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Are We Living in the Matrix?

11 points by vixen99 5y ago

vixen99 5y ago
Paywalled but you get a couple of initial free articles as a guest.
Flankk 5y ago
When you add a chunk of matter to a blob of matter, you increase the volume of the blob by one chunk. When you add a chunk of matter to a black hole, you increase the surface area of the black hole by one chunk. This is incredibly surprising and suggests that our three dimensional reality is actually encoded in two dimensions. This is called the holographic principle and is an active area of research. There are many other curious things in physics that seem to hint at something like a simulation.
- Valgrim 5y ago
  I don't get it. How much surface area is 1kg supposed to be?
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/441490/black-hole-surface-area-mass-equation https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/441490/black-hol...
  - Flankk 5y ago
    When you say 1 kg you might think of a 1 kg iron weight. That iron is composed of atoms, which are broken down into quarks, which you can think of as vibrating strings. The strings cannot be broken down any further and represent information, so everything is information. So you can think of kilograms as a measure of information, like gigabytes. A black hole with the mass of the sun has a diameter of about 4 miles. Both matter and light increase the mass of the black hole, they are both information. The surface of the black hole is called its event horizon. So, the event horizon increases in size in proportion to the volume of the information you put into it. If the surface contains all the information then what is the volume made of, you might ask. The answer is the inside does not exist. The surface of the event horizon is two dimensional.
ericmay 5y ago
Something I find interesting is that humans have spent so much time, effort, and energy into believing the world is not real. The author mentions religions that consider the world an illusion, Plato suggested the allegory of the cave, Descartes suggested the demon, now Bostrom and others suggest the video game. Are humans instinctively on to something? Or is that we have such a difficult time comprehending our existence that we have to invent other gods to explain it away? Are Jesus Christ and the concept of God not just different flavors of simulation theories? Is the theory proposed by Bostrom just a generalization of all religions?
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  I think we are "instinctively on to something" but not because it's useful or somehow increases our fitness. Humans and their runaway brain power make all kinds of systematic reasoning errors, for all kinds of interesting reasons. The "need" to find some explanation for why the world is such a crap sack is probably powered by the same mechanisms that drive us to look for creative solutions to problems in the first place.
- karmakaze 5y ago
  A source of deeper understanding leading to 'not real' could be the realization that basically everything we experience isn't real. Our senses give us a very small set of samples from which we interpolate and extrapolate to give a full description of what those samples are of. If anyone was to be so aware of their own processes they would have to conclude that perception is imagination.
irthomasthomas 5y ago
The original Matrix was based vaguely on the ideas of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard's work was a continuation of Plato's Cave which described civilisation then as being divided roughly in two, with most people living in darkness in a cave, watching shadow puppets projected by the educated class that live in the sunlight. To the cave dwellers, those shadows where reality. Baudrillard argued that over the centuries the shadow puppets had come to influence the puppeteers through a process of reflection. This created a hall of mirrors that was now entirely disconnected from base reality. Anyway, I recall hearing about a letter Baudrillard wrote after the Matrix. He pointed out that in the movie there was nothing to prove that the AI was operating in base reality, and that it was possible, and he chose to believe that the AI was itself operating in an artificial environment, perhaps created by humans to keep the rogue AI distracted and prevent it from enslaving the human race. I always liked that interpretation, and it is fun to think about how that idea would manifest in the real world.
karmakaze 5y ago
Instead of asking 'if' we should be asking 'what if', then we can make some predictions and find ways of testing them. We can also model the properties that we have into a computational model. One huge problem of this is the representation of time/change. If the machine can halt our world to produce the next game state then 'tick' there's no correspondence of our 'time' and outer world time so any properties involving time doesn't need to have any physical basis.

11 points by vixen99 5y ago

Paywalled but you get a couple of initial free articles as a guest.

When you add a chunk of matter to a blob of matter, you increase the volume of the blob by one chunk. When you add a chunk of matter to a black hole, you increase the surface area of the black hole by one chunk. This is incredibly surprising and suggests that our three dimensional reality is actually encoded in two dimensions. This is called the holographic principle and is an active area of research. There are many other curious things in physics that seem to hint at something like a simulation.

Valgrim 5y ago
I don't get it. How much surface area is 1kg supposed to be?
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/441490/black-hole-surface-area-mass-equation https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/441490/black-hol...
- Flankk 5y ago
  When you say 1 kg you might think of a 1 kg iron weight. That iron is composed of atoms, which are broken down into quarks, which you can think of as vibrating strings. The strings cannot be broken down any further and represent information, so everything is information. So you can think of kilograms as a measure of information, like gigabytes. A black hole with the mass of the sun has a diameter of about 4 miles. Both matter and light increase the mass of the black hole, they are both information. The surface of the black hole is called its event horizon. So, the event horizon increases in size in proportion to the volume of the information you put into it. If the surface contains all the information then what is the volume made of, you might ask. The answer is the inside does not exist. The surface of the event horizon is two dimensional.

ericmay 5y ago

Something I find interesting is that humans have spent so much time, effort, and energy into believing the world is not real. The author mentions religions that consider the world an illusion, Plato suggested the allegory of the cave, Descartes suggested the demon, now Bostrom and others suggest the video game. Are humans instinctively on to something? Or is that we have such a difficult time comprehending our existence that we have to invent other gods to explain it away? Are Jesus Christ and the concept of God not just different flavors of simulation theories? Is the theory proposed by Bostrom just a generalization of all religions?

hiptobecubic 5y ago
I think we are "instinctively on to something" but not because it's useful or somehow increases our fitness. Humans and their runaway brain power make all kinds of systematic reasoning errors, for all kinds of interesting reasons. The "need" to find some explanation for why the world is such a crap sack is probably powered by the same mechanisms that drive us to look for creative solutions to problems in the first place.
karmakaze 5y ago
A source of deeper understanding leading to 'not real' could be the realization that basically everything we experience isn't real. Our senses give us a very small set of samples from which we interpolate and extrapolate to give a full description of what those samples are of. If anyone was to be so aware of their own processes they would have to conclude that perception is imagination.

irthomasthomas 5y ago

The original Matrix was based vaguely on the ideas of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard's work was a continuation of Plato's Cave which described civilisation then as being divided roughly in two, with most people living in darkness in a cave, watching shadow puppets projected by the educated class that live in the sunlight. To the cave dwellers, those shadows where reality. Baudrillard argued that over the centuries the shadow puppets had come to influence the puppeteers through a process of reflection. This created a hall of mirrors that was now entirely disconnected from base reality. Anyway, I recall hearing about a letter Baudrillard wrote after the Matrix. He pointed out that in the movie there was nothing to prove that the AI was operating in base reality, and that it was possible, and he chose to believe that the AI was itself operating in an artificial environment, perhaps created by humans to keep the rogue AI distracted and prevent it from enslaving the human race. I always liked that interpretation, and it is fun to think about how that idea would manifest in the real world.

karmakaze 5y ago

Instead of asking 'if' we should be asking 'what if', then we can make some predictions and find ways of testing them. We can also model the properties that we have into a computational model. One huge problem of this is the representation of time/change. If the machine can halt our world to produce the next game state then 'tick' there's no correspondence of our 'time' and outer world time so any properties involving time doesn't need to have any physical basis.