Mind games lead researchers into a dead end. Is our world real? Scientists have asked this question before. And today physicists have doubted: maybe the universe represents a matrix, as in the film of the same name? The question, apparently, has matured so seriously that a publication on this topic appeared in the reputable scientific journal NewScientist.
Information about the world around us looks uniform, instantaneous, but in reality it comes to us at different speeds.
And there are events - the light flickered, someone snapped their fingers - the duration of which is shorter than the time required for their perception and processing. By the time we realize this has happened, it has long been in the past.
Our perception of the world resembles a television broadcast with a delay, and we are far from live broadcast. There is no particular cause for concern, but just as a minute delay in the broadcast allows censorship, our brains sometimes do not show us what really happened, but construct something fantastic.
The classic evidence of this is the flash lag effect. Imagine a rotating disc with an arrow. Next to the disc is a lamp that flashes exactly when the arrow points up. But at the moment of the flash, it seems to a person that the arrow is in the position in which it will appear in a few moments.
One explanation comes from David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine and Terrence Seinovski of the Salk Institute for Biological Research.
Scientists believe that the point is that the brain is reconstructing what happened in the past. The perception of what happens at the moment of the flash is determined by what happens to the disc after it. Subsequent research has confirmed that what happens at a certain moment is perceived as influenced by what happened afterwards.
Therefore, you should not blindly trust common sense, which convinces us that we exist in the present.
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By the way, a serious philosopher, laureate of many prestigious awards, professor at Oxford University Nick Bostrom confessed in one of his interviews that the film "The Matrix" made such an impression on him that in a month he wrote a book entitled "We live in computer simulation?"
The scientist argued that with a probability of 25 percent, our world is now a matrix - a computer simulation of reality. The philosopher had in mind a program that simulates the consciousness of one, several people, or in general of all mankind.
- And the simulation was created by the so-called posthuman civilization, consisting of the descendants of today's people, but internally and externally so changed that it is difficult to call them people, - explained Bostrom.
The scientist considered these super-beings to be representatives of "true humanity". And he endowed with extraordinary capabilities - for example, computing, acquired as a result of the fusion of the brain with supercomputers.
“It cost nothing for such cyborgs to create a virtual world,” the philosopher argued. He even suggested why they needed it. To explore your own past.
“Our descendants faced gaps in their history and decided to fill in the voids by launching into the game a lot of simulated faces - you and me,” Bostrom enthusiastically built his extraordinary theory.
Almost ten years have passed since the publication of Bostrom's book. It would seem that the philosopher's crazy fantasies should be forgotten. So no. On the contrary, physicists undertook to prove that computer supersimulation is possible. And our world is just a matrix.