Is Reality a Simulation Created by a Vastly Superior Civilization?

Have you heard this philosophical argument – that while we may think we are flesh and blood beings in a physical world, our actual reality is far more likely to be a simulation created by a far more advanced civilization?  This argument comes from a thought experiment in philosopher Nick Bostrom’s paper "Are You Living in a Simulation?"

 Recently at Recode’s Annual Code Conference, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was asked about this and replied why he believed that this was indeed the case.

Here is the core of his argument:

"40 years ago, we had Pong. Two rectangles and a dot. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D with millions playing simultaneously. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by 1000 from what it is now. It's a given that we’re clearly on a trajectory that we’re going to have games that are indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is 1 in billions."

After giving this argument, Musk asks, “Tell me what’s wrong with that argument.”

You can watch the question and answer here.

Well, I would argue that there is something left out of the reasoning.  First of all, we might ask what exactly is the difference between what we call reality (for lack of a better word) and a simulation.  That is, we have to establish at the beginning if the two really could be the same.  And I would argue that there is something very important that distinguishes  simulations (like what we play in video games) and what we experience in our everyday world.

And the difference is that we are experiencing something.  We are conscious of various kinds of things.  Perhaps all we are conscious of are illusions.  (Descartes and the Matrix movies explored this possibility).  But we are nevertheless having a conscious experience and that is more that one can say about avatars within the World of Warcraft or whatever your video game of choice happens to be.  And as video and all sorts of other simulations advance (as they surely will) and become more lifelike, we have no reason to believe that will experience anything.

The source of our experience, why we are conscious of anything remains a mystery.  Perhaps one day we will solve that mystery and find away to weave that into a simulated reality.  But the “hard problem” of consciousness remains vexing, so perhaps we shouldn’t count on it being solved anytime soon.  Based on the progress we've made in all the centuries we have been debating it, we might be as likely to invent time travel.  

(By the way, I am not denying we've made progress in understanding ways our brain and nervous systems function to facilitate our experiences.  I'm talking about the how or why of subjective experience itself.)

But if in a thousand years or two, we do find a way to create simulations that are having consciousness experiences, then for all intense and purposes, we have become gods.  Maybe that will happen at some point down the road.  But I don't think I'll be putting it in the category of things that are overwhelmingly likely to happen.

Sense8: A Sci Fi Exploration into Collective Consciousness

Just wanted to plug the show Sense8 (available on Netflix).  It’s an entertaining show, but also an interesting exploration into what we might call collective consciousness.  Produced through a collaboration between the Wachowsi brother and sister and J. M. Straczynski (Babylon 5), the story focuses on a group of 8 people on disparate locations of the planet who we (and they) slowly discover have a telepathic (or empathic) connection.  Here is a trailer:

One of the interesting things about the show is that in crucial situations, any one of the eight might link with one of the others in order to draw on their ability in a crucial situation.  For example, one of the characters, facing thugs in Africa, is able to (much to his surprise) access the martial arts abilities of another character in South Korea.  It’s quite an exciting scene.  Of course, there’s nothing in the literature on telepathy that could suggest a possibility.  It’s just a rather fun scene (like many Sci Fi shows).

But Sense8 does explore psi in more subtle ways.  Occasionally, a song will emerge in all the minds of the characters simultaneously in ways that are relevant to the characters in their lives at that moment.  It feels an awfully lot like a real synchronicity.  At other moments, a character will feel emotions from what another character is experiencing (and they don’t know why).   At other times, another character will have a strong empathic connection and actually experience a memory of some event as if they were actually the one having it. 

During the titles and credits at the beginning, you see a beautiful, world-wind tour of scenes all over the planet, evoking the sense that somehow, we really are connected.

If you’re interested in ideas like synchronicity or explorations into collective consciousness, you might want to check out the show.  Here is a (mostly positive) review I found online.  

Quantum Mechanics and Psi (Part I)

Recently I happened across this Washington Post column reviewing two books that examined the intersecting domains of quantum mechanics and philosophy.  The books, “The Quantum Moment” and “The Island of Knowledge,” were reviewed by James Trefil, a professor of physics at George Mason University.  Quantum mechanics is a fascinating, perhaps even mind bending, subject, so it never hurts to find insightful, articulate books on it.  And in my opinion it’s also a plus if they spare us the abstract, technical jargon.

According to Trefil, both of these books succeed doing this pretty well.  Trefil describes how each book begins with a “lengthy introduction to the development of science, starting with the Greeks and running through to the quantum weirdness of modern times.”  “The Quantum Moment,” by Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, is primarily about how scientists and philosophers have dealt with the strangeness of the quantum world and how this strangeness has seeped into modern culture.  “The Island of Knowledge” uses quantum mechanics to explore the problem of limitations of knowledge in a general way.  He also goes beyond quantum mechanics into compelling discussions of cosmology and multiple universes.

In the last paragraph of his column, however, Trefil takes an unhappy and unnecessary turn.  There, he expresses his relief that these authors avoided any “fruitloopery” in their discussions of quantum mechanics.  That is, they avoided “the unfortunate tendency to enlist the mysterious nature of quantum mechanics to try to explain New Age hypothesis such as extrasensory perception or reincarnation.”

First, this lumping together of ESP, of which a considerable amount of refereed, published laboratory research exists, with reincarnation (or whatever 'New Age' buzzword pops into his head) is rather lazy.  Unfortunately, this rather casual dismissal of ESP or any possibility that consciousness plays a role in the mysterious nature of quantum physics is common, especially in discussions found in popular media like mainstream newspapers or science magazines.  I’ll give a few reasons why this sort of off the cuff dismissal, devoid of any real argument whatsoever, is unwarranted.

First, as Trefil and the authors of the books he reviews make clear, quantum mechanics, despite its successes, remains mysterious.  Despite a century of work by the best of minds, there is no consensus interpretation.  The best known explanation is known as the Copenhagen interpretation, which seems to suggest the world is in a state of probability flux until a measurement is made.  That is, as Schrodinger argued, the theory implies that a suitably positioned cat can be simultaneously in a half live –half dead state.  The next popular alternative is the Many Worlds explanation  (which Trefil appears to find compelling) that argues that the universe is continually branching into multiple parallel universes.  There are others that try to manage a more objective collapse (that is, without requiring measurement) of the waveform.  Given that we still have fallen short despite these rather astonishing attempts, one might expect more open-mindedness. 

Perhaps more key – consciousness itself remains if anything even more mysterious. Currently, there is nothing in the equations throughout classical physics that even remotely suggests how vast agglomerations of non-conscious particles (quarks, strings, whatever) become conscious.  The only thing in physics so far that even hints at some link between consciousness and matter are those interpretations that suggest consciousness is somehow involved in the collapse of the quantum waveform.  Given the complete dearth explanations that have some hope of grounding consciousness in the laws of physics as we understand them, how can such possibilities by dismissed with a wave of the hand in the name of sober, rigorous science?

Then there’s the fact that abundant evidence implies ESP does exist, as well as other forms of psi, such as telekinesis (see the above link).  This evidence strongly suggests that consciousness cannot be reduced down to something that emerges from matter.  And the possibility that consciousness in some sense can affect the probabilities underlying the quantum waveform should be seriously explored, not dismissed out of hand.  The evidence on this in the form of telekinesis and other psi phenomenon is considerably more substantial than, say, a process of bifurcating universes.  (The maxim “extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence” would be bad news indeed for the Many Worlds hypothesis if it were applied there with the same degree as it is with psi.)

It’s a rather fascinating spectacle to watch figures representing the voice of seriousness and scientific rigor wave away items that actually have evidence (such as ESP) while they wax on with admiration for (perhaps even more radical) theories that don’t.

This isn't to say that resolving the puzzles of quantum mechanics will necessarily involve psi.  But at this stage we're in a weak position to not even consider the possibility.  I believe that the link between consciousness and quantum mechanics should be explored more deeply, and the psi data gives us a lot of interesting evidence to do that.  In another column soon, I’ll get more into this.

Would the Existence of Psi Be a Really Cool Thing? If so, why?

Last April I attended the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson where I was fortunate to hear many great presentations on consciousness, from such philosophers and scientists as  David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose, and many others.

There was a particularly fascinating presentation by Julia Mossbridge on a meta-analysis of presentiment experiments.  She and her co-authors analyzed a large number of experiments while testing the hypothesis of presentiment in various participants.  That is, they measured and found a physiological effect in test subjects that anticipated results for which test subjects could not have predicted.  It's similar to precognition effects in psi, except in this case the focus was on physiological responses such as electrodermal activity, pupil dilation, and heart rate.  The meta-analysis was based on 26 studies published between 1978 and 2010.  Long story short, Mossbridge and her co-authors found that there was indeed an anomalous anticipatory effect, with the odds against the result being pure chance less than 2.7 < 10.^-12  

One quick point: It's my sense that a growing percent of the audience at this conference is growing sympathetic to the evidence supporting psi.  At the conference’s closing, Stuart Hameroff, one of the co-organizers of the conference, predicted that within a few years, psi will reach mainstream acceptance.  This prediction was met by a fair amount of applause among members of the audience.

Nevertheless, after Mossbridge presented her findings, during the question and answer period that followed, Susan Blackmore (a well-known psi skeptic) made a little effort to pour some cold water on the results.  There wasn't much she could say except that her familiar argument that she couldn't replicate a ganzfeld psi effect way back when.  (She seems to argue that her inability to get significant results means we should disregard all other results for ganzfeld experiments.)

She prefaced her comments with the words "It would be great if this were true" and that's been turning around in my head since the conference.  I assume that Blackmore is referring not just to presentiment but all of psi, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis.  And I wondered, did Blackmore really think it would be wonderful it those things were true?  Would it really be wonderful or a really cool thing if the psi evidence is confirmed.  And if so, why?

I suspect that Blackmore prefaced her comments with these words to suggest that psi advocates might be biased toward accepting their findings because that's what they want to find.  Perhaps she believes that because she takes the opposing position that she is less likely to possess some emotional attachment that is skewing her ability to look at the data objectively.  This is something I've noticed before.  Sean Carroll makes a similar point in this debate on whether our consciousness survives the death of our body.  His point that our attitude that we might wish for life to go on after death may likely prevent us from looking at the evidence objectively.

If we leave out the question of survivability (which obviously one would wish for, but the evidence is more controversial), would it really be the case it would be wonderful if psi were true?  If so, why?

I can't deny that I do want the evidence to be true, but at the same time, I don't think that that prevents me from being sufficiently sober toward the data.  After all, we're all human and we're all subject to cognitive biases.  But presumably well designed experiments should overcome that.  And no one in the audience at the Tucson conference suggested otherwise.  So bottom line --- I don't think such comments contribute much in the presence of a well-designed meta-analysis of a diverse group of studies.

Nevertheless, why is psi appealing for me?  I think for me I am drawn toward a worldview that suggests something interesting that underlies our material world.  Perhaps I find the notion that we are interconnected in ways beyond the physical world with one another (and our world) ....what?....enchanting?  Could this open the door to perhaps a more miraculous way of looking at our world?  Or open the way of a more profound sense of meaning, beyond what would be possible if the foundations of our reality were nothing more than subatomic particles?

Comments anyone?

Whatever, I think these are exciting results.  I think we will be seeing more such results.  And this could mean something exciting unfolding in our world.

My two cents, anyway.

UPDATE:  By the way, there's something I meant to add. While comments such as "this would be really wonderful" appears to suggest "too good to be true" (and therefore invites skepticism) I think another response is warranted.  After all, if there really is some reason to think that it's a good thing, that should motivate to take a closer look.  Perform more experiments.  Be more open minded.  Not dismiss out of hand (as skeptics tend to do).  If it's really the case that psi means something very wonderful or cool for our world, that should justify more (not fewer) looks at the data (while remaining as rigorous and objective as possible, of course).

Maybe the Hard Problem of Consciousness Means We Should Examine the Psi Data

David Chalmers is one of the most influential philosophers to challenge how we think about consciousness.  Here he is in a fascinating TED Talk explaining his ideas.  If you're unfamiliar with Chalmers, I strongly suggest taking the time to hear it.  He's an unusually clear and engaging speaker, and his articulation of the 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' is very good.

I'd like to highlight a few key points that he makes in this talk.  He begins by noting that "there's nothing we know more directly...but at the same time it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe."  He adds that consciousness is also extremely important- it is what gives value and meaning to everything we have.  But all our scientific understanding has not provided us with a satisfactory answer to such questions as 'What is consciousness?' and 'Why are we conscious?"

He goes on to note that there are problems with all of the reductionistic and physicalist explanations of consciousness.  Neuroscience has given us abundant information about the correlations between the processes of the brain and our awareness, but no true explanations of the cause of our subjective experience. Explanations of emergence also fall short.

At about the 8:00 mark, Chalmers says "Consciousness is a kind of anomaly." In other words, consciousness just doesn't seem to fit with our best scientific understanding, grounded in the laws of physics.  He suggests that in order to make progress, we need to consider radical ideas (maybe several radical ideals).  One radical idea he offers is that consciousness may be in some sense fundamental, like mass or time.  That is, it's not something that simply arises with the right combination of particles.  In some sense it may be a basic constituent of our reality.  A second idea he offers is that "consciousness might universal." In other words everything, even rocks or thermostats, is, at least at a rudimentary level, conscious.

It's here that I would like to jump in and suggest a crazy idea that to me isn't really so crazy.  Chalmers's bold claim that "consciousness is a kind of anomaly" has an interesting implication: are there any data that confirm the anomalous nature of consciousness apart from our own experience?  After all, if we're serious about wanting to integrate consciousness into our scientific understanding, it should be obvious that we should inquire as to exactly how it is anomalous.  To do that we need to perform careful, laboratory controlled experiments designed to test how consciousness deviates with respect to the laws of physics.  Chalmers's arguments are interesting and influential, but I think it will be difficult to bring about a radical understanding of consciousness without strong empirical foundation that demonstrates consciousness anomalies.

But wait!  We already have such a literature.  It's called psi.  And there has been a good deal of research and published studies that document significant effects for a number of categories of psi.  Dean Radin has posted a helpful website with links to much of this research.

I spoke briefly to Chalmers at the recent Science of Consciousness Conference in Tuscon.  He didn't appear that interested in pursuing psi at the moment, which may not exactly be consistent with the approaches he is favoring.  However, his co-organizer of the conference, Stuart Hameroff (and co-author with Roger Penrose on a theory of consciousness involving quantum computing within the brain) is indeed very open to this prospect.  As the conference was drawing to a close, Hameroff predicted that psi will soon be embraced by scientists and philosophers studying consciousness.

For me, the 'hard problem of consciousness' really does require that we open our minds a bit toward new ways of thinking about consciousness.  And further, given that we have no theory of consciousness truly grounded in the laws of physics as we understand them, there is no justification to ignore data that surprises us or appears not to fit with our notions about our world.  Indeed, such results might suggest we're on the right track.

Is Nothing Truly Alive?

About a month ago, an essay appeared in the New York Times entitled, Why Nothing Is Truly Alive. Of course, it's a provocative title, so I decided to check it out.

The main argument by Ferris Jabr, an editor at Scientific American, is that scientists have largely been unsuccessful with coming up with a good precise, universally accepted definition of life.  And he adds,

To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.

He also discusses how things like crystals and digital programs that everyone agrees is not alive, can be seen to have life-like characteristics.

Jabr goes on to argue that life is really only a construction in the mind.  And therefore nothing is really 'alive.'

It's certainly a provocative argument.  And it's certainly interesting how 'life' cannot seem to be captured in any precise, objective definition.  Food for philosophical musing, and all that.

There is, however, this thing called subjective experience, and Jabr doesn't consider its relevance in his piece.  And that seems to be a pretty big piece missing.  Without our subjective experience, we might well consider the possibility that what are called living things are not substantially different from the non-living.  Of course, if we didn't have subjective experience, we wouldn't be considering anything.

My point, is that while we might not be able to define clearly and precisely what life is, that doesn't mean we don't experience something called life.  That is, life is (obviously) a very meaningful concept in our experience.  We know what it means to live or not.  In fact, we really do know a great deal more about this than virtually any scientific concept that Jabr likely thinks we know tons about.  We know we are alive.  And while Thomas Nagel has convinced many of us that we may not know a lot about the subjective experience of other creatures, we do know they possess some kind of subjective experience.

And it's not just that we know we have life, we know that it's the most important thing we have.

It's a pretty big difference then, I think, when a scientist or philosopher discusses the nature of things while feeling free to leave out our subjective experience, than when he does.   Or when there is a presumption that things that can't be defined precisely are assumed not to exist.  I imagine there are a lot of things we experience, like love, joy, compassion, that are difficult to define with the rigor and precision of a mathematical formula.

This is the problem that scientists (and some philosophers) get into by marginalizing the importance of our experience.  They don't just get things wrong.  They miss what is perhaps the most important.  After all, without our experience, what do we truly have?  What do we truly value?

Mainstream Media Debunks ESP with a Study that Doesn't Have Anything to Do with ESP

Imagine you are taking a quiz on the latest on scientific results or edge philosophical thinking, and you were asked the following multiple-choice question.

Recent scientific experiments provides evidence for which of the following:

      A)   Countless parallel universes.

      B)   Artificially intelligent robots are on the verge of sentience.

      C)   The world as we know it is actually a simulation (like in The Matrix).

      D)   Mild forms of telepathy between minds.

Recently there have been various articles posted on A, B, and C (and especially A).  While such articles in the mainstream press don’t provide much in the way of concrete evidence, they often give sympathetic views of such speculations.  Nothing wrong with being open minded.  And even if we’re a long way from real evidence on the table, the ideas are interesting and provocative, and likely to attract readers.  Nothing much wrong with that either.

But there is evidence on D.  You can find some papers published in refereed journals here.  Skeptic Richard Wiseman has even admitted that by the conventional standards, some forms of telepathy could be accepted as real..  (However, Wiseman doesn’t believe that such phenomenon should be held to merely conventional standards.) So how does the mainstream press handle that one?

David Metcalfe and Dean Radin have recently posted an interesting recent case on their blogs.  They reference a recent study conducted at the University of Melbourne examining people’s ability to process certain types of perceptions that occurred below their threshold of immediate awareness.  For example, the reactions of participants who were asked questions about pictures when certain details in the background were changed.  The authors of the paper speculated that the results could give some insight into people who believe they are experiencing a sixth sense.

However, as Metcalfe and Radin note, the authors did not attempt to test anything like anomalous transfer of information (like telepathy).  They did not cite any of that literature.  Whatever its merits, the study does not tell us anything about the extant literature on such examples of psi as ganzfeld, card guessing, or dream telepathy.

Yet this seems to be cited all over the place as (yet another) demonstration that ESP is pure bunk.  Here is an example in  National Geographic by Susan Brink.  She even posts a picture of Dr. Rhine of Duke University who famously conducted ESP card experiments, as if the study at University of Melbourne had something to do with Rhine.  George Dvorsky at io9 does the same thing with headline that says: "Breaking: ESP still bullshit, say scientists."   Here’s a video at Discovery News, again pushing the conclusion that this study means claims of ESP is bunk.

As one of the commenters at io9 put it, citing this study as evidence against ESP "amounts to saying there are no UFOs because some can be ascribed to aircraft lights."

You can see here how this ripples across multiple websites.  It’s as if everyone’s just cutting and pasting each other without bothering much to read the article or think about it too much.

It’s so interesting.  There appears to be a lot of hostility across the web for claims for telepathy, as well as ignorance of the research.  In much of mainstream media, the bar for matters of psi appear to be absurdly high.  But for the other topics, such as multiple universes, not so much.

What gives?  What’s the answer here?