How likely is it that we are actually living in a computer simulation feeding us sensory information? This was a question posed to two University of North Carolina professors who attended the 25th Cucalorus Connect festival held November 13-17 in Wilmington.
In short, at the common request of Julian Keith, Ph. D., and Currie Guinn, another Ph. D., investigated the possibility that we, without even knowing it, are actually in a computer world like the world of the Matrix franchise.
Keith began by noting that: “We all experience not the world, but the brain - a three-pound package of lipids, proteins and salt water. But this packaging is designed in a way that creates our sense of reality."
“Our senses are the interface that feeds us, but in reality they have very limited access to what is outside our skull. Your vision only sees a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and you have no idea what is happening outside of that band,”says Keith.
And he continues: “But don't be discouraged, for things are not so bad. If you had to interact with the world on the entire spectrum of what is happening, you would just be crazy. From the point of view of evolution and biology in general, the appearance of brains with a narrow bandwidth is absolutely meaningless. Therefore, our biology is a user interface that simplifies by orders of magnitude what we interact with."
As Keith says, the color spots and sounds we experience don't really exist. They are produced by our brain, which constantly updates our model of reality. And each of us has such a personal matrix. We interact with her without suspecting that there is much else in the world around us. And even more so.
The biological system builds things correctly and very slowly. And our mind has evolved somehow surprisingly quickly and from the point of view of adaptation to survival, it is completely wrong. So the problem with biology, Keith said, is that the main operating system in our minds was designed for a world that no longer exists.”
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And this sad fact makes us vulnerable to technology and its algorithms. How can you hack brains using their optical and other ports? It's very simple: show your brains something bright. This will lead to the release of dopamine and the brains will make the one who runs there feel good. And then this brain is yours - the main thing is to make it release dopamine according to an intermittent schedule of variable responses. Facebook works exactly the same way, but it uses likes instead of dopamine.
Keith concludes her speech: “The guys at Amazon, Google and Facebook take your data and are very sensitive to certain types of stimulation and reinforcement. What do they want from us all? That's right: click, click, click … They create a "default trance state" as soon as you pick up the devices interacting with the system."
Next, Dr. Currie Guinn takes the floor and without philosophical introductions gets down to business:
“Keith tells you about how the brain works, trying to prove that we live in a computer simulation. But I'll do it easier and remind you about a guy named Elon Musk. Well, the one that Telsa, Space X and all that. By his calculations, the chance that we are not living in a computer simulation is about one in a billion."
“Look at our computer games and compare them with the squalor that was 40 years ago. What games will there be in another 40 years? And after 400 years? And in 4,000 years? These will be such toys that the players will not even realize that they are in a simulation, and the bots will be indistinguishable from the real player."
And yet, Curry continues, if you specifically load the brain with this question, you can understand where we exist. So, if we exist in a kind of virtual system, then this system must have bugs and glitches. And there are a lot of them - you just need to look closely.
To begin with, you can take the Deja Vu effect already played in the film about the Matrix. The next phenomenon is all sorts of incredible coincidences. Quantum phenomena, from which Einstein's hair stood on end and he began to mumble about "eerie interaction at a distance." And the most important thing is, as it were, the laws of physics, which all boils down to a set of unclear where they come from constants and sets of constants. And after all this, you keep thinking that the world is real?
“However, one question remains incomprehensible for everyone: why me, you, the rest of the people spend their precious time in this fucking simulation? The answer is most likely to be found in weather forecasts. How do we get them? We build supercomputers, write a program for them and run … a simulation there. Simulation of atmospheric processes, simulation of the movement of the lithosphere, we have even learned to simulate human life and predict the situation in the economy, epidemics, wars and population growth. Therefore, and most likely we are here because we, too, are now counting on something for someone. Perhaps we will even be paid for this work sometime somewhere."