino, it’s easy to see how a computer could exactly keep track of the changes to the numbers and kinds of particles in the system. Subtract 1 from the number of neutrons, and add 1 to each of the numbers of protons, electrons, and neutrinos.

The possibility that DP may apply to various fields of science motivates this study.

Tom Campbell: Virtual Reality: Why It's A Better Model Than String Theory and Holographic Universe

“When the original founding fathers of quantum mechanics were doing these experiments they were really excited… making statements like- ‘if quantum mechanics doesn’t blow your mind, that’s because you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’ They realized this was a really big deal philosophically, (and) scientifically… Then they tried to come up with a good explanation. They couldn’t find one… Now they just blow it off as ‘nobody will ever know… it’s just weird science.’ This My Big Toe theory though, explains it.”  -Tom Campbell

If that chopped up quote sounds vague, pseudo science-y, or confusing (especially if you’re not familiar with some of the basic ideas behind quantum mechanics) I get that. But, when you’re grappling with huge issues like the very nature of our reality and you’re trying to take a broad stroke across the top, things tend to get foggy, so bear with me.

(You should know about the infamous, hotly-debated double-slit experiment covered above for this talk.)

Actually, don’t bear with me, or take anything from me, because our guest, Tom Campbell has an impressive career in applied physics. He worked in military intelligence, reverse-engineering enemy technology, in national missile defense, even on huge engineering projects for NASA— impressive stuff.

But what makes Tom even more of an interesting and rare specimen is that he has also spent three decades researching the nature of consciousness and reality. And, he’s done so by remaining open-minded about topics that many scientists and snopes denizens would greet only with a scoff and a pompous finger wave. We’re talking about the sexy stuff- out of body experiences, altered states of consciousness, the statistically measurable power of intent and a bunch of other stuff that sounds like it’s straight out of an episode of FRINGE...

Read more at disinformation:

Visit Tom's website at http://www.my-big-toe.com/

Are you living in a simulation? - Silas Beane (SETI Talks)

"Is the Cosmos a Vast Computer Simulation?" New Theory May Offer Clues

Professor Silas Beane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bonn in Germany said that his group of scientists have developed a way to test the 'simulation hypothesis'--the idea that we may be living in a computer generated universe that has been debated by the greats of philosphy, from Plato to Descartes, who speculated that the world we see around us could be generated by an 'evil demon'. Plato wrote that reality may be no more than shadows in a cave but the human species, having never left the cave, may not be aware of it.

If the cosmos is a numerical simulation, there ought to be clues in the spectrum of high energy cosmic rays. Now more than two thousand years since Plato suggested that our senses provide only a weak reflection of objective reality, experts believe they have solved the riddle using mathetical models known as the lattice QCD approach in an attempt to recreate - on a theoretical level - a simulated reality. Lattice QCD is a complex approach that that looks at how particles known as quarks and gluons relate in three dimensions.

"We consider ourselves on some level universe simulators because we calculate the interactions of particles by basically replacing space and time by a grid and putting it in a box," said Beane. "In doing that we face lots of problems for instance the box and the grid size breaks Einstein's special theory of relativity so we know how to fix this in order to get physical predictions that are meaningful."

"We thought that if we make the assumption that the so-called simulators face some of the same problems that we do in terms of finite resources and so on then, if they are doing a simulation and even though their box size of course is enormous and the grid size can be very small, as long as the resources are finite then the box size will be finite, the grid size will be finite," Beane added. "And therefore at some level for instance there would be violations of Einstein's special theory of relativity."

According to MIT's Technology Review, "using the world's most powerful supercomputers, physicists have only managed to simulate tiny corners of the cosmos just a few femtometers across (A femtometer is 10^-15 metres.) That may not sound like much but the significant point is that the simulation is essentially indistinguishable from the real thing (at least as far as we understand it)."

Read more: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/10/is-the-cosmos-a-vast-computer-simulation-new-theory-may-offer-clues.html

Nick Bostrom - The Simulation Argument (Full)

Nick Bostrom (born Niklas Boström, 10 March 1973) is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, superintelligence risks, the reversal test, and consequentialism. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics (2000). In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology and he is currently the founding director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

He is the author of over 200 publications, including Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, a New York Times bestselller and Anthropic Bias. He was awarded the Eugene R. Gannon Award and has been listed in Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list. Bostrom’s work on superintelligence has influenced both Elon Musk’s and Bill Gate’s concern for the existential risks facing humanity over the coming century.

View his paper "The Simulation Argument" here: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation

From the paper written by Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, Martin J. Savage...



Observable consequences of the hypothesis that the observed universe is a numerical simulation performed on a cubic space-time lattice or grid are explored. The simulation scenario is first motivated by extrapolating current trends in computational resource requirements for lattice QCD into the future. Using the historical development of lattice gauge theory technology as a guide, we assume that our universe is an early numerical simulation with unimproved Wilson fermion discretization and investigate potentially-observable consequences. Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum. The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice...

read the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1847v2.pdf

Alan Guth - Can We Create a Universe?

Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). He is currently serving as Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with Alexei Starobinsky and Andrei Linde, he won the 2014 Kavli Prize “for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation.”

He graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, also in physics.

As a junior particle physicist, Guth developed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1979 at Cornell and gave his first seminar on the subject in January 1980. Moving on to Stanford University Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1981, the idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a positive vacuum energy density (negative vacuum pressure). The results of the WMAP mission in 2006 made the case for cosmic inflation very compelling. Measurements by the BICEP and Keck Array telescope give support to the idea of cosmic inflation, preliminary confirmation of which was given on 17 March 2014, with the findings of the B-mode polarization signature. However, on 19 June 2014, lowered confidence in confirming the cosmic inflation findings was reported...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Guth

Why Running Simulations May Mean the End is Near

By Phil Torres

People have for some time speculated about the possibility that we’re living inside a computer simulation. But the 2003 publication of Nick Bostrom’s “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?” brought a new level of sophistication to the topic. Bostrom’s argument is that one (or more) of the following disjuncts is true: (i) our species will go extinct before reaching an advanced posthuman stage; (ii) our species will reach a posthuman stage but decide not, for whatever reasons, to run a large number of simulations; or (iii) we are almost certainly in a simulation.

Defeaters of this argument include the possibility that present trends in technological development are non-projectable into the future, and that the philosophical theory of “functionalism” is false. In the absence of these defeaters, though, the argument appears sound.

The claim that at least one of these three possibilities holds is known as the simulation argument. The simulation hypothesis, on the other hand, is the claim that the third disjunct is true. Another way to put this disjunct goes as follows: if we run large numbers of simulations in the future, we should assume that we ourselves are simulants in a simulation – that we are mere strings of 1s and 0s being manipulated by a massively powerful algorithm on a supercomputer somewhere in the universe one level above ours. Simulating universes counts as evidence for us being in one.

The reasoning is no doubt familiar to most readers. We can put it like this: imagine we’re running lots of simulations (of an “ancestral” variety) right now. Since minds are functional rather than material kinds (according to functionalism), then the beings inside these simulations are no less conscious than we are. Computers too are functional kinds, which means that there may be further simulations running on simulated computers within these simulated worlds. So the ratio of “real” to simulated minds will end up being hugely skewed towards the latter.

Now imagine that you randomly select any individual from any world, real or simulated. Upon picking a person out you ask: “Is he or she a simulant?” In virtually every case, the individual selected will be a simulant. Repeating this over and over again, you eventually happen to select yourself. You ask the same question, but how should you answer? According to a “bland” version of the indifference principle, you should answer the same way you answered in every other case: “The person selected – in this case me – is a simulant (or almost certainly so, statistically speaking).”

An interesting thing follows from this, which is only briefly explored in Bostrom’s original paper. (Others have discussed it for sure, but some of the implications appear not to be fully examined.) Imagine you keep selecting individuals, and eventually pick someone in the universe one level above ours. Is this person a simulant? Again, the most probable answer is “Yes.”

The same applies to the simulators of his or her world, and the simulators of their world as well, and so on. In other words, the central line of reasoning of Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis entails that if we run large numbers of simulations in the future, there almost certainly exists a vast hierarchy of nested simulations – universes stacked like matryoshka dolls, one enclosed within the another.

Bostrom notes that the cost of running a simulation is inherited upwards in the hierarchy, a point that counts against this “multilevel hypothesis.” But the fact is that if simulations are common in the future, it will be much more likely that any given simulator is a simulant than not.

Not only this but if each simulation spawns a few simulations of their own, there will be far more simulations at the bottom of the hierarchy than the top (where one finds Ultimate Reality). If you had to place a bet, you’d be more likely to lose if you put your money on our world being somewhere at the top rather than the bottom, with loads of simulations stacked above us.

If correct, this has significant implications for existential risks. Risks of an eschatological nature trickle downwards through the hierarchy in a cumulative manner. Many futurists have speculated about what we can do to keep our simulation from getting shut down: maybe we should fight more wars over religion to keep our simulators interested in us, or refrain from discussing the simulation hypothesis too much, lest it affect our behavior (as the Hawthorne effect predicts it will).

But what’s to keep our simulators’ simulation from being terminated? Or the simulation of their simulators? Etc. The termination of even a single simulation above ours means the termination of us: a kind of death by transitivity. And the more simulations above, the greater the riskiness of living below.

(Note: it might not even take a simulation above us getting shut down to terminate our cosmos. Maybe the civilization in a simulation five levels above ours plunges into an existential war. The building in which the computer is housed gets bombed, thus shutting down all the simulations within simulations being run on it. Or maybe our species runs large numbers of simulations in the future but then kicks the bucket in a large-scale nanotech accident. The simulations being run then get the boot.)

In sum, the simulation hypothesis doesn’t just suggest that we’re in a simulation, it suggests that there exists a vast stack of nested simulations. Both conclusions follow from the same line of reasoning. Furthermore, since the bottom of the hierarchy will tend to contain more simulations than the top (if, for example, each simulation runs a few simulations of its own the number will grow exponentially as you move down the hierarchy), it’s more likely that we’re somewhere near the bottom than the top.

This is worrisome. Being at the bottom is extremely risky, since risk is inherited downwards. More simulations above us means more opportunity for an existential catastrophe. It follows that running simulations in the future implies our existential predicament may be far more precarious than we’d otherwise think. Option (iii) implies that the outcome of (i) – extinction – may be just around the corner.

See Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument here: