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Building the blocks of ‘reality’
IT IS not about playing games on your PS2 or watching movies with a headset on. It fact, it addresses an idea which may be far-fetched for most of you. The idea that the world we live in is just a simulation, or in other words, a hoax. An intricate plot developed by those in corridors of power for the ones who are powerless. According to Yale professor Nick Bostrom, the probability of our lives being an “ancestral simulation” is far higher that what most of us would imagine. References to the Matrix line of movies is quintessential for understanding the concept presented in this article.
According to Bostrom, we could be a bunch of conscious computer programs living in a simulated reality. But exactly how implausible is this idea from the so-called reality? First of all we should take into consideration the assumption that all neural processes are substrate independent. In simple terms it means that nervous activities occurring within the tiny nerve endings or synapses can be achieved through any medium given that the circumstances are well defined. Therefore, it is not an essential property of consciousness that be recreated only on the specific carbon based neural networks present in all living beings. According to our assumption, a silicon based network would offer the same effect. Consciousness is not about creating hardware worthy of thinking on its own. A suitably coded program is enough to make a computer become aware of its self. Again it is not necessary that the programs should be coded for everything a human is supposed to do. General guidelines could be duly programmed for the generation of subjective (or generalized) experiences, which would in turn be processed further to create objective (or personal) experiences by each of the individual programs.
Moreover, a simulator of this strength would have enough computational power to keep track of the belief states of the human beings in it. Should any error occur the, the director could easily edit the minds of those subjects who have become aware of the anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could push back time a few seconds, and then re-run the whole simulation again as to avoid the anomaly. This could explain the phenomena of Déjà-vu.
The amount of computational power available is no longer an issue. In fact a lot of scientists have come to the conclusion that with the current trends in increasing processing power, we will be able to create consciousness in a couple of decades. Roboticist Hans Moravec of the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh has worked out that emulating the mind would take about 1014 operations per second. That seems like a lot now. Today’s fastest computers struggle to get above 1012 operations per second, but we are heading in that direction. According to thinkers like Ray Kurzweil and Eric Drexler, we have not been able to squeeze the maximum potential from our technology. There are already designs that allow nanotechnology, the size of a sugar cube, to do up to 1024 processes per second.
Possibilities
So now that we are all ready to emulate consciousness, what are the chances that we are not living in one right now? According to Bostrom there are three possibilities:
1. The human species is most likely to go extinct before it reaches the status of post-humanity. Post-humanity talks about the time when humankind acquires most of the technological capabilities that one can currently show to be fully consistent with all physical laws and material and energy constraints. In simpler terms, this means that human beings achieve complete compatibility with nature via their technology.
2. If humans do achieve post-humanity, they will be too preoccupied with other more important things than to run simulations to live in.
3. Humans will one day simulate consciousness, and then go on to create simulated Universes for them to live in.
If the third possibility is true then the chances are they’ve already done so, and you’re living in one.
Plugged or unplugged?
Given the argument that you might just be living in the real world, the pre-consciousness-emulation period or the “original history” according to Bostrom. But given how many simulations there’ll be, the probability of that is very slim. All things considered, Bostrom says, the probability that you’re living in a simulation is “close to unity”.
“I think the argument is watertight,” he says.
So for a second if we do accept that, all things considered, Bostrom is right, we are in a very smart reality program, but how does this so called program handle “reality”? The answer is that it works on a “need-to-know” basis. As humans, we don’t look at everything at a microscopic level. In fact, the most of what the huge majority of us sees is just a really zoomed out, low detail version of the world. So what if someone wants to look at, say a cell, in an electron microscope? The program smartly increases the detail for that very segment of its reality by a thousand. This satisfies the curious minds of those jacked inside the system, and also prevents the system from a drastic slow down.
Simulating the universe down to its most minute details is a waste of valuable resources, and only those sections need to be simulated that would remove any sort of suspicion from the minds of the onlooker. As we really don’t know what “reality” actually is, we will accept any subatomic irregularities as “the way they are”. If one looks at subjects such as quantum mechanics, the mind boggles over their alarmingly bizarre natures.
According to Bostrom, the creators of this simulation could be posthumans re-enacting the original history. So we, the subjects of such a simulation, are on the same line as they once were, that is we will be simulating consciousness too. Thus a simulation with in a simulation would be created. A box within box effect. So if we, too, can be the creators of a simulated universe, what prevents our posthuman creators from being simulated beings too? And their creators? This could become a near infinite channel of realities, paralleling each other only in content and not in time. Bostrom thinks that such a possibility is highly probable and should not be neglected.
Hacking into reality
So now that we are convinced that the world is nothing but ones and zeroes crunched by our naïve minds, how can we be like say Neo from The Matrix? Can we really hack into reality and perform miraculous feats that are only possible on the silver screen? Well, yes and no. There have always been reports all around the world over anomalies such as floating monks, the Bermuda triangle, etc. So if such anomalies do exist, what prevents us to be one? We have always heard of meditation and extra “soul-searching” improving one’s conditions. So if this is the way to turn into a flying superhero, go ahead and start meditating today. But on the other hand, maybe the creator of this simulation has put those anomalies to put us off-track; and maybe this system is far more fool proof than most of us geeks would like to imagine.
Being the average Joe How much of The Matrix could be real? Can we unplug? Doing the impossible?
So what should one now do that one knows that one’s life is just a simulation? Well according to Bostrom, one should not panic or flip out.
“Anyone who started to change their life because of this would be a mad loony,” he says.
But, according to Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, one should change his life style as radically as possible in order to avoid getting “deleted”. First you need to work out the purpose of the simulation. If it’s just for entertainment then you’d better make sure you’re part of all the fun. What that means varies across cultures, so to be safe you should be funny, outrageous, violent, sexy, strange, pathetic and heroic all at once —”in a word dramatic”, says Hanson.
Entertaining though it might be, Bostrom thinks Hanson’s advice is useless because “it’s almost impossible to work out what our world is for. We don’t have any direct access to how the simulators set it up. The least misleading advice would be to get on with your business as you would have done before.”
He even thinks it would be okay for everyone to know what’s going on. “Presumably in the original history there were people who had these crazy ideas,” he says. “If you were trying to run as realistic simulation as you could, you wouldn’t want to ban that.” Maybe he’s right. After all, millions of us sat through The Matrix without the “post-humans” pulling the plug on us. And nobody panicked at the idea that the Earth was a simulation created by a future civilization intent on using us for batteries. But what did Bostrom think when the film came out? Was he impressed? Apparently he was not.
“Using humans as an energy source is ridiculously implausible,” he says. “But that’s Hollywood for you.”
The writer
ACCORDING to Nick Bostrom, The Matrix could be far closer to reality than most of us would like to imagine. Through a variety of statistical methods, the Yale professor has proved that, out of a list of related probabilities, the world could well be a simulation. But how much of Nick’s theory coincides with the subliminal Wachowski movie? Here are a couple of comparisons:
Are we just humans connected to a system or just a couple of billion programs running in cohesion? According to Nick, the probability that we are programs is slightly higher than that of being humans plugged into a system. But the argument rises over the usefulness of such programs? Apparently we are doing nothing more than polluting the seas, dirtying the land and consuming more resources than we require. So the probability of being post-humans linked in to a “program reality” is higher keeping in mind the sheer human lust for entertainment. Thus the matrix’s prognosis that human minds need to be kept busy in order to reach optimal throughput could well be true.
Answer: Apparently there is absolutely no way to unplug out of program reality. But there are several assumptions surrounding the process of unplugging. Dying could be one of the ways a mind becomes free, allowing either a deletion of a program or a restart of a human subject. The infamous “light at the end of the tunnel” might just be a method of the system to start rejecting a subject out of the program. On the other hand, sleeping could be a temporary method of getting unplugged, allowing the human mind to come back to its regular environment in order to normalize the chemical reactions in the brain. Thus dreams could really just be blurred out representations of the “true reality” that the program distorts in order to keep the illusion of the “fake reality”, ironically, true. As Morpheous said in the first Matrix, “How could you know that you were in a dream if you never woke up?”
Answer: The Matrix emphasized on the theory that once your mind truly believed that the world was just an overly complex illusion, you could reject the laws of the system. All laws of physics, chemistry, biology, etc, would no longer be applicable on you. This sounds tragically false. For example, one of you after reading this story in ScienceDotcom, starts believing that this world is nothing but a test and jumps off his roof, hoping against hopes that he would start flying. Rest assured that you will fall flat on you face, and would also break all the bones in the process.
But what about “backdoor passes?” “Administrator rights?” The very structure that powers our current computer systems could very well be the essence of the program we are living in. Maybe some people do have these secret administrator rights. The agents in The Matrix had all the administrator rights to go around flying and morphing in to any and everything present inside the program. So if someone does unplug, finds a way around “program reality” and manages to capture a couple of the administrator rights, could very well be in pretty good shape, to say the least. There have always been rumors surrounding supernatural phenomena. Ghosts far stronger and faster than the average man, spirits taking over human bodies, vampires jumping from roof to roof, etc. There have also been stories about men doing things that deny all laws of physics. We have all heard stories of saints that were powerful enough to blow apart mountains with a single twitch, men of religion that were stronger than an army of a thousand strong men. But as with all rumours, these claims remain without substantial proof or hard evidence. But what prevents them to be true is just another question in this hierarchy of queries.
All of these comparisons could very well be false, just another series of baseless ideas based upon other ideas. What ever the truth might be, rest assured that we are not being governed by an army of robots using us as pencil cells. — HM
