Like most people today he can't help but stick in some political commentary, but I thought there was enough meat in the article to make it worth posting ->
Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation
Jason Kehe
Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation
Jason Kehe
Quote:The only people who absolutely disagree are, well, scientists. They need to get over themselves and join the fun.
Quote:“But this is nonsense,” says the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. “I mean, why should the world be a simulation?”
This is typical of the flustered incredulity mustered up by the physics community whenever the subject of the simulation disturbs the learned serenity of their exemplary calculations. Lisa Randall at Harvard, Sabine Hossenfelder of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, David Deutsch at Oxford, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin, the list goes on and on, and they all make versions of the same point: Our perceiving brains “simulate” the world around us, sure, but there’s no such thing as a “digital physics” or “its from bits”; real-world things (its) don’t come from code (bits). It’s so reductionist! So presentist! Just play out the thermodynamics! Or consider many-body effects! Even Neil deGrasse Tyson has, more recently, backed away from his Muskian metaphysics. (Though one of his counterarguments is, it should be said, highly untechnical. He simply doesn’t think far-future other-dimensional alien simulators would be entertained by beings as slow-moving and petty and cavemannish as we—in much the way we wouldn’t be entertained by the daily drudgery of actual cavemen.)
OK, but, and with all due respect to these undisputed geniuses: Maybe they should read their own books. Take Rovelli’s latest. In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, he puts forward what he calls the “relational theory” of reality. Basically, nothing exists except in relation to something else. “There are no properties outside of interactions,” Rovelli writes. So that tree over there? It isn’t just barely there. If you’re not interacting with it, it can’t be said to be there at all. Well, something is there, it seems, but that something is only and merely the potential for interaction. “The world is a perspectival game,” Rovelli concludes, “a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other.”
Note the word he uses there: game. Reality is a game. What kind of game? A video game, maybe? Why not? Though Rovelli wouldn’t take kindly to this interpretation, isn’t that precisely how video games work? When your character is running through a field, whatever’s behind you, or otherwise out of view—trees, items, baddies, something better to do with your time—is only there, meaningfully there, if you turn around and interact with it. Short of that, the game won’t waste resources rendering it. It doesn’t exist, or exists only as a programmed possibility. Video games, just like our reality, are Rovellianly relational.
Quote:At this, our polite physicists might finally lose their cool and go entropic on us, raging hotly. But why? Why does this kind of playful speculation so incense not only them but so many other highly intelligent people, from philosopher-historians like Justin E. H. Smith to commentators like Nathan J. Robinson? They never really say, beyond dismissing simulation theory as either illogical or out of touch, a plaything of the privileged, but one senses in their skepticism a genuine fear, an unwillingness to even entertain the idea, for to believe that our world is fake must, they seem to think, be to believe, nihilistically, and in a way that makes a mockery of their lifelong pursuit of knowledge and understanding, in nothing.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
(This post was last modified: 2022-06-29, 07:22 PM by Sciborg_S_Patel. Edited 2 times in total.)
- Bertrand Russell