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What if the objective world is just a computer simulation?
What if the objective world is just a computer simulation?

Video: What if the objective world is just a computer simulation?

Video: What if the objective world is just a computer simulation?
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Are we really living in a computer simulation? This was an issue raised in a talk by two professors at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington during a conference there.

Julian Keith, Ph. D. and Curry Guinn, Ph. D., investigated the possibility that we are actually in a computer world like the Matrix movie without even knowing it.

Keith began by remarking: "We all perceive the world, based on the picture drawn to us by our brain, which creates our sense of reality."

Our senses are interfaces that feed us information, but even they have limited access to what is outside of your skull.

"Your vision only sees a sliver, a tiny range of the electromagnetic spectrum," Keith said. "You don't know about most of it."

It's not that bad. “If you had to interact with the world in the full range of what is happening, you would be in a stupor,” said Keith.

"So biology has developed a user interface that makes what you interact with enormously easy."

This interface, your mind, continually produces the colors and sounds we experience.

"It constantly updates your model of reality and interacts with it. This is your matrix. You interact without knowing if there is anything else there."

The problem with biology, Keith said, "is that the basic operating system of your mind was designed for a world that no longer exists. The biological system builds things very slowly. But cultural evolution is much faster."

This makes us vulnerable to the technology and its algorithms. “How can you hack the brain with your eyes and ears? Show him something that grabs his attention, something colorful and vibrant. Give him some kind of social reward. Nothing pays off more than attention from someone else.”

This, in turn, leads to the release of dopamine, which makes you feel good.

It's addictive, it's a reward that releases dopamine in an intermittent, variable response schedule. You don't win at a slot machine every time. You don't get likes or comments on Facebook every time you post, and you don't always see the right cat video entertainment.

"The folks at Amazon, Google and Facebook take your data and are very sensitive to certain types of stimulation and reinforcement. What do they want?"

They create a “default trance state” when you just look at your devices.

Curry says we can already live in The Matrix

“Keith was talking about the science of reason,” Curry said. “I'm going to be a little more speculative. Perhaps we are indeed living in a computer simulation. I'm not the only one who says this. Elon Musk of Telsa and Space X said there is a billion to one chance that we are not living in a computer simulation."

The arguments Musk used for this idea are from an article by Nick Bostrom, a professional philosopher in the UK. “He put a few numbers together and suggested that there is an ultra-high probability that we are living in a computer simulation,” Curry said.

See where computer games are now compared to where they were 40 years ago,”said Curry. Today's are much more realistic, although we still know we're just playing a game.

- Where will they be in 40 years? Or 500 years from now? Or five thousand years from now?”He asked. Bostrom suggested that these future computer games will be so similar to reality that we won't be able to tell the difference. And the characters in them may not be aware that they are in a simulation. “We will inevitably create realities that are indistinguishable from this reality,” Bostrom said.

How can we know that we are in the matrix? - Glitches in the system. Deja vu, for example in the movie The Matrix, when a character sees a cat repeatedly crossing a doorway can be one glitch. Ghosts, extrasensory perception, coincidences may be different. The laws of physics in our universe seem to be specially designed with a set of constants that make carbon-based life possible.

Why would anyone want to create such a simulation of life?

One of the clues may be quantum physics, where some things that seem impossible are true: an object that can be in two places at the same time. A phenomenon that Einstein called "eerie action at a distance."

- Why should we or anyone else carry out these simulations? Curry asked. “We've got a ton of them,” he said. - Supercomputers perform simulations to predict the weather. We use them to better understand our environment and make changes. We use them to study human activities and ask questions such as, for example, how is the population growing? What things work best? We run these simulations.”

- How can we then live if we are in the matrix? Curry asked. “We have to behave as if our life is an example of what is possible,” he replied.

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