Based on physics, what insights do you make about reality?

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LoveNotHate
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25 Aug 2017, 3:03 pm

Physics tells us:

a.All matter is connected. There are no "gaps" in matter. Our brain filters our reality to make us perceive gaps. For example, "air" or "light" appears like empty space, however, there are actually air and photonic molecules that our brain filters out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIYU5IrIazc

b.Quantum entanglement suggests matter is interrelated over long distances (i.e., a particle in London knows what a particle in New York is doing). This is based on probability math. Simply, the spin of a particle in London can be changed, and consequently, a particle in New York will change to be consistently biased based on the particle in London. If these particles were not "entangled", then there should be no consistent change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

c. Quantum superposition reality "collapses" from many potential states to a single state. The reality will know is one of the many potential realities. In 2013, it was shown that a specific type of molecule can exist in quantum superposition. Scientists are investigating using freezing to put ever-larger particles into superposition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition

The promise of quantum computing is that they can compute in the superposition state so that all the potential states can be accessed before the collapse to reality. <-----WOZZERS . This is so unbelievable that there are many skeptics to quantum computing. That many potential realities can be accessed before one of them becomes our reality.<---WTF

d. Error Correction codes in matter - as if matter is a building block, built by a creator, a physicist has found "error correction codes" built into matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvMlUepVgbA

e. Observer effect - the observer collapses reality states. To know something , then that reality state must have collapsed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

Conclusion:
This is why high profile physicists suggest we likely exist in a simulation.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... imulation/

It is easy to see how our reality could be like the holo-deck on Star Trek.

What do you make of our reality?

Image

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shlaifu
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25 Aug 2017, 3:59 pm

If realty is a simulation, chances are so are we. So, that, for now, doesn't require immediate action from me, and for all intents and purposes, things are staying the same until someone figures out whether we are A) in a simulation, and B) exist outside of the simulation.
and then there's the question if it is a self-assembling simulation.


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naturalplastic
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25 Aug 2017, 4:03 pm

We are all just characters in a big game of "Farmville" being played by a geeky kid on a computer in his bedroom.

And that geeky kid is himself a simulated character in ANOTHER game of Farmville being played by a bigger geeky kid in a bigger bedroom, in a bigger universe that is also..

a game of Farmville being played by a geeky kid on a computer in his bedroom in .......



LoveNotHate
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25 Aug 2017, 4:25 pm

shlaifu wrote:
If realty is a simulation, chances are so are we. So, that, for now, doesn't require immediate action from me, and for all intents and purposes, things are staying the same until someone figures out whether we are A) in a simulation, and B) exist outside of the simulation.
and then there's the question if it is a self-assembling simulation.

Yes, there is actually theories on that ...whether it is assembled from within ...

Does consciousness determine reality.



LoveNotHate
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25 Aug 2017, 4:25 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
We are all just characters in a big game of "Farmville" being played by a geeky kid on a computer in his bedroom.

And that geeky kid is himself a simulated character in ANOTHER game of Farmville being played by a bigger geeky kid in a bigger bedroom, in a bigger universe that is also..

a game of Farmville being played by a geeky kid on a computer in his bedroom in .......

Thanks you cheered me up on a Friday weekend. :)



will@rd
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25 Aug 2017, 4:29 pm

shlaifu wrote:
If realty is a simulation, chances are so are we.


That would seem to go without saying.

"We" being the ego-consciousness, with which we tend to associate our given name - although it is entirely possible that there is more to us than that, and that another portion of our individual totality does exist outside the simulation.

Which is to say, your current personality is actually an RPG character, while a higher portion of your mind plays the game from the outside, and will continue to exist, even after your "character" is killed off (and may even be playing multiple characters, in multiple games, simultaneously (thus occasional "past-life memory" bleed-overs).

shlaifu wrote:
and then there's the question if it is a self-assembling simulation.


In other words, a daydream, in the mind of a higher consciousness.

How could we ever hope to know the mind that imagines us? o_O The thought sprains the brain...


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techstepgenr8tion
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25 Aug 2017, 8:10 pm

This is a seven year old Google talk that I thought was interesting, mainly for highlighting Emmy Noether as a mathematician as well as covering some implications about symmetries and broken symmetries that tells us a little bit about how we're starting to think conservation of energy still equals out with broken symmetries such as a one-way arrow of time or lots of matter but little antimatter:



I'm having a tough time really making a decision on what the science means to me when I see it. There seem to be some strange feedback loops and we're still dealing with a lot of postulated things and plug figures.

What I think I'll be more interested in is seeing where the field of quantum biology goes. We know that quantum tunneling plays a key role in photosynthesis in plants. It would be great if we could somehow come up with powerful organic solar panels of some type which would cost a lot less, be made from renewable resources, and shelve a lot of the really toxic stuff that we're using to manufacture them now.


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25 Aug 2017, 8:17 pm

As for the virtual universe idea - I still don't feel like I understand what they mean by 'virtual'. On a few occasions I've taken a work day to listen to Tom Campbell on his My Big Toe theories while I was working on various other things and one of the problems I have with his specific explanation is that he's suggesting reality renders itself as we visually process it. I've heard other people like Donald Hoffman say somewhat similar things or some neutral monists of the Mock-James-Russell variety talk about the eye being the merger of subject and object, the later is really tough to make pragmatic sense of but it doesn't have a particular weakness that Tom Campbell's WOW type analogy has.

To have a fully virtual world it would be easily rendered if it were just the first-person characters who are made of some kind of stuff we could call 'participant' and all other things - both organic and inorganic - being part of something called 'background' or 'backdrop'. You get a much less parsimonious rendering if all of the organic matter has some degree of 'participant', and even worse if evidence starts showing that even classically inanimate objects also have some degree of participant. At that point - what qualifies what's left as a virtual world? It could be made of data but the complexity of relationships and connections suggests that it's far from being a parsimonious setup.

Maybe someone will come up with an explanation for what justifies virtual reality claims for a reasonably conscious universe but I doubt I'll have a whole lot more to say on that until I hear someone make a good case for it.


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25 Aug 2017, 8:52 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
This is a seven year old Google talk that I thought was interesting, mainly for highlighting Emmy Noether as a mathematician as well as covering some implications about symmetries and broken symmetries that tells us a little bit about how we're starting to think conservation of energy still equals out with broken symmetries such as a one-way arrow of time or lots of matter but little antimatter:



I'm having a tough time really making a decision on what the science means to me when I see it. There seem to be some strange feedback loops and we're still dealing with a lot of postulated things and plug figures.

What I think I'll be more interested in is seeing where the field of quantum biology goes. We know that quantum tunneling plays a key role in photosynthesis in plants. It would be great if we could somehow come up with powerful organic solar panels of some type which would cost a lot less, be made from renewable resources, and shelve a lot of the really toxic stuff that we're using to manufacture them now.

thanks I will watch later.

I would expect in "quantum biology" you would see the formulas and ideas change to formulaic probabilistic outcomes, rather than deterministic.

I found this video. I am going to watch it now.



techstepgenr8tion
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25 Aug 2017, 9:00 pm

LoveNotHate wrote:
I would expect in "quantum biology" you would see the formulas and ideas change to formulaic probabilistic outcomes, rather than deterministic.


AFAIK there are certain types of molecule whose electron structure can exploit energy changes in incoming particles as they tunnel. I know Stuart Hameroff often brings up benzene rings and suggests that the radial structure causes there to be a lot of free-floating electrons that have a pliable relationship with their host molecule. A lot of this seems to be about the fungibility of energy but that's about as far as I've been able to follow yet.


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25 Aug 2017, 9:04 pm

I imagine if this universe were a simulation, it would differ from the actual universe in that it would be lower in resolution and idealized to some degree. If ran on technology similar to that which we have, I would expect a simulated universe to be quantized, which ours is, yet, at the same time, being part of the simulation, I would expect us to not be able to perceive this quantization, but we can.



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25 Aug 2017, 9:32 pm

Chronos wrote:
I imagine if this universe were a simulation, it would differ from the actual universe in that it would be lower in resolution and idealized to some degree. If ran on technology similar to that which we have, I would expect a simulated universe to be quantized, which ours is, yet, at the same time, being part of the simulation, I would expect us to not be able to perceive this quantization, but we can.


Your last point I agree with, and I would count this as being yet more evidence against the simulation hypothesis. One would think that any intelligence sufficiently advanced enough to actually do something like this would also make sure that those being simulated would never be able to determine that their reality is fake.

There is also the infinite regress problem. If our reality is simulated, then doesn't it stand to reason that there is a very, very high chance that those who have created our virtual world are also themselves unreal? At what point in this long, long chain does one reach actual reality?

No, this whole business of our reality being a computer programme just doesn't make any sense. As an idea it just doesn't work.



LoveNotHate
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25 Aug 2017, 9:35 pm

Chronos wrote:
I imagine if this universe were a simulation, it would differ from the actual universe in that it would be lower in resolution and idealized to some degree. If ran on technology similar to that which we have, I would expect a simulated universe to be quantized, which ours is, yet, at the same time, being part of the simulation, I would expect us to not be able to perceive this quantization, but we can.

Yes, great point.

"Seeing" or "becoming aware" of quantization seems like a breech of the simulation.

However, it's unclear if we can actually do this.

Presently, there is no evidence we can actually access or influence the other potential alternate realities when in a superposition state.

And the observer effect seems to force the collapse of quantization to a particular reality, if anyone becomes aware of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

That would be a counter-argument, that there is a "safe guard".



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25 Aug 2017, 9:50 pm

Lintar wrote:
There is also the infinite regress problem. If our reality is simulated, then doesn't it stand to reason that there is a very, very high chance that those who have created our virtual world are also themselves unreal? At what point in this long, long chain does one reach actual reality?

Lol, 13th Floor had a go at that, 10 years before Inception.

Lintar wrote:
No, this whole business of our reality being a computer programme just doesn't make any sense. As an idea it just doesn't work.

It could have simulation-like qualities but once it gets component and part-rich enough I think it fails as an analogy.


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27 Aug 2017, 11:15 pm

I suppose the question is, what is the likelihood of perceiving quantization in a quantized, simulated universe, when one is part of the simulation? And if quantization is perceived, is the quantization part of the simulation or a manifestation of the quantized nature of the system on which the simulation is ran?

For example...

Image

Above is a particle in a box. Let's assume this is a photon. The photon cannot exist where the curve crosses the horizontal access. The photon exists with some non-zero probability between the nodes, and thus is represented the spatial quanta of a photon. Notice though that photons of different wavelengths can exist where other photons can't.

We can simulate photons and their quantized nature on a computer, but that does not express the quantized nature of the computer itself, where data exists as 1's and 0's on a physical medium which is itself quantized into zones, which is itself quantized into molecules, atoms, sub atomic particles, quarks, and so on. The quantization observed in the simulation is built into the simulation as part of it.



Michael829
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31 Aug 2017, 5:51 pm

LoveNotHate wrote:
Physics tells us:


...nothing about Reality.

Metaphysics is philosophy about Reality and what is. Physics tells nothing about that. Physics tells us about our physical universe, how it works, the inter-relations among its component parts. Of course physics isn't completely-known, and probably never will be.

It's a common mistake to assume that Reality consists of the physical world. No, that's just one particular metaphysics, and not a plausible one at that. It's called "Materialism" or (metaphysical) "Physicalism". One problem that it has is that the objectively-existent, fundamentally-existent physical world that it posits is supposed to be accepted as a brute-fact. Be skeptical of any metaphysics that posits a brute-fact.

Physicists Michael Faraday (1844), Frank Tipplere (1970s or '80s), and Max Tegmark (currently) have pointed out that this physical world, and all the observations, measurements and experiences of it, are entirely consistent with a mathematical/logical system of inter-relational structure. ...and that there's no reason to believe in the objectively-existent "stuff" or "things" that Materialism believes in.

The way I put it is:

This physical world (like infinitely-many other ones) consists of a system of inter-referring hypotheticals. ...inter-referring hypothetical if-then facts.

As the abovementioned physicists pointed out, there's no reason to believe in Mateialism's objectively-existent "stuff" or "things".

Why are there those systems of inter-referring hypothetical if-then facts?

How could there not be?

After all, I'm not saying that any of this is objectively real or objectively factual.

The hypothetical systems of inter-referring "if-then"s don't and needn't have any reality, existence, meaning or factuality in any constext other than their own inter-referring context among eachother.

I'll just add that even if Materialism were true, it would be irrelevant and superfluous, since observations and experience are consistent with, and explained by the hypothetical structure described above.

Where i differ from Tippler and Tegmark is that I speak of your own personal life-experience possibility-story as being the fundamental thing, the basic thing. The possibility-world that you live in is only secondary, as the setting for your life-experience possibility-story.

Using pre-existing philosophical terminology, that metaphysics could be called:

"Eliminative Ontic Structural Non-Realism."

I call it "Skepticism", because it's skepticism itself. ...because the metaphysics proposed above makes no assumptions and posits no brute-facts. Complete rejection of assumptions and brute-facts certainly qualifies as skeptical.

This forum isn't exclusively a philosophy forum, and many here aren't interested in philosophy, and so a metaphysics other than the usual standard Materialism might not be well-received here.

That's ok. I accept that.

And no, this universe of ours isn't someone's computer-simulation. A computer simulation couldn't have created this universe. Why not?:

Because our universe, as a possibility-world, and your life, as a life-experience possibility-story, were already there, as an abstract hypothetical story. You can't "create" something that's already there.

The only thing that a simulation could 'create" would be an opportunity for its programmers to observe some particular possiblity-world (such as ours).

Michael829


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