Are We Living In A Simulation? | Carlo Rovelli | Big Questions

but this is nonsense i mean why should the world be a simulation i would just ask what are the right questions to ask we make a mistake when we try to make nothing into something hello i'm carlo raveli i'm here at penguin to answer some big questions are we living the simulation no we are not humans are funny because when they discover something they immediately get so excited they think that our universe is like that in the sort of 18 1900 uh people discovered started to be very good in building machines so they say oh we got it the universe is a machine when much before people started writing said oh we got it people the world is a book everything is a book and recently we have made video games so we say oh yeah we got it the world is a video game but this is nonsense i mean why should the world be a simulation i mean there's just no ground for anything like that what's the world the hard point about science is not really to answer questions so maybe has taken months years sometimes decades in centuries but if you think about all the good questions pose scientific questions we're all answered the problem is that we always get the wrong questions suppose heisenberg who invented quantum mechanics before he went to quantum mechanics came to me and asked the question he would ask what is the force that drives electrons along the atoms around this strange peculiar jumps and orbits it's a wrong question there's just no force that's not the point okay it's something else so i would not ask a question i would just ask what are the right questions to ask what am i assuming which is wrong i'm sure that in my assumption there's something wrong like there were wrong assumptions in in in in kepler in heisenberg copernicus in aristotle please tell me where i'm going wrong and everything is magic about black holes i mean you take a clock near a black hole and and and it stops and it comes out later and no time passes near the black hole you you enter and you you don't exit you don't know where you go after and and these incredible objects were actually understood before seeing them so i studied them at school in my university years in books that were saying well it's a funny predictions of the theory but you know too strange to exist for real no they're out there for real on the one hand we know so much about them and they're perfectly described by the theory we have but still we don't know basic things about them we things fall inside and we have no idea where it goes we see things falling in and you ask well imagine you fell in what will happen a second later we don't know so it's uh it's uh the most clean example of our ignorance about uh about the universe they're marvelous they are the best thing around god it's a concept an idea which is played very differently by different people so it's an extremely flexible idea uh you know it's got father it's got absolute has a bear this is spiritual it's nothing at all it's it's many gods it's just it's just a feeling it's just a creator all sorts of versions of it in fact people use the expression god to denote completely different things from one another so it's very adaptable and i think you can adapt it to everything including to a scientific worldview there are two dominant theories about the big bang one is that time has just a finite extension in in in the past and that's just the name we give to to the end of it and the other is that which for the moment seems more likely is that uh there was in fact something the other side of the big bank it was a contracting universe that bounced into an expanding universe and the number of calculations in um quantum gravity seemed to indicate that that was the case which of course is not a an answer to the question how the universe started it's just an answer to the question what happened 14 billion years ago because if there was a contracting phase which is pushing the the question of how things started more in the past so today we don't have a general answer about the beginning of time there was there is a possibility that 14 billion years ago was the beginning of time like stephen hawking talked but we're not sure what's the other side of the universe just there's no other side of the universe we make a mistake when we try to make nothing into something we're trying to say uh the the unqualified nothing is black it's uh empty but there's no unqualified nothing this house has four rooms what about the fifth rooms is it black is it empty no it's just not there we cannot figure out nothing anymore that we cannot figure out in other words like the can we figure out the no this is the boy the girl the house we humans um always try to extrapolate our experience so we look around us and we see how things are and we think that things should be the same all over we try to continue so we use our concepts that are formed in our environment and we try to project them outside and we make a mistake because to understand how the world works uh outside our little garden we have to change our concept we have to be elastic to think in a different manner and that's why uh we get entangled in in in fake problems because we are rigid in our concepts have you ever been in love i mean your eyes big become bigger your heart start beating fast you're all excited you feel all over you it's just totally visible it's a completely physical thing to love both to love a woman or a man or or something or an idea when people get excited about an idea things happen in their body in their mind this is all physical manifestation of love that is more than that love which is probably the strongest power that acts on that is nothing else that these physical manifestations that's the name we give to this excitement that happen in our body and mind and brain for a person an idea or a god or justice or a revolution do we have souls because we have souls right i mean so is is the name we give to the part of an entity we interact with which we we we don't control we know there is much more going on a human being has a soul a cat has a sort of forest as a soul a book has a soul a song has a soul it's whatever has an emotional impact on me and also to give a name to the complexity of what is happening there which i don't deal in in in the details so i think you have a soul because uh your very complex reality i of course don't know the do you the the infinite complexity of what happens your body and your brain all these processes so i want a name for all these processes which is not just your flesh it is more it's your soul oh

Channel: Penguin Books UK

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Id: lI0kTy0SqRs

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021