Are We Living In "The Matrix?" It Might Be Testable

First, apologies.  I've been neglecting "Bug Reports" in favor of writing that actually pays money: contributing to www.cracked.com.  (If you've come here from there, hello and welcome, BTW).  I'm also working on a screenplay for an indy-style movie; the working title is "Jesus Versus The Mushrooms."  It's envisioned as a stoner-style comedy in the Harold and Kumar tradition, albeit with heavily Gnostic and Fortean overtones.

But now, back to Bug Reports.  One of our staples here is experiments which might prove that we're actually living in "The Matrix."  We dealt with it in our very first post.    And followed up here.

Of course, proving the universe isn't a hologram (or else a really fine-grained one) doesn't mean we're not living in a computer simulation.  This article in Technology Review explains how we might test for such a scenario.  Describing how a supercomputer would simulate a small part of the universe, they write:

Today, we get an answer of sorts from Silas Beane, at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a few pals....
They examine, in particular, high energy processes, which probe smaller regions of space as they get more energetic What they find is interesting. They say that the lattice spacing imposes a fundamental limit on the energy that particles can have. That’s because nothing can exist that is smaller than the lattice itself. So if our cosmos is merely a simulation, there ought to be a cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles...
Beane and co calculate that the lattice spacing imposes some additional features on the spectrum. “The most striking feature…is that the angular distribution of the highest energy components would exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest frame of the lattice, deviating significantly from isotropy,” they say.In other words, the cosmic rays would travel preferentially along the axes of the lattice, so we wouldn’t see them equally in all directions. That’s a measurement we could do now with current technology....
But the calculations by Beane and co are not without some important caveats. One problem is that the computer lattice may be constructed in an entirely different way to the one envisaged by these guys.  Another is that this effect is only measurable if the lattice cut off is the same as the GZK cut off. This occurs when the lattice spacing is about 10^-12 femtometers. If the spacing is significantly smaller than that, we’ll see nothing.

In other words, if we don't find what they predict, we're not out of the woods - we could still be a computer program, just a different kind.  (And that's assuming we're not something really different, such as an analog computer)

But if they DO find it?  Would it strongly suggest the universe is the result of intelligent design?  Not the Judeo-Christian God, necessarily, but a Demiurge of some sort?  One would think so.  Of course one can think of objections: if the universe is infinite, for example, than such "computer" simulations would arise by chance.

Still, the last couple of centuries have not been kind  to religious faith.  First, Galileo's telescope showed the universe wasn't a perfect Aristotelian mechanism. Then we had Darwin,  geographers discovering the world was more than 6000 years old, and Higher Criticism telling us Scriptures weren't written by the people (Moses, etc) who we'd always thought had written them.  It's hardly been worth getting out of bed on Sunday morning.

Scientific proof that we were created by an intelligence greater than ourselves would turn society upside down.  Part of me wants to see it for the sheer David and Goliath aspect.  But the cautious part of me knows that in David and Goliath contests, it's always smart to bet on Goliath.

Sex Magic, Your Data, And You

Marshal McLuhan said "the medium is the message."  One hears this as "the medium is the message."  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage  is a detailed list of the "tropes" that put the TV in TVness. It's a Golden Bough for post-moderns, a collection of mass-media Jungian Archetypes.

What if McLuhan meant "the medium is the message?" 

Did we mention that much of what's in human DNA is thought to be junk?  What if the purpose of some - or all - life forms is to carry secret messages? The idea of using DNA for steganography has actually been around for awhile. 

DNA can also be used as a computer.   And ... the "data" for the DNA computer is, apparently ...  more DNA! 

Is this why all mainstream religions take a dim view of sex magic?  Because of the potential data corruption issues?

Omniscient? No Need For Checkers, then

The game of checkers has been "solved,"  according to this abstract at the Science magazine website:

The game of checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5 × 10²⁰). The task of solving the game, determining the final result in a game with no mistakes made by either player, is daunting. Since 1989, almost continuously, dozens of computers have been working on solving checkers, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to the proving process. This paper announces that checkers is now solved: Perfect play by both sides leads to a draw. This is the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times as complex as Connect Four. Artificial intelligence technology has been used to generate strong heuristic-based game-playing programs, such as Deep Blue for chess. Solving a game takes this to the next level by replacing the heuristics with perfection.

If you're a supercomputer, there's no reason to play checkers anymore; the game will always end in a draw.  The abstract's part about "no mistakes made by either player" suggests a Captain Kirk-like "illogical" move could still work, but reading the whole paper dashes that hope.  If you're a supercomputer, stick to Go, or Solitaire.

Similarly, an omniscient God has no need to create us; our lives are a question he already knows the answer to.  So why are we here?

Human Nature: It's (almost) Fixable

A recent article in Popular Science, if it comes true, will make all religions and  secular metaphysics obsolete.  It's about scientists   working on artificial nerves, the better to make prosthetic limbs with:

Previously, scientists surgically connected electrodes to the nervous system, but they seemed to harm the body’s tissues, making the implant fail within months. In 2005, scientists discovered that they could stimulate a neuron to send a message by shining infrared light on it. Last September, DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D branch, awarded $4 million to a project led by Southern Methodist University engineers to attempt to connect nerves to artificial limbs using fiber optics.

The team suspects that flexible glass or polymer fiber optics will be more flesh-friendly than rigid electrodes. In addition, optical fibers transmit several signals at once, carrying 10 times as much data as their electrical counterparts. “Our goal is to do for neural interfaces what fiber optics did for the telecom industry,” says electrical engineer Marc Christensen, who is leading the SMU group. Transmitting more information faster should give bionic limbs more lifelike movements.

This month, the team will implant optical fibers to stimulate a rat’s rear leg. If it works, Christensen says, in about a decade, robotic arms could be as graceful as Steve Austin’s six-million-dollar one.

Popular Science loves these gee-whiz announcements.  The claim that this technology will be available "in about a decade" may be made, straight-faced, twenty years from now.  Someday, though, they will get it right.  It will be great for paralytics and amputees.  But the real payoff will be finally "curing" human  nature.

Our predicament is simple: we experience reality as an isolated island of self-referential consciousness trapped in a meat bag.  We are selfish because we're wired that way. But this technology, coupled with ubiquitous networking, can make each of us feel what everybody feels.  If one of us suffers, we will all suffer.  If one of us laughs, we all laugh.  We will be pan-humans.  None of us will be happy unless all of us are happy.

Utopian?  Yes.  Feasible?  Eventually.  And there will be unintended consequences, no doubt about it.

How To Train Your Physics

Imagine a "Sims" game produced in the far, far future.  The "people" in the game are produced by sophisticated AI; they're almost human.  You want them to do science; figure out how their world works.

Also, you want the game to last a long time.

One problem is obvious: make the "world" they live in too simple they'll figure it out quickly.  But the other extreme may discourage them so much they give up.  (A third problem is that they may invent something totally unforeseen; if the Sim doesn't have robust error-handling, it'll crash.)

What to do?

Suppose I give the Sim's physics engine AI of its own; an AI slightly more powerful than the Sims'.  As the Sim's subject the Physics Engine to more sophisticated inquiries, it evolves more sophisticated responses.  When the Sims discover the "black body" problem, the Physics Engine invents quantum mechanics.

The physics engine can't contradict itself; if gravity makes things fall down,  it can't start making things fall up.  Apparent contradictions are allowed.  And the Physics Engine, being intelligent, will game the rules, even cheat, if it can.

Intelligence makes mistakes.  Find something wrong, and you've found intelligence.