Scientists at the Institute for Quantum Gravity Research have asked a very interesting scientific question. They decided to figure out how real the reality, people and everything that surrounds them is. They do not exclude that everything that people are, everything that they know, as well as all the events that occur, do not actually exist physically, but are a very complex simulation of the Universe, which consciously imitates its own existence. The new hypothesis of scientists shocked the whole world. A heated discussion has developed around it from the scientific community, where, although they call the assumption controversial, they admit that we really do not know what reality is, and modern science is not yet able to cognize the quantum world and understand, for example, why at the atomic level particles change their behavior when observed. This is stated in a new article,published in the journal Entropy.
The team at Quantum Gravity Research, the Los Angeles-based Institute for Theoretical Physics, founded by scientist and entrepreneur Clay Irwin, bases its hypothesis on the theory of panpsychism, according to which everything in nature is animate. They note that the physical Universe is a “strange loop”, and there are no advanced beings in it, and everything that happens in “reality” is a self-imitation that generates itself from “pure thought”. In the article, experts refer to the hypothesis of the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who addressed this issue in the seminal article "Are we living in a computer simulation?" In it, he suggests that our entire existence may be the product of highly complex computer models controlled by advanced beings whose true nature we will most likely never know.
American scientists believe that it is better not to rely on advanced life forms to create the technology necessary to create everything in our world, according to Bostrom. They suggest that the universe itself is a "mental imitation of itself." Scientists associate this extraordinary idea with quantum mechanics, viewing the universe as one of many possible models of quantum gravity.
But there is one important aspect that distinguishes Bostrom's gopitosis from the authors' idea of becoming. The point is that the initial hypothesis is materialistic and considers the Universe as physical. According to experts, Bostrom could have assumed that humans are simply part of the ancestor simulation created by posthumans. But here the question arises - where does the physical reality come from that would give rise to simulation? The authors of the new hypothesis take a non-materialistic approach, claiming that everything in the universe is information expressed in the form of thought. Thus, in their opinion, the universe "self-actualizes" into its own existence, relying on the underlying algorithms and a rule that researchers call "the principle of effective language." According to this proposal, the simulation of everything that exists is just one "great thought."
Moreover, scientists admit that these simulations could have arisen by themselves. The researchers explain their response with the concept of "timeless emergentism", the idea of which is that there is no time at all. Instead, there is an overarching thought, which is our reality, offering a built-in semblance of a hierarchical order, full of "sub-thoughts" that extend all the way to the wormhole to basic mathematics and fundamental particles The rule of effective language also enters into force, which assumes that people themselves are such “emergent sub-thoughts” and experience and find meaning in the world through other sub-thoughts (called “code steps or actions”) the most economical way.
Scientists associate their hypothesis with panpsychism, in which everything that exists is considered as thought or consciousness, the purpose of which is to generate meaning or information. The authors of the scientific work understand that this is all difficult to understand, so they offer another interesting idea that can connect your everyday experience with these philosophical considerations. The team suggests thinking of your dreams as your own personal simulations. Experts emphasize that they are quite primitive (by the superintelligent standards of the future AI), dreams tend to provide better resolution than current computer simulations and are a great example of the evolution of the human mind.
Most notable is the ultra-high resolution accuracy of these mind-based simulations and the physics accuracy in them. They point to lucid dreaming - when the dreamer is aware that he is in a dream - as examples of very accurate simulations created by your mind, which at times cannot be distinguished from any other reality. As the article suggests, it turns out that it is not so difficult to imagine that an extremely powerful computer that we can create in the near future will be able to reproduce this level of detail.
This idea of Clay and his team in the academic community is called controversial. But the authors of the work believe that people "should think critically about consciousness and some aspects of philosophy that are inconvenient for some scientists."
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