We endeavor to cherrypick the best examples of current thinking and put them into your immense and powerful BRAIN  to enhance your world view. To bring to you enlightenment without the hassle of going to a university and being all socially inadequate around girls and that.

Okay, well, let’s be honest, we don’t do that much, But when we see an article or a news story about THE SCIENCE! that is the equivalent of waking up and finding dinosaurs in your car, then we have to pass it along as best we can.

But, I am afraid, dear, sweet gentle readers, for the first time we have totally failed. We have today found an article of THE SCIENCE! that is so staggeringly obtuse, we have not been able to break it down. More after the jump.

We came across an article at New Scientist that, frankly, even though we have read it several times, does not go in. It does just not go in. We have tried with and without glasses, with lab coats, and we even ran it through the Google translation thingy to see if it would tranlsate it into English or something. But we were bested. The article is made up of lots of little paragraphs that, in of themselves, make sense. But considered as a whole, it makes our BRAINS shut down in a flop-sweat.

Anyhoo. As far as we can tell, the article relates to a current idea that, based on evidence gathered from the  GEO600 experiment in Hanover – a observational project designed to detect and analyse gravitational waves – our world may be nothing more than a holographic projection. Or possibly we are real, and the universe is a 2 dimensional projection. Or something. On the details, we are fuzzy, very fuzzy. But it is weird-ass SCIENCE! thinking, so we are intrigued.

It seems to also include black holes, storage of information about the black hole and its 3 dimensions in the 2 dimensions of the event horizon (that’s the hologram part) and possibly dinosaurs with lasers.* 

As an example of how fucking mind-futzing the article is, even the teaser paragraphs – the bits in the middle in a massive font that are designed to attract your attention with a simple, subject-revealing tease and HUGE quotation marks  - make your brain fart. For example:

“Incredibly, the experiment was picking up unexpected noise – as if quantum convulsions were causing an extra sideways jitter”  

Buh? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN IN ENGLISH? Are we talking timey-wimey spacey-wacey here?

So, anyway, as we have no hope of offering any kind of useful brief summary of the article in any meaningful way, here is a totally random excerpt:

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

[dogsounds comment: that has to be one of the most awesome and random quotes ever uttered by a scientist: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." This scientist would give Slartibartfast a run for his money at a party.]

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Go read the full article at New Scientist here. If anyone can break this down for us, comment below. We’ll take all the help we can get.

And if you like the image above, it’s from wearscience.com who sell all sorts of awesome SCIENCE! themed apparel.

*Actually, the whole “dinosaurs with lasers” part may have just been us projecting to find something familiar and comforting to latch on to. Which we totally didn’t.

Well, I had this one half-done so I thought it would make a nice holiday treat for you all. If you don’t get the joke, then it’s clear you know nothing about videogame history and clearly are not awesome. Which you should sort out.

I’m going to put a little strip up on New Years’ day too, and then back to normal the weekend after. See you on the other side!

Catch this week’s second and totally not catastrophic strip right here 

(facebook readers click here for the video)

These, I am afraid, are mere irritants. Nothing major. How about an event that would guarantee 100% extinction, with no notice whatsoever until it actually happened? How about something that may have already taken place? Worried?

Meet WR 104. More after the jump.

Pretty isn’t it? This is a picture of WR 104 taken from the Keck infrared telecope. WR 104 is a binary star system, located, it is thought, about 8000 light years out from Earth, towards the center of the Milky Way. Two stars, locked in a graceful dance, one an 0-type star, one possibly a Wolf Rayet type star. Both are super-massive, and both super luminous, and both (if our assumptions about their type and makeup are correct) the kind of stars that die in tremendous super or even maybe hypernovae.

The type 0 star poses no real threat, at that distance it will merely be something bright and pretty to look at in the night sky. The other, though, does not seem quite as appealing – there is the slim chance that this star, when it dies, could generate what is the most powerful event known to exist in the universe – a gamma-ray burst.

As is well postulated, when a star dies the slow breakdown of its material leads to a shrinking and a tremendous increase in density. Finally, when the matter within the star can be reduced down no more, and there is no more nuclear fuel to be spent – the core of the star containing only the inert heavy element remnants of past nuclear activity – the star dies in a huge explosion – a supernova - the central remnants crushed by increasing gravitational force to a single point of infinite gravity and infinite mass forming a singularity (a black hole). Matter and gas blown outwards wend their way across space, seeding the formation of new stars and planets. It’s how we came to exist – all matter in the universe came from such destruction – it’s the only place the heavy elements are made. We are all made of start stuff. These things are pretty tame – you’d have to be within, say, 20 light years of a regular supernova to suffer any adverse effects from it.

But, just occasionally, instead of this more typical supernova, something else can occur: sometimes, when a star is massive enough, as well as the outburst of material and the crushing of the inner core the explosion can unleash a torrent of gamma radiation – a gamma-ray burst.

Since their existence was first observed and origins suggested, astronomers, cosmologists and astrophysicists have studied gamma-ray bursts. They are incredible things: they last anywhere from seconds to a few minutes, and the energy unleashed by the star in such an event  can be far greater than our Sun will put out in its entire lifetime. The energy is released in two pencil-thin streams, one from each of the stars’ poles – and they utterly destroy anything that lies in their path.

Well, yeah. But what are the odds that we would even be in the path of such a burst?

Well, as it turns out, the odds ore actually pretty good. See, the image above shows the gases around the stars in a familiar pinwheel shape. The gas and material ejected by the star moves outwards, and as the stars spin around their axis, the material is pushed out into a flat plane about the equatorial area – like the old ice-skater’s arms analogy. So, what does the image tell us? It tells us that if we see the star as a pinwheel, then we can only be facing one place - one of the poles. We are lined up with the axis, more or less. The pole. We could be staring right down the barrel of a loaded gun.

So, let’s assume for a minute that Earth is lined up exactly, and that a gamma-ray burst occurs. What would happen? Well, it is suggested that at the very least, the gamma radiation would destroy ozone  in our atmosphere and create a smog of nitrogen dioxide. Not so bad then.

Not quite. It is thought that it could burn off up to 50% of the Earth’s ozone by ripping apart the ozone molecules in the atmosphere. When you think that the issues we are having now with regards to global warming are caused by a mere 5% depletion of the ozone layer, 50% sounds like a bad thing. And the nitrogen oxide could be a thick blanket that would not only block out the sun – putting a supervolcano’s feeble efforts to shame – but would also be water soluble, precipitating out as acid rain. And this is the best-case scenario. Add to that the theory – still hotly debated at this stage – that the incredible numbers of cosmic rays beating down could lead to mass extinctions  (this is radiation – there is a reason the Apollo missions were scheduled during periods when it was assumed solar activity was at a minimum) and it begins to seem that this may not be a good thing at all, and there would be no way to “escape” the effect.

Now, it is not known for sure that the second star will emit such a burst. Heck, astronomers cannot even really agree on how far the binary system really is from Earth. Maybe 5000 light years, maybe 8000 (any astronomer will tell you that  distance is one of the hardest things you can try to measure). And there is also some evidence that perhaps we are not quite so perfectly lined up with the poles – the burst could, as physicist Michio Kaku puts is, “graze the earth“. And, it has to be said, we have no way to know if this will happen tomorrow, next week, or in a milllion years. But it certainly gets you thinking.

And the best bit? the burst would travel at the speed of light, The same speed as the light from the explosion. So that would, basically give us no warning at all. We would only know it happened, when it happened. For all we know, it happned many years ago.

Maybe even 8000 years ago.

But Carl Sagan set to music and auto-tuned? Fucking awesome.

Facebook readers, as always,  click here to see the videos.

The songs were created by The Symphony Of Science 

And to round off this little collection of awesome, something silly:

(and yes, I know, but “weasels” worked better in the title…)

It’s geek-out time here again at dogsounds towers, and here are two little treats for your inner geek. Remember, the laws of physics cause geeks and nerds to repel, so nerds need not apply. Jump right in after the…uh…jump.

Firstly, a charming and mesmerising interactive journey from the world of the macro – our everyday world – to the world of the quantum, with the Nanoreisen “adventure beyond the decimal”. With quiant and charming sounds and a very subtle and delicate sense of humor, this interactive flash animation takes you from the everyday – a mosquito, a laptop, a car headlight- to the world of the quantum. And includes a very lost and confused-looking mite.

Experience it for yourself here and note the extra level of geek topping in the subtle Star Wars sound effects. The site offers an update service to keep you informed af further adventures to be had. Sadly, you may be waiting for physicists to actually discover the updates first.

Secondly, a fascinating short video that demonstrates something that, go on, you know you have always wondered: just what exactly does happen when you fire a particle accelerator at a webcam?  Haven’t you? Not even a bit?  Wow, you are so a rubbish geek. Sure you’re not a nerd in denial? As ever, facebook readers will have to click here to see the video.

Cooking. What a waste of time. Why spend three hours cooking when you could spend three hours shooting alien dudes or fighting the Nazi war machine in a comfy chair, followed by the eatings?

You need to tell all your friends about this strip so that I can get hella traffic and start to sell advertising space, make my fortune, and hire a damn chef.

Incidentally, my dear friend Eva really did send me a Bayerische Küche, what a sweetie, and I will hopefully soon attempt some of the heavily meat-based dishes. Thing is, I am stuck on one of the ingredients: three ounces of pig’s head.

Which bit of the head in particular?? Without true knowledge, it could all go horribly awry…

Anyway, you can read the new strip here.

So far, we have examined the workings behind Nick Bostrom’s Ancestor Simulation hypothesis, looked at the how’s and the why’s of such an endeavor. Part one, part two and part three (hopefully) illustrate how, probabilistically, we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not. Now, in part four, we will briefly look at what it means to be simulated, how it would work, and if we would ever have any way to know for sure.

It is important to realise that what Bostrom has put forward is not proof or otherwise that pits reality against simulation in relation to our own perceived reality. It is merely an argument of probability, which is intended to lead us towards discussion of our existence and the ntaure of that reality:

“I believe that the simulation argument is sound. The argument shows only that at least one of three possibilities obtains, but it does not tell us which one(s). One can thus accept the simulation argument and reject the simulation hypothesis (i.e. that we are in a simulation).”

“Thus, the simulation argument is not best thought of as a skeptical argument that would have us be more agnostic, but rather as an argument that would have us increase our credence in one particular disjunction (and decrease our credence in its negation). It aims to tell us something about the world rather than to advise us that we know less about the world than we thought we did.”

But, regardless of how the argument is actually interpreted or used, it most clearly puts forward questions that are universal, regardless of the specific ins and outs of “is it possible to do?” or “why would it be done?”

Let’s pretend…

Let’s assume for a moment that the statistics are balanced towards option (3) - that we are actually living in an Ancestor Simulation. What does that mean? Would there be any way for us to prove it? Would we ever become aware of it?

In short, with only one major exception, no.

We shall assume that an originating civilization has created the simulation in which we live, and assume that they are technologically able to simulate not just one human mind, but all the human minds living at this point in time, along with the universe that we experience around us. We won’t worry about their motivations; just assume that it is so. What questions are raised?

The easiest thing to do is use a comparable to give yourself a basic frame of reference. Turn on a videogame console and start up a game. Let’s say, for the sake of illustration, that we are playing Halo. Now pause the game and imagine that YOU are the progenitor civilization, and the game is the simulation that you have created. Imagine for a second that as well as the game world, the NPC’s within the game and the sounds and visuals, you have been able to program the protagonist – Master Chief – will a fully-fledged mind, to the extent that consciousness is present (or at least, to the extent that the Chief perceives himself to be conscious). We will call upon this frame of reference to help illustrate some of the questions we may come across.

Glitches

One popular question often posed is that, if we are all in a simulation running on some fantastic super-computer, wouldn’t there be times when things go a bit wonky and something goes a bit wrong? A universal “blue screen of death”? And if so, surely we would identify these “glitches” and be able to use them as signs pointing to our artificiality?

Well, yes and no.

It is highly likely that any complex system, whether the human brain, your laptop or some vast stellar super computer of a progenitor would, from time to time, encounter calculation errors resulting in flaws and glitches. if we assume that the simulation in which we find ourselves is simulating every living organism on our planet, as well as the planet itself, the observable universe, and all the interactions and physics therein, it is safe to assume that occasionally, such massive computation will fall flat on its ass, or would create strange artifacts due to sloppy programming or omissions.

Glitches or bugs in a videogame can include such things as clipping (objects passing through each other due to incorrect physics routines or bounding box errors), missing objects, objects lacking textures (appearing “blank”), strange AI behaviours, odd audio effects, and many more.

In our souped-up game of Halo, a glitch or bug might mean that the Chief sees a tree hovering a few feet off the ground (which there famously is on the level Assault On The Control Room), or a vehicle thrashing about seemingly of its own accord as the physics engine tries to reconcile its position to a rest-state when another object is in the way. Perhaps he sees an enemy Elite standing there ignoring him, seemingly unable to see the Chief or carrying out strange repetitive actions, as if stuck in a loop.

Now, as we have injected the Chief (in this special release of the game) with human intelligence, it is natural to assume that he would be a little freaked out by something like a hovering tree or a jiggling Bansee vehicle. If you or I dropped a weapon to the ground only to see it spin wildly because it was against a wall and because the program could not reconcile the fact that the final destination of the dropped weapon is beyond or within that wall (because the physics engine had not correctly “bounced” the weapon off of the wall), we would certainly be a little shocked. We would perhaps question our own sanity, or start to think perhaps a poltergeist or some other malevolent force was at work. A scientist might accept the strange behavior as not particularly mystical, and decide to examine it fully, to find out what is causing the phenomenon.

But there is one thing to remember: it is highly unlikely that the person running the simulation wants to send the entities within it on a quest to expose it. After all, if I am running a simulation to evaluate human history, the last thing I need is to make the simulation obvious to those within it, as this would break away from the original history upon which the simulation is based, and render the data useless.

So, it is safe to assume that yes, in an Ancestor Simulation, the creators would be just as guilty as today’s software engineers – sometimes it is impossible to test for everything, some things get left out due to time constraints, and oddities can ensue. So, we just need to look hard and find the glitches, right? Wrong. We never will, because such activity is undesireable to the creator. Therefore, tools will be available to rectify glitches in a way we would not perceive.

It is a problem very easily solved – when a glitch of some sort occurs, simply pause the program, fix the bug, and rewind the program to a few seconds before the bug occurred. Simple. If I am playing a normal game of Halo and I somehow manage to get the Master Chief outside the permitted map area with no way to get back, I simply pause the game and go back to the last saved checkpoint, carrying on as if nothing had happened. In our simulation, although we would experience the glitch, once it was fixed and returned to normal, we would be “rewound a few minutes” and our brain-states would return to the way they were at exactly the point from which play resumed – leaving no trace of memory of the glitched event or rewind. For all we know, we could be finding glitches every single day, and have no way to know. And absolutely no way to prove that it happened.

In The Matrix, Neo experiences déjà vu, and sees a black cat pass a doorway twice. He innocently points this out, and is advised that this means that something has been changed in the Matrix-simulation and this is a glitch that occurred as a result. However, in reality (no pun intended) this would not occur beause once the glitch was rectified or the change made, he would be returned to just prior to the glitch occurring, have no memory of it and therefore not be able to bring it to the attention of his allies.

Therefore, the presence or perception of bugs and glitches cannot be used to prove or disprove the possibility that our reality is simulated.

It’s all too much!

Many people suggest that infinity itself is the sole agent that can determine the “realness” of reality. That, despite the creator civilization having super-duper awesome computing at their disposal, there is no way they could create an infinite universe – that being the universe we observe both visually and in mathematics. This fact surely makes such a simulation untenable?

Well, no, not really.

The fact that mathematics can create infinity does not mean anything, in terms of computing power. Instrinsically, just because an equation on a blackboard suggests that the universe is infinite does not mean that it requires such a universe to exist. And the fact that we can make visual observations that suggest an infinite universe equally does not mean that the infinite universe has to actually exist for us to see it.

Simply put, it is a valid point that it would be prohibitive to run a simulation that requires the creation of infinity. However, it would also be incredibly pointless to actually create such an infinity all the time when, for the most part, observation of this infinity is almost never taking place. 

In game design, this is called LOD or Level Of Detail. In our pimped game of Halo, the Chief can be standing an an enormous valley, snow falling, wind whipping at his armor, and he can look up and see a starry sky. In that sky, he will see galaxies far away, shimmering amidst the stars. To him, that is the observable universe, many millions or even billions of light years away. He could take out a ridiculously powerful telescope, and perhaps bring it to bear on a distant galaxy, and marvel at the hundreds of millions of stars within that galaxy, and how he is now able to see many more galaxies even further away.

But you are the programmer for his reality – a reality he accepts and perceives as totally real – and you really haven’t got a few spare millennia (or the memory in your upgraded super-powerful Xbox) to create all these trillions of stars and galaxies. So instead, you bring LOD to bear. Around the valley you create a skybox -literally a box around the valley he perceives upon which lives a simple texture map of the night sky. Perhaps it is animated to show clouds, shooting stars and movement of the celestial scenery. It does not need to be very high-resolution, because it is supposed to be a very long way away from the Chief, and he is observing it with the naked eye. However, does it follow that when he whips his telescope out, he will see a clunky low-resolution texture map of the night sky? No. When he looks through the telescope, then he sees a chunk of the outside universe with stars and galaxies in higher detail – a different image to the one he was seeing just a moment ago. But, this could again be a simple two-dimensional animated image, as there is no need to use complex modelling at these perceived distances. In effect, there is no limit to how far out into space the Chief looks, as no matter what he uses, he always gets the same thing – a very simple but detailed image that he beleives is the dark, mysterious depths of space, many many light years away. In reality, such an image would probably require less processing power than his own armor, in terms of system resources.

So, in effect, what our simulation creators could do, with very little impact on their system resources, is effectively show us what we need to see, on demand, instead of generating and rendering the whole universe.

The same can be said for the other direction – the quantum world. In the same way, it is not neccessary for the simulation to render down to the atomic or sub-atomic scale. The simulation only needs to constantly render to the naked eye level of resolution. Greater resoltions can be provided on demand, locally to the observer, when magnification equipment is used. In the Ancestor Simulation, it is more likely that it would not be an image, per se, but rather code that convinces the observer that they are seeing what they are.

So, level of detail, or the existence of infinity cannot be used to prove or disprove the possibility that our reality is simulated.

It’s all too much! Again!

Another argument along the lines of the resource management discussion above is that although it is conceivable that the creation of an entire universe – at whatever level of detail – by some supercomputer is possible, surely running the program real time would just be too much. There would be so much to process that it would never get off the ground.

Well, whilst that suggests a certain arrogance about just exactly what a future technological civilisation may or may not be capable of building, it has a fatal flaw.

Who said anything about real-time?

When Pixar creates on of its fantastic CGI animated films, it does not build the whole thing on the shelf, characters, actions and all, and then simply render it to a video recorder. Each frame of film, 24 for each second, is rendered individually. The movements and actions are planned and built in, and the film comes together, frame by frame, on huge render farms that are made up of many, many servers. Each server might render a few frames in an hour. Back in the day, it could take a whole day to render a single frame. For an hour and a half long film, that’s 129,600 frames, renderd one by one. Nowadays of course the process is much faster (even though the amount of stuff being rendered by the computer is much greater, much more complex and contains more elements).

In the same vein, it is possible to imagine that the race creating the simulation have a bank of “servers” that can ”render” the simulated reality. Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that they render this simulation in frames, like an animated movie. Let’s also assume that their “frames” are actually units of time. For the sake of argument, we will assume that they render the simulated “reality” in frames that are in fact a jiffy long. A jiffy is the rather endearing name for what physicists believe is the smallest feasible and measurable unit of time – according to Wikipedia:

“In astrophysics and quantum physics a jiffy is, as defined by Edward R. Harrison,^[4] the time it takes for light to travel one fermi (the size of a nucleon). One fermi is 10⁻¹⁵ m, so a jiffy is about 3 × 10⁻²⁴ seconds.”  

Now, if the creator race have computers that are so powerful they can render a simulated reality at the jiffy level, real-time, then great. Yay them. That’s really powerful tech, they have teh smartz and everyone loves everyone.

But wait. That’s a hell of an assumption. For all we know, they can’t render real-time. We discussed in a previous blog that the instincts that drive man to enquire about his history and his surroundings are inherent in human nature – and will never be forgotten. So it is silly to assume that scientists, eager to simulate a reality for whatever reason, would figure out how to do it and then decide to wait for another few thousand years just beacuse it had to be real-time. Of course they wouldn’t. And they wouldn’t because they would know full well that the render speed of the simulation is irrelevant to the entities living within the simulation.

What do I mean? Simply put, if we were simulated, then we would only be “aware” at the same level of quantisation as the simulation. Our perceptions and thought processes would be rendered and be active only at the same rate as the rendering itself. So I would experience a jiffy of time, then nothing, then the next jiffy, and so on (of course, I would not actually “experience” a jiffy but you know what I mean). I would no more sense the pauses between jiffies than you perceive the spaces between frames in a CGI animated movie, or than my super-conscious Master Chief would be aware that I had paused the Halo game to go get a coffee. Whether each jiffy was rendered real-time, or a thousand million years apart, to a simulated entity reality would simply proceed at normal speed.

This means that being able to “render” a simulation real-time is not a pre-requisite for the creation of a simulated reailty.  

So…

The fact that it may require just too much computing power to “render” a simulation in real-time cannot be used to prove or disprove the possibility that our reality is simulated. 

I think, therefore…I might be?

Consciousness – the sense of self, the “I” in “me” – is an interesting subject. No-one is able to say for sure what it is, or why it is. It could be a side effect of the complexity of the human brain and it’s complex workings. It could be a matter of the soul – an entity that lives within us, and merely inhabits us on our journey of life. Who knows? But in terms of this discussion, does it totally negate the possibility of reality being simulated?

Well, no.

If consciousness is merely a by-product of a complex system then, as we have already stated in our breakdown of the underlying requirements for a simulation, there is nothing available to us in our current uinderstanding of physics, biology or metaphysics to suggest that such consciousness-creating complexity is dependent on substrate – i.e. it is not a matter of what the system is made of that determines the generation of consious thought. There is no reason to suspect that consciousness would not occur in a suitably complex system made from electronic components, or even software components. Without the knowledge of such a limitation, it is untenable to claim that substrate is critical, and therefore any argument that a virtual brain would not create conscious thought is moot.

It is also important to remember that there is also nothing in our current knowledge to prevent us assuming that consiousness is merely a manufactured illusion, or that in a simulation consiousness could not be programmed, rather than actually existing. We do not have the technological capability to say if it possible to simulate consciousness, let alone create it in genuinely by way of a suitably complex system.

On the other hand, it could be assumed that consciousness is an entity – like a soul – that is seperate from our bodies and therefore almost like a beneficial parasite or symbiotic organism within us. Interestingly, this idea both proves and disproves the simulation argument at the same time. Bear in mind here that I am using the word “soul” outside any religious context and with no inherent confirmation of any religious connotations – it is merely a word I choose to use to denote the consciousness within us, because I am getting frustrated typing the word “consciousness” so much!

If our preceived universe is actually real, and not a simulation, and if our “self” is actually a separate entity, then in effect we are still simulated – to a certain degree. Our physical selves would merely be avatars, or vehicles, for such an entity. Meaning that the “me” I perceive as “me” is, in fact, not me! Although this would not be a simulation in the same vein as a full Ancestor Simulation, it woud still, nontheless, reduce our existence to something other than we perceive.

Of course, the other alternative is that the “soul” may in fact be a “gamer” – somebody experiencing a fully-simulated universe through direct injection into that simulation. It may be that without the soul or the “conscious entity”  we are merely virtual avatars, motionless and without direction, until the “player” jacks into the simulation and takes control.

This, of course, raises a whole new question – if the simulation is in fact interactive and has “players” contolling us, does that mean there is a ”player” for each human? Not neccesarily. There may be a limited number of ”players”, and the rest of humanity maybe be NPC’s – non-player characters. Dumb bots, if you will. For all you know, you may be the only actual player-controlled character in the whole world, and the rest of us simple drones (albeit very intelligent and convincing drones).  There is no way to tell.

As a little aside, Jim Elvidge, author of The Universe – Solved, leans more towards this train of thinking. He expands on the simulation hypothesis much like Nick Bostrom, but favors more the idea that physical entities are “plugged into” and ”playing” or experiencing the simulation directly at some level (whereas Bostrom favors the “everything is pure simulation” side of the coin). Both are very compelling and interesting angles, and offer different reasons for such simulations to exist. Ideally, both should be studied alongside each other. 

This also creates the ONLY way for us to find out whether we are simulated or not. If numbers of the human race are actually avatars controlled by flesh and blood beings from “out there”, then it would be within their power to tell us our true nature. Why they would do so is another question. And, judging by the typical postings on abovetopsecret.com, they would most likely not be believed anyway!

So, assuming we could prove the existence of a “soul”, or even if we never do, does the concept put a spanner in the works as far as suggesting we are simulated? I think you know the answer by now:

The existence and/or concept of consciousness and/or a “soul” (in any sense) cannot be used to prove or disprove the possibility that our reality is simulated.

I prove that I cannot prove what I prove.

Some suggest that if we are in a simulation, this simple fact disproves the simulation theory altogether.

Wait…what?

Basically put, Bostrom’s argument is based on the idea that a suitably tecnologically advanced race would have the capability of creating an Ancestor Simulation. This idea is based on our current knowledge and understanding of physics and technology, and is dependent on us being able to predict what may be possible in the future.

But, it is argued, if we are simulated, we have no way to know that our current understanding of physics and technology is real – that is to say, for all we know, the laws of physics and quantum physics as we know them, and in fact all known laws governing the universe, may bear no relation at all to the “real” laws in the “real” world where the simulation-creator exists. For example, in our super-duper Halo game, I could set the physics engine to make magnets where aligned poles attract rather than repel. Or I could make gravity a strong repellent force rather than a weak attractant force. The Chief, inhabiting what he perceives to be his reality, would have no way to know that in my “real” reality, these laws are not the case, and would assume these as universal and correct laws. Therefore, if we cannot say with 100% certainty that our predictions are possible, we cannot say with 100% certainty that the simulation is someting that the “real world” inhabitants are able to create with their knowledge. Therefore, this suggests that the simulation is either not possible, or gives extra weight to the possibility that we are living in the reality that cannot run a simulation and are therefore real, not simulated.

Hell of a paradox, that one. I think I broke my brain.

But, in fact, it does not stop our reality being simulated at all. The counter reply is such:

• If we do live in a simulation, regardless of whether our understanding of “capability” is correct or not, it proves that a simulation is possible and therefore given the statistical probability of there being more simulations that “real” realities, we are most likely to be simulated, or
• If we are NOT in a simulation then it is more likely that our knowledge and assumptions about future technological capabilities are correct and based on “real” laws of physics – meaning that it we are more likely correct in our assumption that we will develop such a simulation at some point, Again, statistically, if we will one day have such a capability and will more likely have more than one simulation running, the likelihood of there being a greater number of simulated realities than our “real” reality is high and therefore means that in all probability we are more likely to be simulated and not real.

Take a deep breath

You know what’s coming…

Being simulated and it’s implications on our understanding of universal laws and technological potential cannot be used to prove or disprove the possibility that our reality is simulated.

So…

In conclusion, what do we have? Well, as Bostrom himself points out, no proof of any kind that our reality is simulated or not. And we probably never will, unless Bostrom has taken the wrong tack and Elvidge has hit the nail on the head with the avatar idea, and we can actually be told. Rather, what we have is a collection of interesting points that compliment the statistical probablility that, in all likelihood, given the assumption that a race will reach the level of technology to create such a simulation, and run many simulations concurrently, it is more likley that we inhabit one of many Ancestor Simulations as opposed to inhabiting a single, “real” reality. Even if the creators run only two simulations, that means that we only have a one in three chance of not being simulated. And then factor in the possibility that their simulated beings may themselves create and run a simulation, and then their simulation may do the same (assuming the creators of each simulation permit it) ad infinitum (although with a lower level of detail each time), the odds of us being the original progenitor race becomes less and less.  Indeed, because of this, the simple act of creating a simulation in no way acts as proof that the creators are the “originals”.  It can make you dizzy.

I hope that you have enjoyed this article, and that it has opened your eyes to a whole different way of thinking. There is probably no way we will ever know one way or the other whether we are simulated or not. That we exist is not in question – “we think, therefore we am”! But we can gain insight into reality and our perceptions. Not only does the concept ask interesting questions of the nature of reality, and our perceptions of it, it forces us to look into theology as well. In pretty much every religion and faith there is a creator myth. Imagine for one minute that we create an Ancestor Simulation. Think about how we would appear to the simulated entities. We would have mystical powers to create and destroy life as we saw fit. We would control their entire universe. We could appear or disappear within the simulation at will. We could make bushes burn, make seas part, speak from the heavens, attribute magical powers to a chosen few individuals. We would, to the inhabitants and for all intents and purposes, be gods. This is interesting because the Ancestor Simulation hypothesis in of itself does not remove any theistic beliefs – in fact, it lends the idea of a creator God even more weight. If we do live in a simulation, and could prove it, it would, in fact, be irrefutable proof of the existence of God. The real kicker would be to find out that God was, in fact, just another simulation himself.  If there is one significant question that stems from all this, it is not “Is God an astronaut?”, it is:

“Is God a computer nerd?”

Now, why can’t physics have been this much fun at school?