CAJ: Simulation Theory - 5.) How Mr. Rich Terrell rocked my CAJ

When talking about the universe as a computer simulation, people might get curious about how to find out if this theory is actually true. Is there any chance to distinguish fake from true realities? 

To start off this topic, let me introduce you to Rich Terrell, the man who really rocked my CAJ.

Rich Terrell

Rich Terrell is a physicist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and adheres to the idea that our universe is a simulation. Some people might argue that he is crazy to believe in such a farfetched theory but first let me prove that this man is not insane. He has helped design missions to Mars, discovered four new moons around Saturn, Neptune and Uranus and taken pictures of the distant solar system. I believe that this man is quite intelligent and that his words can be taken seriously. So from my point of view, I think that what I am presenting to you in the next paragraphs really is worth to be taken into account.

Many people on Earth believe that there has to be a creator, for most of them it is a God, who created our universe. Thus, Rich Terrell asked himself the question which requirements a God has to fulfill. He concluded that a God is an interdimensional being, connected with everything in die universe and a creator responsible for the universe and in some way he is capable of changing the laws of physics. These characteristics sound familiar when looking at the things programmers are able to perform when creating simulated environments. If we now suppose that our civilization will eventually achieve a state of enough computing power to create a universe, our civilization would fulfill all requirements we put on God. Consequently, we could become God. 

The next interesting thought he brings forward is based on a mental experiment. Imagine a box with a human brain and a laptop (could be any kind of computer) inside. Both are approximately of the same weigh, volume and power. Now close the box so that you cannot see the two items any more. What would happen if we asked the human brain and the laptop a question and could not tell if either the brain or the laptop would be answering? To me, his reasoning seems logical that if we are not able to tell the difference the human brain and the computer are qualitatively equivalent. Further, if we believe that a human being is consciously aware, we must also argue that a computer has the same qualities.

Mr. Terrell thinks that he has found evidence in nature to prove the idea that we might be living already living in a computer simulation.
Let me give a brief explanation of what he is trying to say. If we are looking at a simulation we can see all aspects of it clearly from a distance. Let us now zoom in. We will detect that the picture we have been seeing clearly all along breaks down into pixels when we get close enough.
Now he draws a comparison to the real word because that is exactly the same thing what is happening in our universe. Physicists have discovered that matter is made of tiny little pixels which are fundamental, indivisible particles which are billions of times smaller than an atom. Quantum mechanics is the theory that explains this phenomenon and shows that it does not solely apply to matter but also to the entire universe. If we look at the way the universe behaves, we see that it is quantized, that it is made of pixels and that it is made of individual atoms.
Quantum mechanics states that space, time and energy is quantized which means that everything is made of pixels which further means that the universe has a finite number of components or in other words, a finite number of states. Therefore, it is computable. It suggests that everything we can see could really be produced by lines of code inside a powerful computer. 

Finally, this last point presented by Mr. Terrell is the one thing that really blew my mind. With a simple and actually very old experiment, called the Davisson-Germer-Experiment, dating back to the year 1927, Terrell explains the similarity between the way matter behaves and the way a simulation would work.
In general, the experiment consists of a gun which fires electrons at a target of graphite atoms and a collecting screen to record how they ricochet off.

If this apparatus would be scaled up a billion times and if the gun fired real bullets, the pattern on the collection screen would be completely random.
However, in the scaled down subatomic world the electron ricochets are not random. The pattern you can see on the screen reflects the pattern of atoms in the target. So it seems like each electron senses where every atom in the graphite is even though the target is much bigger than it. It looks like the electrons are not got but spread out and so they form this diffraction pattern.
This experiment shows that matter behaves when you are measuring it as individual particles. Nevertheless, as soon as you are not measuring it anymore, matter is diffuse and spreads out so that it does not have a finite from in the universe.
These basic rules of quantum mechanics apply to all tiny subatomic particles. When we take a look at them they are dots and when we look away they lose their physical form.
You may wonder what this experiment has to do with the simulation theory. So here is what Mr. Terrell said. A different way of looking at this outcome is to see how parallel this behavior is with what we can observe in a PlayStation3, for example, while playing a video game. Let us take the example of SimCity which is an enormous city where I can navigate my way through every bit of it because the video game provides me with the frame I need when I’m looking at a particular scenery. When I look somewhere else it provides me with this frame.
In a strange way, our universe might behave in the same way. It gives me exactly what I need to see when I look at something. When I stop looking at it, it is not necessarily there. So it is possible to argue that our world might be already a simulation as the universe is pixelated and only gets into a definite form when observed. That is the exact same way in which a computer simulation behaves.

Honestly, how amazing is that?!

source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ucqYJzK1rk&index=3&list=PL093A8AA11264F3CA

CAJ: The Simulation Theory – 4.) Nick Bostrom and the Simulation Argument

When immersing yourself in the topic of Simulation Theory, you cannot go past this man: Nick Bostrom. He is a Swedish philosopher and transhumanist. 

Nick Bostrom (source: http://research.lifeboat.com/bostrom.htm)

 

Currently he is professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. Further, he is founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School.

He is the co-founder of two non-profit organizations. In 1997, he founded the World Transhumanist Association, now Humanity+, together with David Pearce (see Post3). In 2004, he founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies together with bioethicist James Hughes. The aim of the institute is to spread ideas about the influence of technological progress on democratic societies and individuals, locally and globally. Therefore, the work of international thinkers is regularly published.

Nick Bostrom is famous for his work on “existential risk” which means he addresses the question of humanity’s long-term survival, on transhumant-related issues like artificial intelligence and cloning and of course for his Simulation Argument which will be discussed in this post.

In 2003, he published an article called “Are you living in a computer simulation?”. In this article, he develops three options about our future and argues that one of them has to be true. 

1. Humans (or human-like species) become extinct before they achieve simulation-producing technology.

2. Post-human civilizations have only little interest in making or using this technology.

3. We are probably living in a computer simulation.

The basic idea of the Simulation Argument, as Bostrom calls it, is fairly simple. It says that numerous technologists and futurologists as well as various works of science fiction predict that, in the future, enormous amounts of computing power will be made available to humankind. Bostrom goes on by assuming that our decedents might use their super computers to run simulations of their ancestors and because of their power they could run a great amount of them. Further, he supposes that the people inside these simulations are conscious. The result of which is that it would be likely to think that the vast majority of people would belong to the simulated ones and not to the original race, as Bostrom calls it in its paper. If this is true than we could also argue that we are much more likely to be among the simulated people rather than among the original biological ones. However, if we do not believe that we are currently living in a simulation, we also have no point in arguing that our descendants will create them. 

In general, the Simulation Argument involves probability theory but basically Bostrom explained in an interview that if option one and two do not attain, there would be many more simulated people than non-simulated ones. So it is rational to think that we are living among the simulated rather than among the few exceptional non-simulated ones.

Along with the Simulation Argument comes the Simulation Hypothesis saying that simulated civilizations could themselves create simulations – other simulated civilizations. This would be called “nested simulation” which means having many simulations inside one simulation. However, the Simulation Argument itself does not imply the Simulation Hypothesis; it is just an exceptional extra.

The Simulation Argument imposes a constraint in what you can coherently believe about the future and about our place in the world.

It is a philosophical argument but it clearly differs from others. Neither does it start from a position of doubt, nor does it challenge someone to prove it beyond doubt. It simply assumes that everything is as it seems. It assumes that science tells about the world and that we have computers that are getting faster and better. By assuming these scientific facts, all the Simulation Argument does is thinking what capabilities will eventually be available to a mature civilization. Next it draws out the implications of that and ends up with recognizing that one of the three options mentioned at the beginning is true and that in particular the Simulation Hypothesis seems worth to be taken seriously. 

When Nick Bostrom was interviewed he said that we did not have very strong evidence for or against any of the three options. So he believes that we have to distribute our credence evenly between them. 

In the last section of his paper he interpreted the findings.

Taking a look at option 1, we can see that it is fairly straight forward. If 1 is true, humankind will almost certainly fail to reach a posthuman level. There are many hypothetical situations which might cause us to fail. For example, we could find out that we are about to be hit by a giant meteor or we could go extinct due to the development of powerful but dangerous technology like molecular nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the science of modifying objects at the atomic or molecular level. 

Option 2 suggests that only a too small number of our ancestors will be interested in creating simulations. In order for 2 to be true, there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations. In general, virtually no posthuman civilizations would decide to use their resources to run large numbers of ancestor-simulations. So they would all lack individuals who have enough resources and interest to run the simulations. Or maybe they have laws which would prevent such individuals from creating simulations. There are different forces that could cause convergence. For example, it could be prohibited for ethical reasons to create ancestor simulations. However, from our present point of view, it is not clear that creating a human race is immoral. Another possible force creating convergence might be the loss of interest to run ancestor-simulations. Today, there are certainly a lot of people who would love to create simulations if they could, for example historians. Maybe if a civilization reaches a posthuman stage, the present desires will be regarded as silly. So the scientific value of ancestor-simulations to a posthuman civilization is negligible which is not too farfetched given their intellectual superiority. So a general conclusion which follows from option 2 is that posthuman societies will be very different from human societies.

Option 3 is clearly the most fascinating one. If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos which we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. We cannot be sure if the universe of the people simulating us really resembles the universe we consider as our world. It would be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman and run their own simulations on powerful computers. These computers would be virtual machines which is a familiar concept in computer science. It is possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine etc. So if we become able to create our own simulations, we would have found very strong evidence against option 1 and 2 and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Furthermore, we would have to believe that the people simulating us would themselves be simulated by their creators and so on. So reality must contain many levels and the number could be increasing over time. This leads us to a point were analogies with religious conceptions of the world can be drawn. The posthumans running simulations are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation. They create the world we see and are of superior intelligence. They can interfere in the courses of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws. They can also monitor everything that happens. So in a way there would develop a hierarchy which could lead to the feeling of everybody that their actions would be punished of rewarded by their “gods”, maybe based on moral criteria. But as no one would know whether they are at the basement level of the hierarchy, even the basement civilization would have a reason to behave ethically. There is also the chance of simulators abridging certain parts of the mental lives of simulated individuals and giving them false memories. So if this would be true, then the solution to all evil would be that there is no suffering in the world and all memories of suffering are illusions. Of course this is farfetched as Bostrom says. In general, if option 3 were to be true, we should not go crazy and just carry on living our lives by making plans for the future.

Nich Bostrom gives a small conclusion at the end of his paper. He says that considering all the facts mentioned above, humans might be likely to hope that 3 is true because it would decrease the probability of 1. But if simulators are in favor of ending a simulation before it reaches a posthuman level, then our best hope would be that 2 is true. 

Sources:

https://www.ted.com/speakers/nick_bostrom
http://ieet.org/
http://humanityplus.org/
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/about/staff/
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/members/research_staff/bostrom_nick
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnl6nY8YKHs
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Individual Post: How instant photographs work

How instant photographs work

In general, all cameras capture patterns of light on a plastic-based film covered with particles of silver compound which are sensitive to light. Whereas a black-and-white film only has one layer of silver compound, a color film has three. This text will focus on the development process of color films as they are more relevant nowadays. In order for the film to be turned into a photograph, it has to be developed. While common camera films are processed outside of the camera, the instant camera film already contains the necessary chemicals.

The structure of an instant camera film sheet

Although an instant film can be bought as a film roll, they usually comprise separate plastic sheets. To understand the developing process of an instant photograph, it is essential to know of which layers of chemical an instant camera film sheet is composed of. The sheet has three layers sensitive to different colors of light: blue, green and red, respectively. Underneath each layer, a dye developer layer for the respective complementary colors yellow, magenta and cyan is found. All of these layers are located on the black Base Layer and underneath the Image Layer, Timing Layer, Acid Layer and Clear Plastic Layer. This arrangement is a chemical chain reaction waiting to be set in motion.

Photo development in an instant camera

The reaction is set off with the Reagent. The Reagent Layer is located between the Image Layer and the Color Layers. In contrast to the other layers, it is accumulated at the border of the plastic sheet, separated from the light-sensitive material. When the picture is taken, the sheet is pushed out of the camera through a pair of rollers. Now the Reagent is spread out into the middle of the sheet and a chemical reaction is started. The reagent chemicals move downward through the light-sensitive layers. Particles on the exposed color layers are changed into metallic silver. Therefore, the respective dye layer behind them is blocked which causes the remaining dye layers to move up to the image layer where the requested color is created. At the same time, other reagent chemicals react with the acid layer which finally makes the image visible. This reaction is delayed by the timing layer to assure that the film is not exposed to light before it is fully developed. 

When the image is slowly brought to appearance before our eyes, this chemical reaction can be observed.

[404 words]

CAJ: The Simulation Theory – 3.) Transhumanism

In the past few decades several of the leading computer scientists, neuroscientists, nanotechnologists and researchers at the forefront of technological development created a new way of thinking about humankind’s future. This paradigm is called “Transhumanism”. The essential belief is that transhumanists reject the assumption that the human condition is constant. This assumption is implicit in traditional futurology and political thinking. By disbanding this assumption, it becomes obvious that our future offers various possibilities: intimidating ones like for example the extinction of mankind but also exciting ones as the reanimation of frozen patients. These two examples are only a few of the areas transhumanism is dedicated to. 

Another field of exploration is virtual reality. Transhumanists believe that if we can simulate the human brain on a computer, it would be possible for us to eventually enjoy unlimited life-spans and create a virtual reality. 

Transhumanists think that within a time period of seventy years we might be actually capable of letting these things come true. This awareness is what keeps the transhumanist philosophy and movement going. Theorists follow the belief that we will be able to transcend our biological limitations by means of technology and that we can provide a constructive approach to the new situation. Therefore, their aim is to provoke public discussion about all these possibilities and make sure that these topics are understandable not only for academics but also for the whole society. 

Transhumanist embrace the sometimes intimidating opportunities that technology has to offer for humankind. They do not panic because of moral issues that many topics like genetic engineering bring with them. They do all it takes to make it possible for those who want to become “post-humans”. Whether the tools to achieve this state are “natural” or “unnatural” is completely irrelevant.
A post-human is a possible future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards.

In 1997, the World Transhumanist Association was founded which is nowadays called “Humanity+”. Max More, well-known member of the Association, defined Transhumanism in 1990: 

 “Transhumanism is a class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.”

Max More: born Janurary 1964 in Bristol, England; a philosopher and futurist who writes, speaks, and consults on advanced decision-making about emerging technologies; CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation

 

This can be seen as the philosophy of Humanity+. One of the most well-known members, besides Max More, is Nick Bostrom. In the next post his life will be explored and one of his most popular philosophical approaches, namely “The Simulation Argument”.

relation to other CAJs:

Genetic Engineering

robotics

Transhumanism

Nanotechnology

Permanent human expansion into the solar system

sources:

http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/

http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/#answer_19

 http://www.transhumanism.org/resources/transhumanism.htm