Sometimes people take The Matrix quite literally, while it is actually a very good metaphor for government and democracy. Morpheus hints at this very transparently in a couple of monologues:
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes [grins]. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.
So what Neo later sees are endless fields of human beings being grown for the very purpose of obtaining energy from them. Still don't see what's going on here?
And then later in the training program he tells Neo this:
Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
And indeed, I see that all over again. Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia. The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers. Those who hint to this idea are called radicals and extremists, even though it is not them, but the elite in power, who have a stake in this whole game.
The system being better than the alternatives and the system caring about you are two different things.
> The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers.
Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have! What's the approval rating of Congress?
Your rhetoric is the same I see time and time again. People need to "wake up" and see that the system is terrible, and they're so stupid for not seeing it. People do see it, we've got well past that point. The idea that there are significant problems with the way we run countries is painfully fucking obvious. You're not smarter than everyone else for seeing that there is corruption, or that people lie. These revelations are not new, they're not anything different from what we've seen for thousands of years.
The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia.
Well it's a good point, we can point at countries without democratic-ish rule and they're often really terrible places to live. I get to complain about MPs spending expenses money on duck houses on the internet because I have reliable infrastructure and enough money to buy a computer and an internet connection. I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace
We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.
Right, but... what if the reality is that there's a mix of better and worse-intentioned people in government, as well as emergent structural inefficiencies and competing ideologies?
I understand that we need a good narrative to comprehend the world, but I think we can do better than the "government = bad" one. The truth seems like it would be more nuanced.
If you look at the whole of human history, you'll see that government is a direct result of the human compulsion for power. Wherever there is an opportunity to assert power and dominion over others, someone will step up and take power by force or coercion.
Governments formed as those that took power needed a system by which to subjugate those within their territory and indoctrinate them to help expand their influence.
It took centuries for people to adjust those political systems to remove ultimate power from one individual and disperse it amongst many. The more people that have influence over the power structure, the less likely that it'll be able to do really evil things.
Our modern democracies are literally the result of thousands of years of evolution of our social contract.
If you think they are so bad, look at countries/places where the government has very little power to control its population. What results are militias and other armed groups that use force to exert influence and maintain power. This struggle is happening pretty opening in Mexico, for example.
If you were, today, make all government disappear, the world would become a chaos of small groups fighting for power. Over years/decades, groups would push out other groups, and gain larger territories. As size increases, the need to keep the population in line (to remain in power) would require those in power to maintain order through laws, police, and provide services.
Well I thought this was another crazy fan theory but those quotes actually make more sense in the context of government than talking about the matrix. The choice of words doesn't seem like a coincidence.
>While it is actually a very good metaphor for government and democracy.
It is also a very good metaphor for social norms. Power people have over others by misleading them, lying to them, shaming them, threatening them, having something they want, etc. People create their own matrix to fit in, to adapt. People start lying to themselves, stop following logic and start to rationalize away bad feelings and bad ideas that hurt.
There doesn't have to be a lattice to be a simulation.
A lattice assumes the simulation is using rectilinear coordinates, but it doesn't have to.
It could also use relative coordinates - each particle in the simulation is defined based on the angle and distance to the nearest other particle. (Where angle is relative to the spin axis of the particle - no global angle.)
This is actually a natural way to simulate things because in general particles only affect nearby ones, which then affect others in turn (at the speed of light. Could this be why there is a speed of light? Because of the delay of each particle affecting the next?)
Forces with infinite range are modeled by starting a particle at 0, then when a force "message" is received update the particle with the new force acting on it, and send the force message along to the next particle in the chain. This works because the infinite forces can never be created from nothing, they can only be moved from place to place (the electromagnetic ones usually cancel out), and forces propagate at the speed of light, so there is time for each particle to notify the next.
I wonder if the particles are using socket.io or sockJS to listen for "force messages". I personally have found sockJS to be more reliable, especially cross-domain.
> It could also use relative coordinates - each particle in the simulation is defined based on the angle and distance to the nearest other particle. (Where angle is relative to the spin axis of the particle - no global angle.)
Are you sure? IMO, these coordinates will not be infinitely precise, lest they require infinite memory. Consequently, you would find that the space of possible angles and distances is in fact discrete, as it were defined by a lattice. The structure of the coordinate system is implicit in this case.
> To repeat them, and generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the last atom, would take more energy than the universe has
He's only saying that we cannot simulate this universe within itself. But how does that imply that our potential simulators couldn't live in a vastly larger universe with a vastly larger amount of energy?
If the computational theory of mind is correct -- the theory that our minds can be emulated by a computation at some substitution level -- then I can even give you the code for the Matrix. It's called the Universal Dovetailer, and it's a simple program that runs all possible programs. On each step it runs the next instruction of every program running so far and introduces the first step of a new program. Given infinite time, it performs every conceivable computation.
Due to the Church-Turin thesis, we know that the infinite set of all programs can be enumerated and we also know that it doesn't matter in which programming language we use, provided it is Turing-complete.
Since the Universal Dovetailer is a conceivable program, this computation will contain itself in a recursive fashion (simulations within simulations).
wasn't this here only yesterday or the day before?
it is interesting, but some fantastic naivete shines through the article... it early on states that the rules of our universe need not be the rules of the external universe, then begins to discuss constraints that only apply if the rules are identical in both.
populist pseudoscience imo. still entertaining though...
Eh, computational constraints are likely to be true in a large number of universes. There is no way to prove the universe isn't a simulation in a universe with arbitrarily powerful computers, but we can rule out universes with high constraints (like our own), or else test for things like approximations going on under the hood.
I think it's pretty unlikely, but it's possible and if a test confirmed it that would be incredibly important.
The author makes a number of logical errors. For example:
> To...generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the last atom would take more energy than the universe has.
Right. But the problem is that the only universe we know about is the one that we live in. So if we were we living in a computer simulation, we would have no knowledge of the 'real' universe. Therefore, we could never say with any confidence that there's not enough energy in the 'real' universe to simulate the 'fake' universe.
I like the idea but I also have a few issues with how simulated universes are commonly seen or how we assume we could detect them. I'm not a mathematician or physicist by any means, so I guess my opinion is purely subjective and could easily be discarded.
The first one is that we assume this would be a computer simulation, i.e. a very complex program with potential bugs and such. While I'm not against the idea that some sort of computer might be behind it, the chance that it wouldn't behave anything like our computers seem more than likely. It also assumes that every projection (for lack of a better word) is the result of complex calculations, rather than the result of how the many inherent properties of a system behave together. This is something that strikes me as odd with a lot of people in sciences (broadly speaking), is that they often start assuming the tool they're using is in fact the basis of what they're trying to study with it.
My second issue, which sort of ties into the first, is that a lot of people often assume that the laws of physics would therefore be bendable. I guess the Matrix (a film I really liked, and still do) might have been partly responsible for that. It seems to me that even if we were simulated, it would in fact not change much, if anything, we would still abide by the simulated laws of simulated physics, within a simulated environment which imposes a set of restrictions on us.
Finally (sorry if this is dragging), my third issue, is a God complex one. We assume that our Simulators actually realize what they have, or rather all the intricacies of what they have made. What seems to be billions of years for us, in my view, could very well be a fraction of a second for them. Our existence may very well be (not that it currently isn't mind you) completely insignificant in their whole experiment, or whatever the simulation may be. This reminds me of a discussion with my AI professor when I was at uni, I argued that we might not be able to tell we've created a successful AI if its lifespan was too short for us to witness (I also think the first real AIs will be suicidal but that's a completely different story). It could also be that we are, in fact, unable to recognize its existence as such based on our standards.
Not really tied to any of my points, but there's also this story about simulated reality which I really like http://qntm.org/responsibility
The power of the "Matrix" concept is its illustration of the subjectiveness of what we think of as "reality." I think we for sure live in the meatspace version of the Matrix. So it's more blobish, but it's a distributed construct that is quite convincing to its inhabitants as long as it holds together!
These experiments cannot definitively prove anything. Here's why:
1) A perfect simulation, by definition, would be impossible for its inhabitants to detect.
2) Detection of an imperfect simulation requires an absolute understanding of the universe. This includes the imperfect simulation itself, any imperfect simulation(s) containing it, the physical universe, the multiverse; everything.
Putting aside any philosophical arguments about whether it's even possible to absolutely know anything, let alone the complete mechanics of the universe, the conclusion one would arrive at is the same conclusion that those who ponder the origin of our universe (irrespective of simulations), arrive at: infinite regress.
Therefore, definitively proving whether or not our existence is that of a simulation, and completely understanding literally everything that exists, has existed, and will exist, are one and the same.
.. and our programmers created Occam and made him come up with his razor so that most serious people (sorry .. simulations) who might actually be able to answer this question within the system will more likely discard it because of how much their training emphasizes Occam's razor.
edit: quoting the part of the article that read like the flying spaghetti monster [1]
> In such a makeshift cosmos, the fine details of the microscopic world and the farthest stars might only be filled in by the programmers on the rare occasions that people study them with scientific equipment. As soon as no one was looking, they’d simply vanish.
> In theory, we’d never detect these disappearing features, however, because each time the simulators noticed we were observing them again, they’d sketch them back in.
In a way, there is good amount of knowledge base in India on Advaita, which is pretty much the same concept - that world is Maya, and the creation is just the triad of knower-knowledge-knowable.
The "experiments" in this philosophy include stuff like meditation, quietening of mind, and just removing the false sense of ego.
Now, like in any experiment, what is the expected, measurable output? Firstly, since the underlying model changes, the meaning of "I", perceptions, the meaning of "sense organ" etc. should all change. After all, we created our world models from "experiencing" through five senses. If we go beyond, the reality would be very different, including the possibility of the fact that the very concept of "I", time or space doesn't exist anymore.
Now, since Advaita has existing for thousands of years, it is natural to ask if anybody went "beyond" this world? How did they express the reality? Indeed, you have thousands of people like that - and through almost all the centuries. And they have expressed what it feels like.
Are they able to manipulate our reality? Perhaps. We indeed read about these things. But then, the focus usually is on the fact that everybody has access to that state, and waking up from Maya is something inherently a journey into the self.
UG Krishnamurti (who was supposedly one of enlightened persons) put it as this: "How can you transmit certainty of certainty of truth to somebody else?". Indeed, one may transmit by conducting experiments etc. But there is no certainty really - our assumption that natural laws will never change is still an assumption.
Any deviation from the current laws of physics might be considered as either evidence that we are living in a simulation, or that the current laws of physics are incomplete.
Some arguments are given that some deviations are especially indicative of the former. In my opinion these arguments are very weak. Mainly because the simulations they have in mind are sufficiently elegant, that the deviations they cause are things that could also arise in an elegant mathematical model.
This is exactly what I thought when reading the article. Gamma rays have not been found beyond a certain level of energy? We must therefore live in a simulation!
Even the big bang had a finite amount of energy, this doesn't prove anything, just that we don't know about anything beyond that.
I'm quite a bit nutty about this question actually. I'm in the process of creating a comic about a further out sentient race that try to reach the beginning of the universe. Along the way, they stop by Earth and decided to give us a bump in technological advancements.
[+] [-] snitko|12 years ago|reply
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes [grins]. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.
So what Neo later sees are endless fields of human beings being grown for the very purpose of obtaining energy from them. Still don't see what's going on here?
And then later in the training program he tells Neo this:
Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
And indeed, I see that all over again. Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia. The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers. Those who hint to this idea are called radicals and extremists, even though it is not them, but the elite in power, who have a stake in this whole game.
[+] [-] IanCal|12 years ago|reply
> The very idea that maybe the dearest leaders of whatever country you live in don't actually care about you doesn't seem to be able to penetrate people's minds, even though time and again they lie and abuse their powers.
Really? Because the prevailing opinion with people I speak to is that politicians are bastards, and that's replicated here. In fact, politicians are very rarely looked at in a good light. People dislike what we have! What's the approval rating of Congress?
Your rhetoric is the same I see time and time again. People need to "wake up" and see that the system is terrible, and they're so stupid for not seeing it. People do see it, we've got well past that point. The idea that there are significant problems with the way we run countries is painfully fucking obvious. You're not smarter than everyone else for seeing that there is corruption, or that people lie. These revelations are not new, they're not anything different from what we've seen for thousands of years.
The problem is nobody has a good plan for what else to do.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace, at the very best it is suggested you go to Somalia.
Well it's a good point, we can point at countries without democratic-ish rule and they're often really terrible places to live. I get to complain about MPs spending expenses money on duck houses on the internet because I have reliable infrastructure and enough money to buy a computer and an internet connection. I'm not worried about a group of teens in the military coming in and raping my wife.
> Even if you hint to people that maybe we don't really need a government to live our lives in peace
We don't, not if everyone is nice. But "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" is the kind of political plan I'd expect from a 5 year old. Unless you have a concrete suggestion, something better than "not this", then you have nothing to add to an incredibly important conversation.
[+] [-] md224|12 years ago|reply
I understand that we need a good narrative to comprehend the world, but I think we can do better than the "government = bad" one. The truth seems like it would be more nuanced.
[+] [-] Osiris|12 years ago|reply
Governments formed as those that took power needed a system by which to subjugate those within their territory and indoctrinate them to help expand their influence.
It took centuries for people to adjust those political systems to remove ultimate power from one individual and disperse it amongst many. The more people that have influence over the power structure, the less likely that it'll be able to do really evil things.
Our modern democracies are literally the result of thousands of years of evolution of our social contract.
If you think they are so bad, look at countries/places where the government has very little power to control its population. What results are militias and other armed groups that use force to exert influence and maintain power. This struggle is happening pretty opening in Mexico, for example.
If you were, today, make all government disappear, the world would become a chaos of small groups fighting for power. Over years/decades, groups would push out other groups, and gain larger territories. As size increases, the need to keep the population in line (to remain in power) would require those in power to maintain order through laws, police, and provide services.
Government is inevitable.
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 127|12 years ago|reply
It is also a very good metaphor for social norms. Power people have over others by misleading them, lying to them, shaming them, threatening them, having something they want, etc. People create their own matrix to fit in, to adapt. People start lying to themselves, stop following logic and start to rationalize away bad feelings and bad ideas that hurt.
[+] [-] ars|12 years ago|reply
A lattice assumes the simulation is using rectilinear coordinates, but it doesn't have to.
It could also use relative coordinates - each particle in the simulation is defined based on the angle and distance to the nearest other particle. (Where angle is relative to the spin axis of the particle - no global angle.)
This is actually a natural way to simulate things because in general particles only affect nearby ones, which then affect others in turn (at the speed of light. Could this be why there is a speed of light? Because of the delay of each particle affecting the next?)
Forces with infinite range are modeled by starting a particle at 0, then when a force "message" is received update the particle with the new force acting on it, and send the force message along to the next particle in the chain. This works because the infinite forces can never be created from nothing, they can only be moved from place to place (the electromagnetic ones usually cancel out), and forces propagate at the speed of light, so there is time for each particle to notify the next.
[+] [-] dwaltrip|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weland|12 years ago|reply
Are you sure? IMO, these coordinates will not be infinitely precise, lest they require infinite memory. Consequently, you would find that the space of possible angles and distances is in fact discrete, as it were defined by a lattice. The structure of the coordinate system is implicit in this case.
[+] [-] zvrba|12 years ago|reply
He's only saying that we cannot simulate this universe within itself. But how does that imply that our potential simulators couldn't live in a vastly larger universe with a vastly larger amount of energy?
[+] [-] TelmoMenezes|12 years ago|reply
Due to the Church-Turin thesis, we know that the infinite set of all programs can be enumerated and we also know that it doesn't matter in which programming language we use, provided it is Turing-complete.
Since the Universal Dovetailer is a conceivable program, this computation will contain itself in a recursive fashion (simulations within simulations).
[+] [-] varjag|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenerdfiles|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jheriko|12 years ago|reply
it is interesting, but some fantastic naivete shines through the article... it early on states that the rules of our universe need not be the rules of the external universe, then begins to discuss constraints that only apply if the rules are identical in both.
populist pseudoscience imo. still entertaining though...
[+] [-] Houshalter|12 years ago|reply
I think it's pretty unlikely, but it's possible and if a test confirmed it that would be incredibly important.
[+] [-] jackson1372|12 years ago|reply
> To...generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the last atom would take more energy than the universe has.
Right. But the problem is that the only universe we know about is the one that we live in. So if we were we living in a computer simulation, we would have no knowledge of the 'real' universe. Therefore, we could never say with any confidence that there's not enough energy in the 'real' universe to simulate the 'fake' universe.
[+] [-] grownseed|12 years ago|reply
The first one is that we assume this would be a computer simulation, i.e. a very complex program with potential bugs and such. While I'm not against the idea that some sort of computer might be behind it, the chance that it wouldn't behave anything like our computers seem more than likely. It also assumes that every projection (for lack of a better word) is the result of complex calculations, rather than the result of how the many inherent properties of a system behave together. This is something that strikes me as odd with a lot of people in sciences (broadly speaking), is that they often start assuming the tool they're using is in fact the basis of what they're trying to study with it.
My second issue, which sort of ties into the first, is that a lot of people often assume that the laws of physics would therefore be bendable. I guess the Matrix (a film I really liked, and still do) might have been partly responsible for that. It seems to me that even if we were simulated, it would in fact not change much, if anything, we would still abide by the simulated laws of simulated physics, within a simulated environment which imposes a set of restrictions on us.
Finally (sorry if this is dragging), my third issue, is a God complex one. We assume that our Simulators actually realize what they have, or rather all the intricacies of what they have made. What seems to be billions of years for us, in my view, could very well be a fraction of a second for them. Our existence may very well be (not that it currently isn't mind you) completely insignificant in their whole experiment, or whatever the simulation may be. This reminds me of a discussion with my AI professor when I was at uni, I argued that we might not be able to tell we've created a successful AI if its lifespan was too short for us to witness (I also think the first real AIs will be suicidal but that's a completely different story). It could also be that we are, in fact, unable to recognize its existence as such based on our standards.
Not really tied to any of my points, but there's also this story about simulated reality which I really like http://qntm.org/responsibility
[+] [-] psycr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b1daly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaku|12 years ago|reply
Be careful, agents are always watching.
[+] [-] wellboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pscsbs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rl3|12 years ago|reply
1) A perfect simulation, by definition, would be impossible for its inhabitants to detect.
2) Detection of an imperfect simulation requires an absolute understanding of the universe. This includes the imperfect simulation itself, any imperfect simulation(s) containing it, the physical universe, the multiverse; everything.
Putting aside any philosophical arguments about whether it's even possible to absolutely know anything, let alone the complete mechanics of the universe, the conclusion one would arrive at is the same conclusion that those who ponder the origin of our universe (irrespective of simulations), arrive at: infinite regress.
Therefore, definitively proving whether or not our existence is that of a simulation, and completely understanding literally everything that exists, has existed, and will exist, are one and the same.
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aufreak3|12 years ago|reply
edit: quoting the part of the article that read like the flying spaghetti monster [1]
> In such a makeshift cosmos, the fine details of the microscopic world and the farthest stars might only be filled in by the programmers on the rare occasions that people study them with scientific equipment. As soon as no one was looking, they’d simply vanish.
> In theory, we’d never detect these disappearing features, however, because each time the simulators noticed we were observing them again, they’d sketch them back in.
[1]: http://www.venganza.org/
[+] [-] aapje|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j15e|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linvin|12 years ago|reply
The "experiments" in this philosophy include stuff like meditation, quietening of mind, and just removing the false sense of ego.
Now, like in any experiment, what is the expected, measurable output? Firstly, since the underlying model changes, the meaning of "I", perceptions, the meaning of "sense organ" etc. should all change. After all, we created our world models from "experiencing" through five senses. If we go beyond, the reality would be very different, including the possibility of the fact that the very concept of "I", time or space doesn't exist anymore.
Now, since Advaita has existing for thousands of years, it is natural to ask if anybody went "beyond" this world? How did they express the reality? Indeed, you have thousands of people like that - and through almost all the centuries. And they have expressed what it feels like.
Are they able to manipulate our reality? Perhaps. We indeed read about these things. But then, the focus usually is on the fact that everybody has access to that state, and waking up from Maya is something inherently a journey into the self.
UG Krishnamurti (who was supposedly one of enlightened persons) put it as this: "How can you transmit certainty of certainty of truth to somebody else?". Indeed, one may transmit by conducting experiments etc. But there is no certainty really - our assumption that natural laws will never change is still an assumption.
[+] [-] tobico|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yetanotherphd|12 years ago|reply
Some arguments are given that some deviations are especially indicative of the former. In my opinion these arguments are very weak. Mainly because the simulations they have in mind are sufficiently elegant, that the deviations they cause are things that could also arise in an elegant mathematical model.
[+] [-] Zarathust|12 years ago|reply
Even the big bang had a finite amount of energy, this doesn't prove anything, just that we don't know about anything beyond that.
[+] [-] ethana|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stuartcw|12 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXeVgEs4sOo
[+] [-] fauria|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benbou09|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trumbitta2|12 years ago|reply
And, after a SPOILER ALERT, that movie is:
The Thirteenth Floor
[+] [-] bprater|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] a3voices|12 years ago|reply