Poll 77 - What if the world's a simulation?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgbuKJnlW10

Poll 77 - "Simulism: If you discovered the life you're living is in a gigantic virtual simulation, how would that change the way you behaved?
1. I'd be nicer to people
2. I'd be more selfish
3. I wouldn't change a thing"
Poll ended February 4th, 2011.  12.6% chose answer 1, 14.3% chose answer 2, and 73.1% went for answer number 3.

By a significant factor, most of the visitors to the Tenth Dimension blog said they wouldn't change a thing if they knew the world they see around them were only a simulation. I'm reminded of Stephen Hawking's take on free will - even though he tells us he doesn't believe it exists, he acknowledges that the complex interactions that make a person choose one path or another can make it impossible to predict what that person will do - effectively, he tells us, it works to say that free will exists as a flawed but convenient interpretation, even for a scientist like Dr. Hawking who stands firmly in the "no such thing as free will" camp.

Likewise, I think the above response is the healthy one. Are we like Neo, living in the Matrix, but unaware of its existence? If Life is But a Dream, shouldn't we still make the best of what we've been given? On my Facebook Wall, there's a much-discussed video posted by New Scientist which suggests that persons trained to believe free will is an illusion will be more likely to cheat on tests, and less likely to be altruistic. Here's that video again:



I think there could be a similar parallel drawn here - wouldn't it be easy to say nothing matters if it's all just a simulation? But the above poll question contradicts that outcome - by asking people specifically what they would change, most people said they wouldn't change a thing. What if the question instead had been "would you change your behavior if you knew you were only living in a gigantic simulation? Without specific options to consider, would people be more likely to say they would change after all?

Well, here's an answer for you. Last year we ran the following poll question, check out the results that time. This was one of four poll questions we looked at under the title More Tangential Thinking.
Poll 72
Poll 72: "Simulism: would you live your life any differently if you knew the reality you're seeing around you is really just a gigantic virtual simulation?" Poll ended October 3 2010. 59.4% said yes, and 40.6% said no.

My comments at the time started out with the following paragraph:

Another completely different example of tangential thinking. People love to play with these "nested Russian dolls" concepts: what if my reality is a dream of some other reality? What if our universe comes from a black hole in another universe, which comes from another black hole, and so on?

So there you have it. Two substantially different responses to two fairly similar poll questions. As the pollsters will often admit: "it's all in how you ask the question".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next:  New video - Changing Your Brain

Living in a Simulation

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezPlq2Z59E

Welcome to 2011! People of my generation walk around this time of year saying "can you believe it? This year sounded impossibly far away when I was young, it doesn't seem real!".

The above new video accompanies my blog entry from last August, on the subject of Simulism: the idea that we could be living within a gigantic virtual world, whether we are aware of it or not. Simulism.org is a wiki created by the Netherlands' Ivo Jansch, and it brings together a number of interesting bits of information about (to quote from the wiki) "the possibility that our existence rests on an unimaginably complex n-dimensional k-state computer grid with rules governing the transition from one state to another".

In my previous post on Simulism and the above video blog, I talk about several other shows which have showed Simulism-related concepts, including The Matrix, Inception, Star Trek: TNG's holodeck, and a television show I had not come across before called Play. The Movies page at the simulism wiki lists a number of other films, most of which are obviously science fiction. But I couldn't resist adding a few of my favorite films to the list because (in my opinion) they present related concepts:

A Christmas Carol - could this 1843 Charles Dickens novella be the grand-daddy of Simulism? The ghosts conjure virtual worlds of time travel and alternate timelines that to Ebenezer Scrooge are completely real.

It's a Wonderful Life - when George Bailey is shown an alternate version of the world as it would have been without him, can't this be thought of as a simulation?

Groundhog Day - being trapped at a certain instant of time (6 am on Groundhog Day), and then being given the freedom to explore all the possible timelines that extend from that instant: is Phil Conners trapped in a simulation? The movie offers no explanation so we are left to imagine what could have been the cause of his predicament.

Brazil - since so much of this film is surreal, placed "somewhere in the twentieth century" according to the opening subtitle, it's possible that the entire film is a virtual world, a simulation. Could Sam Lowry have woken up from the dream, Neo-style, at any moment in this movie? Since the world depicted in this film is unlike any version of the twentieth century you or I experienced, there are other "alternate history" discussions that could just as easily be related to this film, one of my all-time favorites.

The wikipedia article on alternate history presents some examples of stories exploring the "what would have the world been like if this rather than that had happened" as far back as two thousand years ago: ideas of parallel universe versions of our own observed universe are not as new as you might suspect! And if Information Equals Reality, then all of these examples of simulism, alternate histories, and parallel universes may not just be flights of imagination, but examples of the possibilities inherent in the underlying structures of our reality.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time's Illusions

Poll 71-73 - More Tangential Thinking

Poll 71
Poll 71: "In the June issue of Scientific American, it said this: 'A function of space plays the role of time. So even though the system as a whole is timeless, the individual pieces are not'. Do you agree with this statement?" Poll ended Sept 14 2010 73.3% were in agreement, while the remaining 26.7% were not.

It's interesting to me that this phrase was accepted by such a large percentage of visitors to this blog, while similar or related proposals in past poll questions have appeared to be more contentious. This dichotomy between thinking of time as a direction, a way of describing change from state, within a larger realm of timelessness is at the center of my approach to visualizing the dimensions. Last week, in Bees and Tangential Thinking, we talked about Stephen Hawking's proposal that there is another kind of time that is at "right angles" to our spacetime. I agree with that idea but again and again I'm confronted with people who are confused about time, spacetime, and how that relates to the fourth spatial dimension. The word "time" has many interpretations! This Scientific American quote that we looked at in this poll question is one way to ease people into the idea that time is a direction, not a dimension, and that time's opposite direction, anti-time, is just as valid within the underlying fabric of reality.

As I like to say, thinking of time without anti-time is like thinking of up without down or forward without backward: you need to consider the two opposing directions to be thinking about a spatial dimension, and thinking about what's beyond the fourth spatial dimension requires tangential thinking.

Poll 72
Poll 72: "Simulism: would you live your life any differently if you knew the reality you're seeing around is really just a gigantic virtual simulation?" Poll ended October 3 2010. 59.4% said yes, and 40.6% said no.

Another completely different example of tangential thinking. People love to play with these "nested Russian dolls" concepts: what if my reality is a dream of some other reality? What if our universe comes from a black hole in another universe, which comes from another black hole, and so on?

In my blog entry on Nassim Haramein, we looked at similar recursive ideas. As part of one of his presentations, Nassim shows clips from a couple of movies: the opening sequence of "Contact", and the ending of "Men in Black", both of which give us graphic ways of visualizing a universe that is embedded in other universes. I've remarked in my book and my blog that the "universe embedded in a rose in an abandoned parking lot" idea from Stephen King's Dark Tower series is another interesting fictional portrayal of this recursive/fractal idea.

But with Simulism, we're generally talking about something that is a more deliberate construct, as opposed to something that just "happened" as a result of the naturally occurring fabric of reality. In chapter four of my book I said this:

From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple” virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept–our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.

Which leads us back to the poll question: if you were shown incontrovertible proof today that you are living in a simulation, a virtual world, would you change the way you behaved? 59% said they would change. Fascinating! I want to know more, so a new poll question is running here now to ask people how they would change.

Poll 73
Poll 73: "It turns out that in a certain way the 'Geocentric Model' really was correct - in a very real sense, each of us is an observer at the exact center of our very own version of the space-time universe." Poll ended October 24, 2010. 85.3% agreed, and only 14.6% disagreed.

Think about this question in terms of the previous poll question. If you are an observer, piloting your focused consciousness attached to this collection of atoms and molecules that you call your body as you ride the entropy-driven arrow of time, how much control do you have?

The answer, I hope you'll agree, is more than most of us have been trained to believe. In Changing Reality, we looked at some of the new scientific evidence to support this idea. Here's the video for that entry:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCJLRrFTX3Q

Enjoy the journey!

Next: Polls Archive 53 to 73

Thinking Bigger

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmW_gECyIFE

This is the video accompanying my text blog from earlier this year, Our Universe Within the Omniverse.

Ah yes, our old friend the omniverse. Connecting the idea of there being extra dimensions with the idea of there being an omniverse containing the many different forms of multiverse and parallel universes that various cosmological theories have advanced would certainly fall under the category of Thinking Bigger, wouldn't you agree? To be clear, not all multiverse theories posit the necessity of there being extra dimensions, but (as I've always said) when you add extra dimensions it becomes much easier to visualize how there could be other universes just as real as our own, existing within their own versions of spacetime, and yet completely inaccessible from "here". "Here" is our unique universe's position within the multiverse landscape.

In my most popular blog of all time, Jumping Jesus, I embedded Google Video windows showing the amazing Frank Theys documentary "TechnoCalyps" (yes, that's how he spells it). My facebook friend Sean Dickinson recently sent me a link to a ten minute YouTube clip from that same movie which I think does a nice job of expanding these Thinking Bigger conversations beyond physics and beyond technology, through the questions of Simulism and into the realms of the spiritual and the mystical.

A direct link to the above movie is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHchKCaSGOY

Some theorists propose that there is only one dimension, and this is an idea we've played with before. In entries like "An Expanding 4D Sphere" and "Our Universe as a Point", we've tried to show how ultimately each dimension is enfolded by the next: the 2D circle contains the 1D line, the 3D sphere contains the 2D circle, the 4D hypersphere contains the 3D sphere, and so on. By the time we're talking about hyperspheres constructed from four or more spatial dimensions, we're rapidly moving beyond what our monkey brains are capable of visualizing! But if our reality is defined at the tenth dimension, that tenth dimension contains a 9D hypersphere as a subset, which contains an 8D hypersphere as its subset, and so on. Wheels within wheels, spheres within spheres, a logic that continues all the way to the tenth dimension: and if a theorist says there is only one dimension, then I would say they are somehow pointing towards the enfolded nature of all of these structures considered simultaneously.

We're going to continue this line of reasoning in these upcoming entries: Extra-dimensional Geometry, Thinking Biggest, Psychedelics and Spacetime, and Tangential Thinking.

Till then, enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Dancing in the Omniverse

Simulism

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezPlq2Z59E

Tomorrow's my birthday. Happy birthday to me, wherever/whatever I am right now!

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLgieQXQnDU

A couple of weeks ago I showed you the Augmented Reality my company created to promote the Legendary Pictures re-launch of the Godzilla franchise "Gojira", which is slated for a 2012 release date. It's been really exciting to see all the positive feedback, including this nice review from Robert Silva, who writes for the New York Times' about.com , and this mention on the popular website "Ain't It Cool News".

Life is But a Dream?
With Legendary Pictures' Inception being such a big hit right now, there's a lot of renewed interest in that age-old existential question: is this all a dream? Is there a way for us wake up from the dream and return to the underlying true reality?

The moment in The Matrix when Neo wakes up in the pod raised these same questions. Likewise, these questions come up in the above video, which is based on my text blog Life is But a Dream, a blog which incorporates ideas compiled into a ten minute YouTube movie called The Quantum Apocalypse.

Simulism
Ever hear of simulism? Check out this link: http://www.simulism.org/Simulation
Simulism.org is a wiki created by the Netherlands' Ivo Jansch, and it brings together a number of interesting bits of information about (to quote from the wiki) "the possibility that our existence rests on an unimaginably complex n-dimensional k-state computer grid with rules governing the transition from one state to another". To which I would respond, my approach to visualizing how "ultimately, the ten spatial dimensions represent an information space from which our observed reality emerges as a tiny subset" is another way of approaching the same idea.

One of the pages at Ivo's thought-provoking wiki lists movies that involve people being embedded within simulations where they may or may not be aware of that fact. One film listed there was a new one to me, if you have 19 minutes check it out, I've posted the video here. Created by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, it's called "Play".


A direct link to the above movie is at http://futurestates.tv/episodes/play

Information Equals Reality
Chapter Four of my book is called "The Binary Viewpoint". Here's a paragraph that relates to all this:

From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple” virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept – our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.

Are you and I really living in a vast simulation? What difference would it make if we were or we weren't? Either way, the goal should still be to find ways to enjoy the journey. And if we're not, then why not? Find the problem. Make a change. Make things better.

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time is in the Mind, in FPS