Jaron Lanier - Could Our Universe be a Fake?

Jaren one of the fascinating questions that is circulating among some pretty smart scientists and philosophers deals with a question are we living in a simulation seemingly an absurd question to Ordinary People or even until you start to think about it and when you think about it there is very interesting ramification you've come at it from a number of perspectives yeah well what would mean if we're living in a simulation um if all it means is that we're living in a world that follows rules that we can Discover it just means that physics works and it doesn't mean very much usually what people mean is something a bit more I could say almost Sinister that there's like this other entity that's looking in on us somehow some that there's some player involved in our lives on a different footing than we have That's What It ultimately boils down to and that and that entity would have created this universe well maybe not maybe they just win it in a contest or something way back in the early days of virtual reality we used to we used to um imagine these crazy scenarios like what if you raised a baby in virtual reality and never told this person that they were in a virtual world you know what would they be like and of course if we did it with the kind of virtual worlds we could build today they'd be a neurological disaster because their body would never have developed properly it would be very cruel so we haven't tried that um but it's an interesting question what if you had a really good world could you tell so moravec who back in the 80s robotics researcher CMU he came up with this crazy argument that goes like this let's suppose it's possible to build a virtual world that's so robust that somebody could plausibly limit it and not realize okay now if it's possible perhaps we do it but we're in this big universe even if Humanity doesn't do it somewhere in the billions and billions of stars some civilization will do it and if they can do it once they'll do it twice because once you can do a technological trick you can replicate it So eventually if it's possible at all there ought to be tons of virtual worlds but there's only one base reality that all these virtual worlds in so if you suddenly find yourself born into some reality the chances are it's a virtual reality cuz there's more of them okay that's the argument now the counterargument is interesting in order to make Virtual Worlds good enough to be like the one we're in where we can perform fancy physics experiments you'd need a quantum computer well would you absolutely need it you'd be happier with a quantum computer sure because you have to simulate Quantum events because we have Quantum events in our world now if you build quantum computers the cleanest way to think about how they work is a particular wonderful interpretation of quantum interactions that's due to Everett which is the many worlds interpretation so this way of thinking has a lot of copies of your computer and they're all in different worlds and they're all running at once and that's why they can do tricks that just this ordinary computer in this world couldn't do and then when you get your answer out you can think of it as discovering which world you're in okay now and all those worlds in a sense have to be real not simulated world they're all real yeah now here's the interesting thing um because the many worlds interpretation has become so much popular with the Advent of interest in Quantum Computing now there are all these other ideas about multiple worlds there's Max tegmark's ideas and there's Lee mullen's ideas and there's uh the uh there's this idea of a landscape of string theory Cosmos um there's all of these different ideas now if all of these allow for an Infinity of different worlds that exist in parallel if you like all of a sudden I mean if you have an Infinity of Worlds you can't have more than infinity so you can no longer have more Virtual Worlds than worlds so in order to make quantum computers in the first place you've probably convinced yourself that there are an Infinity of Real Worlds so all of a sudden your chances of being in a virtual world have gone way way down yeah and the argument counterargument to that is what Paul Davy says and Paul Davy says if you have multiple Real Worlds then the odds of getting a civilization that can do virtual reality now goes up substantially and when you can do multiple worlds it will proliferate so rapidly that you're dealing with a higher order of infinity soer order order of infinity so you're giving with like a trans finite Infinity some infinities are bigger than other infinities I mean you that's cancer stuff so so what what you have is the more you have multiple universes the more likely you're living in a civilization I think we're at the point where we don't know what we're talking about I I I actually you know I've used diagonalization arguments on this and I have to agree we don't know enough um but I will point out one other little thing which is let's go back to this idea of the pimply kid who's looking in on us now we have we as Humanity have experimentally proven in principle the quantum cryptography works and now this is a kind of secret message that is so secret that if anyone has read it along the way Quantum effects will destroy part of it so you can be absolutely certain and furthermore if you were some God figure or some pimple video game kid who was reconstituting the universe in order to cover Your Tracks you'd have to be able to perform a fantabulous calculation to recreate what would have been had you not looked recreate the whole universe so the fact that we've sent quantumly encrypted messages and nobody's listened either means that the pimple kid doesn't exist is shy polite considerate bored whatever uh or that the pimple kid is so intensely powerful that he can actually cover his tracks um either case makes me feel that we shouldn't pay attention to the pimply kid because if he's bored not paying attention or doesn't exist forget about him if he's so powerful that he can calculate any universe and has effectively calculated all of them then we're one little tiny blip you know on this Continuum and there's there's we're so profoundly non-sp special from the perspective of this deity that we might as well not exist well you know these arguments at one level sound like they're kind of intellectually silly on but on the other hand for me they're great entertainment I think they're entertainment but I really think they're very probative I think they're probative of our understanding of what we know what we don't know what we could know so I'm all for it I mean we can take it we can have fun with it but I think there's a very serious aspect to it as well so I support the the the research honor I think it's good stuff

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 189,785

Keywords: Jaron Lanier, Closer To Truth, Universe, Physics, The Matrix, Simulation, Cosmos, Information, computer simulation, computer, scifi, sci-fi, science fiction, futurism, aliens, reality, consciousness, virtual reality, VR, tech, technology, education, lecture, University, College, research, science, proof, know, knowledge

Id: 5kngQ6mVI68

Length: 7min 11sec (431 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 12 2016