...virtual Reality Matrix

[DominO123]

Interesting.

Any comment?

 

----------------

 

'Multiverse Theory' Holds That the Universe is a Virtual Reality Matrix

 

Sydney Morning Herald | July 22 2004

 

Comment: Isn't it amazing that scientists have finally had to admit that the design of the universe is so perfectly crafted so as to indicate intelligent design and yet they still try to avoid any explanation which includes the word God.

 

The multiverse theory has spawned another - that our universe is a simulation, writes Paul Davies.

 

If you've ever thought life was actually a dream, take comfort. Some pretty distinguished scientists may agree with you. Philosophers have long questioned whether there is in fact a real world out there, or whether "reality" is just a figment of our imagination.

 

Then along came the quantum physicists, who unveiled an Alice-in-Wonderland realm of atomic uncertainty, where particles can be waves and solid objects dissolve away into ghostly patterns of quantum energy.

 

Now cosmologists have got in on the act, suggesting that what we perceive as the universe might in fact be nothing more than a gigantic simulation.

 

The story behind this bizarre suggestion began with a vexatious question: why is the universe so bio-friendly? Cosmologists have long been perplexed by the fact that the laws of nature seem to be cunningly concocted to enable life to emerge. Take the element carbon, the vital stuff that is the basis of all life. It wasn't made in the big bang that gave birth to the universe. Instead, carbon has been cooked in the innards of giant stars, which then exploded and spewed soot around the universe.

 

The process that generates carbon is a delicate nuclear reaction. It turns out that the whole chain of events is a damned close run thing, to paraphrase Lord Wellington. If the force that holds atomic nuclei together were just a tiny bit stronger or a tiny bit weaker, the reaction wouldn't work properly and life may never have happened.

 

The late British astronomer Fred Hoyle was so struck by the coincidence that the nuclear force possessed just the right strength to make beings like Fred Hoyle, he proclaimed the universe to be "a put-up job". Since this sounds a bit too much like divine providence, cosmologists have been scrambling to find a scientific answer to the conundrum of cosmic bio-friendliness.

 

The one they have come up with is multiple universes, or "the multiverse". This theory says that what we have been calling "the universe" is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an infinitesimal fragment of a much grander and more elaborate system in which our cosmic region, vast though it is, represents but a single bubble of space amid a countless number of other bubbles, or pocket universes.

 

Things get interesting when the multiverse theory is combined with ideas from sub-atomic particle physics. Evidence is mounting that what physicists took to be God-given unshakeable laws may be more like local by-laws, valid in our particular cosmic patch, but different in other pocket universes. Travel a trillion light years beyond the Andromeda galaxy, and you might find yourself in a universe where gravity is a bit stronger or electrons a bit heavier.

 

The vast majority of these other universes will not have the necessary fine-tuned coincidences needed for life to emerge; they are sterile and so go unseen. Only in Goldilocks universes like ours where things have fallen out just right, purely by accident, will sentient beings arise to be amazed at how ingeniously bio-friendly their universe is.

 

It's a pretty neat idea, and very popular with scientists. But it carries a bizarre implication. Because the total number of pocket universes is unlimited, there are bound to be at least some that are not only inhabited, but populated by advanced civilisations - technological communities with enough computer power to create artificial consciousness. Indeed, some computer scientists think our technology may be on the verge of achieving thinking machines.

 

It is but a small step from creating artificial minds in a machine, to simulating entire virtual worlds for the simulated beings to inhabit. This scenario has become familiar since it was popularised in The Matrix movies.

 

Now some scientists are suggesting it should be taken seriously. "We may be a simulation ... creations of some supreme, or super-being," muses Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, a staunch advocate of the multiverse theory. He wonders whether the entire physical universe might be an exercise in virtual reality, so that "we're in the matrix rather than the physics itself".

 

Is there any justification for believing this wacky idea? You bet, says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, who even has a website devoted to the topic ( http://www.simulation-argument.com). "Because their computers are so powerful, they could run a great many simulations," he writes in The Philosophical Quarterly.

 

So if there exist civilisations with cosmic simulating ability, then the fake universes they create would rapidly proliferate to outnumber the real ones. After all, virtual reality is a lot cheaper than the real thing. So by simple statistics, a random observer like you or me is most probably a simulated being in a fake world. And viewed from inside the matrix, we could never tell the difference.

 

Or could we? John Barrow, a colleague of Martin Rees at Cambridge University, wonders whether the simulators would go to the trouble and expense of making the virtual reality foolproof. Perhaps if we look closely enough we might catch the scenery wobbling.

 

He even suggests that a glitch in our simulated cosmic history may have already been discovered, by John Webb at the University of NSW. Webb has analysed the light from distant quasars, and found that something funny happened about 6 billion years ago - a minute shift in the speed of light. Could this be the simulators taking their eye off the ball?

 

I have to confess to being partly responsible for this mischief. Last year I wrote an item for The New York Times, saying that once the multiverse genie was let out of the bottle, Matrix-like scenarios inexorably follow. My conclusion was that perhaps we should retain a healthy scepticism for the multiverse concept until this was sorted out. But far from being a dampener on the theory, it only served to boost enthusiasm for it.

 

Where will it all end? Badly, perhaps. Now the simulators know we are on to them, and the game is up, they may lose interest and decide to hit the delete button. For your own sake, don't believe a word that I have written.

 

Paul Davies is professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie University's Australian Centre for Astrobiology. His latest book is How to Build a Time Machine.

[Anoushik]

Wow

[Azat]

Great comment Anoushik. You crack me up.

[Arpa]

Can we proceed from her?

It has been proven without the shadow of a doubt that God does exist.

Can we move on?

Except.

Would you guys please remember to send us ditital photographs of your encounter with Him?

Hopefully not so soon!

Those of us whp are so intent to prove His existence may consider a more immediate meeting with Him!!

Astvats mi arastse!!

 

I am not in a hurry.

I couldn't care less!!

[DominO123]

Dear Arpa, even if the first few lines of the article may suggest that the article is about a god, it isn't.

 

Its about multiple universes, and computer simulation universes.

[DominO123]

http://www.simulation-argument.com/

[DominO123]

Copied from Lingua Franca: http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0012/hyp...arofworlds.html

 

War of the Worlds Do you believe in God? Or in multiple universes? By Jim Holt

 

 

DO WE LIVE IN A "DESIGNER UNIVERSE"? This question has been batted around since the 1960s, when cosmologists began to notice that the laws of nature seemed fine-tuned for conscious life to emerge. If the fundamental constants of physics—the strength of gravity, the ratio of the mass of the proton to that of the neutron, the energy density of empty space, and so on—had differed by a hair from their actual values, the universe would have been a lifeless dud: no stars, no stable elements, no evolution. It is as if a cosmic designer had twiddled a bunch of control knobs until they were at precisely the right settings to ensure that beings like us would eventually shimmer onto the scene.

 

The Cosmic Designer Hypothesis is one way of explaining the improbable fine-tuning of nature's laws. And compared with the Big Fluke Hypothesis (which is really no explanation at all), it may not look so bad. But those who find its deistic flavor unpalatable have suggested a third option: the Many Universes Hypothesis. This hypothesis, which has been around for a couple of decades, has been elegantly spelled out by the physicist Steven Weinberg in his essay "A Designer Universe?," published last year in The New York Review of Books and recently anthologized in The Best American Essays 2000.

 

The argument goes like this. Suppose our universe is but one among a vast ensemble of universes that all somehow coexist. Suppose further that the fundamental constants vary randomly across these universes. Then we could expect that at least one universe out of the ensemble should be hospitable to intelligent life. Add to this the truism that we can only observe a universe that is consistent with our existence—the so-called anthropic principle—and the apparent fine-tuning of our universe suddenly seems wholly unremarkable.

 

At first blush, the Many Universes Hypothesis would appear rather extravagant, requiring a huge (perhaps infinite) number of additional universes merely to account for some features of our own. The Cosmic Designer Hypothesis looks downright economical by comparison. Since these extra universes are cut off from our own in space and time, and are thus unobservable, they would seem to offend against the principle that our theories of the world should posit no more entities than needed. Shouldn't these universes be shaved away by Occam's razor?

 

Well, that depends on what grounds we have for believing they exist. In an excellent article in the June 2000 issue of the journal Noûs, Roger White points out that some philosophers, notably Derek Parfit and John Leslie, think that our universe's otherwise improbable fine-tuning could be grounds enough. Their case turns on an uncontroversial principle of probabilistic reasoning: If the truth of a certain hypothesis (Many Universes) would render a certain observation (fine-tuning) more likely, then making that observation increases the likelihood of that hypothesis.

 

But one must be careful here. It is true that the existence of many universes would make it likely that at least one of them would be life fostering. The hypothesis would not, however, have any bearing on the probability that this particular universe would be life fostering. Consider the analogy of rolling a pair of dice. If you roll them just once, the chance of getting double sixes is only one in thirty-six. If you roll them twenty-five times, the chance of getting double sixes on at least one of the rolls rises above fifty-fifty. Yet the total number of rolls has no effect on the odds of getting double sixes on any particular roll.

 

Some people think that if you roll the dice repeatedly and don't get double sixes, then you are more likely to get double sixes on the next roll. They are victims of the notorious gambler's fallacy. In a 1987 article in Mind, the philosopher Ian Hacking sees a kindred bit of illogic behind the Many Universes Hypothesis. Suppose you enter a room and see a guy roll a pair of dice. They come up double sixes. You think, "Aha, that is very unlikely on a single roll, so he must have rolled the dice many times before I walked into the room." You have committed what Hacking labels the inverse gambler's fallacy. Doesn't one make a similar mistake when one argues that because we live in an improbably congenial universe there must also be a great number of uncongenial ones out there?

 

Proponents of the Many Universes Hypothesis have vigorously denied that any such fallacy taints their reasoning. Interesting as it is, the resulting debate needn't concern Weinberg. His case is different from that of the philosophers. The philosophers argue that the fact that our universe appears to be fine-tuned supports the hypothesis of multiple universes. Weinberg, by contrast, supplies independent grounds for believing in multiple universes. There are several physical theories, he points out, that seem to imply their existence—for instance, Andrei Linde's "chaotic inflation" model, in which cosmos-engendering big bangs are fairly routine.

 

So if the Multiple Universes Hypothesis is true (as Weinberg qua physicist suspects), there would seem to be no explanatory need for the Cosmic Designer Hypothesis (as Weinberg qua unbeliever desires). It remains possible, of course, that they are both true: that there are many different universes, and that a cosmic designer painstakingly tailored one of them for us. But now it is the hypothesis of a cosmic designer that stands in need of independent grounds to be believed. Evidence of design is no longer enough.

 

JIM HOLT

[Anileve]

Now cosmologists have got in on the act, suggesting that what we perceive as the universe might in fact be nothing more than a gigantic simulation.

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

Ok...but if it is indeed a simulation the original entity must exist as well, otherwise what would the simulation be based on?

[DominO123]

Ok...but if it is indeed a simulation the original entity must exist as well, otherwise what would the simulation be based on?

style_images/master/snapback.png

 

Exactlty... this was one of my certainties I have posted in the past... even if we could be a simulation or a dream, a thing must exist simulating us or dreaming about us.

 

But I disagree with the article that says that the probability that we are a similation is greater than not... for a similuation to happen we have to have an advanced specy building the quantum computer... while universes are just created by infinit numbers in any frames(since times doesn't exist beyond a conscious world, I like to say frame insteed of time)... while for having a simulation there must be a prerequist(advanced species)... so I think the chances that we are in a true universes is greater than a simulation.

[DominO123]

http://www.halexandria.org/dward408.htm