If we open reality.exe?

light leaves the sun and eight minutes later gets to your body which absorbs a part of it the rest bounces off in all directions and some of it reaches the eye passing through the lens and forming an inverted picture of you on the screen and the back of my eyeball this picture sets up chemical changes in a light sensitive substance and these changes disturb the cells which are tiny living creatures of which the screen is built they pass on their agitation to other very elongated cells and these in turn to cells in a certain region of my brain it is only when this terminus is reached and these molecules and atoms and particles of these brain cells are affected that i see you or you see me and the same is true of the other senses i neither see nor hear nor smell nor taste nor feel anything at all until the processes after the most drastic changes and delays arrive at this center it is only at this terminus this moment and place of all arrivals at the grand central station of my here and now that the whole traffic system what i call my universe springs into existence all this hurting on having no head [Music] you are watching this now this excerpt always reminds me of uh the nature of reality that is to say the fact that we are alive as energetic beings while also being aware that we are collection of microscopic things an animated movie playing out in front of us every second of every day viewed and interacted with by us now i'm not trying to cause an existential crisis here i'm trying to do the opposite opposite stephen wolfram is a computer scientist physicist and businessman in 1987 he started wolfram research over the past few years he has began the wolfram physics project to find the fundamental theory of physics to answer the question how does our universe work okay hello everyone well thanks for joining me here today we are going to be talking about getting to the fundamental theory of physics now i never expected this if you'd asked me even last fall i would have said that i have an idea but i don't know if it's going to work and i'm really excited to say that it's working i think we've come a long way we're not actually at the end we're not there yet and i'm sort of hoping that uh all of us together can really finish this job the establishing idea is based on the observation that a complex system can emerge from a simple underlying rule to illustrate this wolfram uses something called cellular automata so wait what are cellular automata fair enough so typical case of a cellular automaton it's an array of cells it's just a line of of discrete cells each cell is either black or white and in a series of steps you can represent as lines going down a page you're updating the color of each cell according to a rule that depends on the color of the cell above it and to its left and right so it's really simple so the thing might be you know if uh the cell and its right neighbor uh are not the same and or the cell on the left is is is black or something then make it black on the next step and if not make it white typical rule um that rule i'm not sure i said it exactly right but a rule very much like what i just said has the feature that if you start it off from just one black cell at the top it makes this extremely complicated pattern so some rules uh you get a very simple pattern some rules you have the rule is simple you start them off from a sort of simple seed you just get this very simple pattern but other rules and this was the big surprise when i started actually just doing the simple computer experiments to find out what happens is that they produce very complicated patterns of behavior so for example this rule 30 rule um has the feature you started from just one black cell at the top makes this very random pattern if you look like at the center column of cells you get a series of values you know it goes black white black black whatever it is that sequence seems for all practical purposes random random so the idea when relating back to simulating reality is that perhaps the complexity that happens every minute of every second around us can be reduced to a simple underlying process as we see in the emergence of randomization in rule 30. so could that same idea be carried into a vr simulation a simulation that when double clicked could generate a new reality that operates to the same level of detail that our physical reality does i you know what i thought was going to happen is i thought we you know i thought we had a pretty good i had a pretty good idea for what the structure of this sort of theory that sort of underneath space and time and so on might be like and i thought gosh you know in my lifetime so to speak we might be able to figure out what happens in the first 10 to the minus 100 seconds of the universe and that would be cool but it's pretty far away from anything that we can see today and it will be hard to test whether that's right and so on and so on and so on to my huge surprise although it should have been obvious and it's embarrassing that it wasn't obvious to me but but um to my huge surprise we managed to get unbelievably much further than that it's like general relativity it's a very nice mathematically elegant theory why is it true you know quantum mechanics why is it true what we realized is that from this that they are these theories are generic to a huge class of systems that have these particular very unstructured underlying rules and that's that's the thing that is sort of uh remarkable and that's the thing to me that's just it's really beautiful i mean it's and the thing that's even more beautiful is that it turns out that you know people have been struggling for a long time you know how does general relativity theory of gravity relate to quantum mechanics they seem to have all kinds of incompatibilities it turns out what we realized is at some level they are the same theory this opens up a level of exploration that we as a species are only scratching the surface of it was only a few decades ago that we had to rely on pen paper and calculators to theorize the complex problems now we can rely on computer language and processing power which brings us to something that wolfram coins computational irreducibility if you think about things that happen as being computations you think about the some process in physics something that you compute in mathematics whatever else it's a computation in the sense it has definite rules you follow those rules you uh follow them many steps and you get some result so then the issue is if you look at all these different kinds of computations that can happen whether they're computations that are happening in the natural world whether they're happening in our brains whether they're happening in our mathematics whatever else the big question is how do these computations compare is are there dumb computations and smart computations or are they somehow all equivalent and the thing that i kind of uh was sort of surprised to realize from a bunch of experiments that i did in the early 90s and now we have tons more evidence for it this thing i call the principle of computational equivalence which basically says when one of these computations one of these processes that follows rules doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple then it has reached the sort of equivalent level of sophistication of computational sophistication of everything so what does that mean that means that you know you might say gosh i'm studying this little tiny you know tiny program on my computer i'm studying this little thing in nature but i have my brain and my brain is surely much smarter than that thing i'm going to be able to systematically outrun the computation that it does because i have a more sophisticated computation that i can do but what the principle of computational equivalence says is that doesn't work our our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done and all these other sorts of systems and so what consequences that have well it means that we can't systematically outrun these systems these systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no sort of shortcut that we can make that jumps to the answer now in a general case right right is that but but the so what has happened you know what science has become used to doing is using the little sort of pockets of computational reducibility which by the way are an inevitable consequence of computational irreducibility that they have to be these pockets scattered around of computational reducibility to be able to find those particular cases where you can jump ahead i mean one one thing sort of a little bit of a parable type thing that i think is fun to tell you know if you look at ancient babylon they were trying to predict three kinds of things they tried to predict you know where the planets would be what the weather would be like and who would win or lose a certain battle and they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other the cynical side of myself keeps asking the question why you know why simulate reality why create another reality my mind immediately goes to three avenues research prediction and art in the field of research such a simulation could open up a virtual playground that could allow researchers to run experiments that play out in the same way a physical world experiment would opening up avenues for viral treatment or simply understanding biological processes to a deeper fundamental level as an example predicting weather patterns down to the minute and second say with more realistic simulations the world of games and storytelling would be endless a standardized set of rules that if chosen by developers could create complex medieval or sci-fi worlds that are built on the fundamental theory that basically operates everything around us in this world take this voxel game as an example here we have a piece of software where tiny objects which we can think of as atoms make up the world all governed by rules like gravity and wind if we increase the resolution on this we would have something that looks more like reality with the voxels now at a microscopic level now obviously the generation of a world as complex as this would take a huge amount of processing power computer power so we may need something like a quantum computer to bring it to the next level this video by gibril's explores this concept this map is in what's called superposition now superposition is something that happens in quantum mechanics which just basically means that this map currently exists as every possible map imaginable so here we have a game that is made up of atoms generated by complex rules based on the laws of our known universe this field is at an extremely early stage wolfram himself notes that they are making discoveries on a weekly basis that throw wrenches into their preconceived notions it's a field that's waiting for young minds to discover while watching one of wolfram's interviews i came across this comment my argument is that if we can harness enough computing power to create a universal simulation that simulates our own universe we would end up having an infinite loop or recursive creation of simulations if we can create a simulation that resembles our own then there would be beings within it that would create their own simulations and so on and so forth resulting in an infinite loop now i don't have a problem with this because it is exactly what would happen if we were to simulate our own universe my argument is computational power and memory if a simulation would create an infinite loop of the simulation creation then that would require an infinite amount of computational power and an infinite amount of memory each simulated universe could potentially have an infinite amount of simulations run so it would be infinity to the power of infinity of computational power imagine a tree where a branch had an infinite amount of branches and those branches had an infinite amount of branches and those branches had an infinite amount of branches and those branches had an infinite amount of branches and those branches had an infinite [Music] protect your server today with advanced ddos protection powered by mc pro hosting and cloudflare mc pro hosting because every hero needs a shield this season on the disrupt i'm taking your voice messages directly so if you'd like to join the show head on over to the virtual experience dot link and click the message box from there you can record a question comment or random shower thought i'll play them at the end of each video hello disrupt um i've recently come up uh upon upon a problem that that i'm not quite sure what what to do about you see one of my clones recently developed free will and uh it's kind of it's kind of causing me a lot of problems because sometimes people think that that's me so is that like identity identity theft does like what how do i go about living my life well at the same time no longer having to worry about this clone because he's quite he's he's it's not it is it's it's doing quite the quite the doing me quite the dirty so uh good luck thank you and uh see you around the metaverse okay so uh believe it or not this is actually a problem that a lot of people face so first and foremost just know you're not alone um the first thing you're going to want to do is have a conversation with the clone itself really talk it out the clone may be thinking some things from his perspective that you are not familiar with and you might have some things to bring from your perspective that the clone is not familiar with um so the first step would be conflict resolution uh the next step if there is no resolution that can be uh sort of agreed upon and the clone continues to uh kind of act out and and and uh really cause cause chaos then you may actually have to um incinerate the clone itself um it's it's a tough decision but uh yeah first and foremost try to resolve it peacefully if not then you may have to bring down the hammer you

Channel: Disrupt

Views: 306,689

Rating: 4.9042463 out of 5

Keywords: 1weekinvr, 1 week in virtual reality, vsauce, disrupt, vr simulation, simulation, vr exe, physics, wolfram physics project, wolfram interview

Id: vM_SAq0RoII

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020