Introduction: You don’t exist! I don’t exist either! At least we don’t exist in the way that we think we do. We’re simulated beings, maybe wetware simulated (as in someone else’s dream), more likely as not software simulated, like the characters in a video game.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
OOPS: Tweaking, Miracles, Upgrades and Patches: So say you feel like playing God and creating a universe, not a real one of course but a simulated one, on your supercomputer (which presumably has greater capacity than your wetware brain which could also create one). So, you (the Supreme Simulator) start writing the initial ‘in the beginning’ set(s) of software with a view to creating a Big Bang and dictating the parameters that will control the subsequent evolution of your cosmos. Of course, not being a real God, it’s hard to think of everything and initially Part ‘A’ may not mesh totally well with Part ‘B’, and by the time you get to Part ‘Z’, everything’s an absolute mess. So, you start rewriting and revising and patching things up by tweaking the software here and there so that you end up, down the track, with a cosmos that’s a unified and consistent whole.
Oops #1 – Part ‘A’ created matter; Part ‘B’ you dictated and created an equal amount of antimatter, making Parts ‘C’ through ‘Z’ pretty irrelevant because your cosmos is now pretty boring – just a universe of pure energy! So, tweak #1 is to create Part ‘B’ but under the surface set the value to an extremely low number. You now have a matter dominated universe.
Oops #2 – In Part ‘C’ you create gravity along with your matter so as to keep your universe orderly and behaving in a nice clockwork way. Oops, your universe now quickly contracts and undergoes a Big Crunch – end of evolution; end of simulation. Tweak #2: create some antigravity in the form of Dark Energy to prevent that Big Crunch while allowing gravity to maintain the desired clockwork predictability.
Oops #3 – Having taken care of the macro (you’ve evolved your matter via gravity into planets and stars and galaxies and associated debris) in Part ‘D’, you now polish off the software, all the bits and pieces needed to control the micro – Part ‘E’. Oops, you find that turns out not to be compatible with your macro software. Well, that apparently has no actual bearing on the other parts of your cosmic creation and since you’re ultra busy dealing with 1001 other problems and issues, you don’t bother to tweak this. You ignore this – no one will be any the wiser! (Oops, you didn’t plan on the eventual evolution of cosmologists and quantum physicists!!)
OOPS: Why Are Miracles A Tweak? A miracle is something unexplained and unexplainable. It’s a direct violation of the known laws of science. To my mind, a miracle is something that corrects a mistake; a mistake that never should have happened in the first place if the Supreme Simulator had been on the ball. For example, say you have to have a limb amputated, only at a later date it grows back! That’s a miracle that corrects what presumably the Supreme Simulator hadn’t counted on or programmed or desired. So, count up the number of alleged miraculous events that have been recorded over the eras of human history – that’s a lot of alleged tweaks!
Why Don’t I Know This? If you and everything around you (out to the farthest boundaries of the Universe) are just a simulation (created either inside the wetware mind or as software in a machine – the Supreme Simulator’s supercomputer) you wouldn’t know. You’d be programmed not to know or otherwise plain ignorant in the same way that the character in your dream in unaware it’s a mental creation – an artefact of your mind. Ditto the characters in a video game – they don’t know they are an artificial creation; an artificial life form. Since you are a simulated entity, you are not in control since you are pre-programmed and have to just go with the predetermined flow – the Supreme Simulator’s puppet. You can no more control your activity than a calculator can help but calculate that the cube root of 27 is 3. Ditto the entity in your dreams does what your mind commands it to do, even if you aren’t aware at the time that your mind is a puppeteer. Your dream character(s) has/have no free will in other words.
Never-the-less there may be ways to come to terms with the correctness or otherwise of the basic scenario that you are simulated and a Supreme Simulator is in control. The hint comes from the above – the need for The Boss to tweak their simulation creation to eliminate discrepancies or paradoxes, which is the same as saying there’s evidence that the Supreme Simulator has failed to tweak. The fact that tweaks are necessary in our natural environment is suggestive that we are indeed in a simulation; otherwise parts of the Universe (assuming it’s really real) make no real sense. Either Mother Nature screwed up, or the Supreme Simulator did. The fact that macro and micro physics don’t mesh is but one illustration. Another is that matter on the micro scale has a wave/particle duality. A third is quantum entanglement, where two objects can influence each other at faster than light speeds.
Mysteries abound when something can not be, yet apparently is. One whole set of issues here revolves around the conflict between what theory says isn’t possible, yet what eyewitness testimony says is. Translated, it’s the sceptics vs. the ‘I know what I saw’ mob. A tweak could resolve their differences.
Example: Take the Loch Ness Monster and related lake monster sightings. Biologists claim that one can not have a viable population of large creatures in such a confined space. You need a relatively large population for reproductive purposes and a large food supply for same, all in a relatively small volume. It should be easy to verify the existence of large animals in a natural cage. On the other hand, you have to account for, and then discredit all eyewitness testimony. A tweak could resolve the differences.
Example: Crop circles exist. No explanation for their existence makes total sense. They are obviously made by intelligence, but Mother Nature isn’t the guilty party in this case (although Mother Nature is responsible for some geometrical shapes like the spirals in some sea shells, flowers, snowflakes, etc.). No known natural force can account for crop circles. Human intelligence is the most likely explanation, but problems abound like the making of complex patterns in the dark of the night and why haven’t those responsible been caught and dealt with? I could list other problems like why England and not Australia Australia
As a general rule of thumb, just about anything science says is near impossible, yet for which there’s some degree of credible eyewitness testimony to the contrary, might be a candidate as a quirk courteous of our Supreme Simulator! Collectively, these topics fall under a general umbrella called ‘anomalies’ and whole books can be read that are full of case histories. For example, your attention is directed to the many volumes compiled by William R. Corliss of anomalies culled from the scientific literature in his Sourcebook Project series. Then there are those wonderful collections of anomaly tomes penned by Charles Fort.
Mysteries abound where something should or shouldn’t be, yet apparently isn’t or is. There often is a conflict between what sciences theoretically say should or should not be, yet scientific observations end up producing opposite findings. Perhaps the conflict between theory and observation/experiment is evidence that our Universe needs tweaking.
Example: Theoretical physics predict that the vacuum energy should have a certain value. Experimental evidence suggests that the vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude less than theory predicts. This by the way is the greatest discrepancy between theory and observation ever recorded in all of science. A tweak could resolve the differences. Another case, noted above, is that theoretical physics says there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the Universe. Observation says that theory is just plain nuts because we don’t detect any antimatter remotely close to that predicted!
So why are these discrepancies allowed to continue? Why hasn’t the Supreme Simulator tweaked these? My best guess is that probably its because having set the simulation program in motion, and since none of the quirks are serious enough to cause the program simulation to crash, it’s easier just to allow everything to run its course and not ‘end program’ for the sake of relatively major, but not Universe-threatening, repairs. Minor fixes, like those ‘miracle’ tweaks can be fixed on the run without interrupting the simulation, just like some upgrades to your computer software can take place while you work, while others don’t take effect unless you shut down and boot up again. If you can soldier on and not shut down your operation and live without the upgrade(s), that’s okay.
So does that mean our Supreme Simulator, The Boss, is at least 13.7 billion years old since the program running our (presumably) simulated Universe is 13.7 billion years old because it’s been 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang? Not really, since there doesn’t have to be any relationship between time as experienced by the Supreme Simulator and our perception of time, just like you can watch a two hour movie, but as far as the characters in the movie are concerned, perhaps two days, two weeks, two months, two years or two decades have elapsed. So, perhaps one second passing to The Boss is the equivalent of a decade going by the boards to us.
And just like watching a movie, you can speed the film up, or slow it down – even freeze frame it if you’re so inclined. Now if our Supreme Simulator decided to speed up, slow down, even freeze frame (stop) the action, we wouldn’t notice because all of our surroundings would be speeded up, or slowed down, or stopped by the exact same amount (which has some obvious parallels with general relativity).
To be continued…
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