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Video Description
In 2003 Nick Bostrom proposed the simulation argument: either we are in a simulation, or something prevents us from making them. This video from the Conscious Radical channel points out that the intuition behind that clean modern maths is far older than his paper.
The Gnostics called the world a phantom born of error, the Hindus called it maya, the Buddhists called it samsara, and Plato described a cave. What links them is not a computer fantasy but a shared suspicion: that the observer is part of what is observed. The video holds the modern argument and the ancient traditions in the same room, and lets the oldest questions do the talking.
Full Video Transcript
The more I look the more I see that reality isn’t what it appears to be. Ancient texts from the Gnostics, the Hindus, the Buddhists and Plato all had a name for it and now our most serious physicists are describing the universe as rendered information.
Now I am not going to pretend that I understand quantum mechanics that well but I have tried to get my head around it with some serious brain aches and hopefully I will describe it here in a way that makes sense without the woo-woo.
The Gnostics called it a phantom because they believed the material world was a
corrupted imitation of the Pleroma. The Hindus call it Maya and that translates
to that which is not. Plato called it a cave where humans are trapped, mistaking
illusions for reality. Watching The Matrix in my 20s, yes I am giving away my
age, it possibly gave me my first real thought that this world could quite
easily be a simulation. But as with many thoughts in your 20s, it found a place inside my brain
and hibernated for a while. But year after year, seeing the architecture around me,
coming across the Gnostic texts, the thought resurfaced. How does an ecosystem this exquisite
happen by accident? And physics gave me part of the answer. In 1993, two theoretical physicists,
Gerard Tehuft and Leonard Susskind proposed something that sounds like science fiction
but is now mainstream physics. They called it the holographic principle and their concept was that
all the information needed to describe a three-dimensional region of space can be encoded
on a two-dimensional surface at its boundary. So think of the hologram on your credit card.
It’s a flat surface but the image looks three-dimensional. The math says our reality
might actually work in the same way. The depth and the solidity might be projected from a flatter
simpler layer of information underneath. So were the flat earthers right after all?
Einstein was particularly disturbed by the Copenhagen interpretation which holds that at
a very small scale particles don’t have a fixed position until something measures them.
before you look the particle exists as a cloud of possibilities it’s the act of looking that makes
it pick one so reality at its base layer only commits to specifics when something is watching
now einstein believed in local realism meaning the universe has an objective existence independent of
observation and he spent his later years trying to prove that quantum mechanics was incomplete
and that there must be hidden variables determining a particle’s behavior but i digress if you wanted
to design a system that didn’t waste processing power wouldn’t you do exactly this so say for
example you’re designing a game you wouldn’t necessarily render the forest if no one was
in the forest but you would render it when a player walked in and that apparently is the
way that the universe behaves and that’s how the maths works the universe also has a smallest
possible unit of space and the smallest possible unit of time below them you
can’t go so think of a digital photo if you were to zoom in far enough you’d hit
individual pixels there’s no half pixels the pixel is the floor so reality has a
floor like that in space and in time if you are building a simulation you’d have
to do the same thing because you can’t render infinity you’d have to pick a
resolution what makes this even stranger is what james gates discovered so he is a theoretical
physicist at maryland and he’s been working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry
in which he has found mathematical structures buried within the equations when he decoded them
they contained error correcting codes now that’s the exact kind of code your web browser uses
to keep data from being corrupted when it travels across the internet he didn’t go as far as to say
that this proved anything but the astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson was visibly shocked with this
revelation none of this proves that we’re in a simulation but it does show us that reality
at its base layer behaves in ways that look uncannily like a designed system quantized
and rendered on observation it’s mathematically clean it’s possibly projected from a lower
dimensional surface and it contains code coded the traditions that named this reality phantom
and illusion and cave were doing the same work the physicists are doing now but they just used
the vocabulary that was available to them at the time let’s start with the gnostics because their
language is closest to ours the gospel of truth calls the world a phantom made from error the
apocryphon of john describes reality as a flawed copy generated by a lesser being who didn’t know
what they were doing the gnostics held that the material world was a kind of forgery and that what
was real lay behind it in the realm they called the pleroma the fullness the system they were
describing had a maker but the maker wasn’t the source because the source was elsewhere
the resemblance of these texts in relation to the holographic principle is uncanny they were
describing a projected reality generated by something that wasn’t the deepest layer they
didn’t have a word for code so they used error phantom and forgery then the hindus the sanskrit
word Maya is usually translated as illusion but that does flatten it a
little Maya is closer to that which is not it’s the surface that hides the
substrate in the Advaita Vedanta tradition the world we experience is
real in the sense that we experience it but it isn’t the deepest layer of what
is there’s something underneath called Brahman which is the actual ground
mayor is the projection and brahman is the source so this is the same recognition the gnostics had
in a different language and cosmology the layer we live in is a layer and there’s a layer underneath
it that’s more real plato’s cave is the version most western viewers will know the allegory of
the cave prisoners were chained in the cave watching shadows on the wall and mistaking
them for reality. One prisoner escapes, sees the fire casting shadows and then sees the
sun outside. He returns to tell the others but they don’t believe him because they prefer
the shadows. The cave is Plato’s image written in the 4th century BC for the recognition
that consensus reality is a projection of something deeper and that most people will
refuse to see it even when shown as a tcr viewer you’ll probably recognize the sociological
argument that happens inside the cave the system holds because the prisoners inside it defend it
now plato’s contemporaries the sophists were having a related conversation this takes me back
to studying classics at college and to protagoras in particular and he’s best known for the
the philosophical statement, man is the measure of all things, that are, that they are, and of things
that are not, that they are not. The sophists argue that there is no absolute objective truth that
exists independently of human perception. If the wind feels cold to you, it’s cold to you. If it
feels warm to someone else, it’s warm to them. Because humans can only experience the world
through their senses and minds reality is defined by what we perceive they shifted philosophy away
from trying to understand the absolute unchangeable nature of the universe and focused instead on
human experience language and society but two and a half thousand years before quantum mechanics
the sophists were saying that the observer is part of what’s observed and physics
is now describing the same thing. The Buddhists took the same recognition and built a practice
around it. The Buddhist concept of samsara is the cyclical reality we inhabit. It’s generated
and sustained by attachment, perception and unexamined awareness. The world is real in the
sense that it produces consequences but it isn’t real in the sense that it’s the final layer.
the buddhist response was contemplative practice and they built techniques for seeing through the
projection in real time now contemporary cognitive science is studying these techniques
because the meditators report perceptual changes that map onto what neuroscience can measure then
there’s a philosophical version which is more recent in 2003 the oxford philosopher nick
Bostrom proposed what is known as the simulation argument. He didn’t claim we’re in a simulation
but stated one of three things must be true. Either civilizations always destroy themselves
before they can build ancestors simulations or civilizations that could build them choose not to
or simulated minds vastly outnumber biological ones and we are statistically far more likely
to be among the simulated. The foundational assumptions remain a subject of philosophical
debate but Bostrom is running a probability argument that is very similar to the one the
traditions arrived at. The version of reality you assume to be base reality may not be. That’s five
traditions funnelling into one philosophy despite being separated by continents and millennia.
They all agreed that reality is not what it appears to be, that something is underneath what is being projected and that it has a source.
Physics is now showing that the projection has a structure, possibly two dimensional information projected into a three dimensional experience and possibly containing code.
The question for you, now that you can’t pretend you didn’t know, is what changes?
Source: The Conscious Radical