New hypothesis argues the universe simulates itself into exi

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PSA

I'm going to hit the 'spaz alarm' right at the top because there's enough mindless zealotry here that, sad to say, it's needed.

Putting a lid on the well before anyone tries pouring a bucket of poison in, and also making it clear:

This is speculation, thoughtful speculation but speculation nonetheless, by some of the more freelance portions of the scientific and philosophy of science community - to be taken as a thought experiment rather than the new Good News, and there will be no place to pick up white robes, spiked Koolaid, and passports to French Guyana afterward as that's not the point of the thread. If your deepest wish is to honor said information by joining a doomsday cult or testing reality by jumping off a skyscraper - consider yourself an at-risk member of the WP community, please read no further, and I'd recommend finding psychiatric help immediately as practically anything you see online is likely to have that effect on you within the week.

End PSA


Thread Author's Commentary:

The reason I wanted to post this - it's an article where people who might want to get a foothold on something that's not Christianity and not reductive materialism, might have some onramp into understanding what kinds of claims might be getting made by someone who would espouse a pantheistic, panentheistic, or animistic worldview in a modern naturalist context (ie. not based on religious revelation but taking the pieces and parts of what we're dealing with in terms of our own consciousness and the strange dips of behavior in the universe that do happen, violate reductive materialist expectations, but which generally don't offer an on-ramp into some fixed spiritual or theological cosmology, rather something that seems to deeply and deviously enjoy thumbing our desire for certainty in the eye).

I think I've mentioned some of the other models for this that I've already been chewing on - for example Stephen Wolfram's hypergraph concept, Eric Weinstein talking about Escher's 'hand that writes itself', and most explicitly Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's Conscious Realism which seems to suggest reality as a social network of conscious agents operating on Darwinian and Markovian mathematical dynamics (which I might add happens in a structural context that maps beautifully onto one of the more mainstream theories of mind - ie. functionalism - but picks a somewhat obscure and lesser known subcase which would be 'functionalism with multiple realizability').

Articles like these aren't to be believed 'on faith', every bit as much (to many people perhaps more so) as the latest novel hypotheses on string theory or dark matter aren't intended to be taken as given. To that end the very word 'hypothesis' in the title of the article is both responsible and instructive. The goal is really to chew on the structure of it, the implications, and leave it on the back burner to see if more items that hit your radar match a pattern similar to this. In a way living life without multiple divergent heuristic models to scan information with blinds one to potential structures that aren't in their tool kit because there's no context to slot said information.

The reason I'd give it as much attention or sit in a place where I think some model similar to this, neither theistic nor materialistic (and this is going to be a very short and underdefined explanation - can unpack it later if desired) because there doesn't seem to be any good evidence that the universe is fundamentally structured on morality rather morality is an emergent and pragmatic phenomena (which at least takes out mainstream rather than esoteric versions of the Abrahamic traditions) and at the same time - to even be able to key these words and know that I'm keying them, looking at a computer screen, puts materialism in a paradox where the claim is that non-conscious matter is giving rise to consciousness, it's like claiming there's a number you can multiply 0 by and get a non-zero result if complexity is the claim, and then on top of that we're increasingly finding an information-basis to the universe (people with no interest in mysticism) and we're finding structures in the universe that seem akin to... lets just say agentic routing of information, as if there are preferences. Add to that all of the personal breaches of said reductive materialist claims that people experience which, as private non-repeatable experiences, can't be made to be the basis of peer-reviewed experiments.


Ideally the invitation is to anyone - who feels they have the following capacity - to think of topics as strange as these in the most hard-nosed way they can manage, that is joining the dance of keeping an open mind without it being so open that it falls out. There's also an added benefit - when you can hold truly unusual or reality-breaking hypotheses or ideas in your head without falling down a rabbit hole, it's much harder to be sold a bill of goods by your favorite network news channel or memes bombarding you on Facebook or Twitter where the partisan manipulation can range from strikingly over to covert.


Article:

Big Think: New hypothesis argues the universe simulates itself into existence, by PAUL RATNER
26 April, 2020

https://bigthink.com/surprising-science ... BC_LOcozTc

^^^

Smiles... if We Come into This World Naked

And Stay That Way Without Any Clothes... Without

Any Written Words to Collect Knowledge

What We Find Just By Observing

Nature as A Natural

Scientist of

Seeing Patterns

Living in Nature is that

As Above, So Below, Within

Inside, Outside, And All Around

We Are Both Leaf And Tree

As Any Child With

Eyes Will

See Picking

Up A Leaf off Of Grass

Where From A Distance

Grass Is A Leaf As Well As Meadow

Looking Out into Space Just A Reflection

Of Stars... Neurons Points of Light in Now

What Science Brings as a Look Within Even

Deeper As Above, So Below, Within, Inside

Outside, And All Around; Yet, What Remains

As Solid

Truth

Is THere
Is a Tree in Every

Leaf And Flower of Life

In Every Star Flower Seed...

It's not so Much A Stretch that

Existence As Whole Reflects A Mind

Such As the Leaf of Our Tree We See And See With too...

It's Just

Common Sense

And Feel For Those who

See With A Bigger Picture

Than Only Shells, Words, Idols, Forms

Of What Is So Much Greater ALL that is...

At Essence

ALL

With

No

Separation

This is surely

Nothing New in News

Above Or Below the Sun

Within The UNiVerSE And More

Outside The Same

All

Around...

Surely if i came to

This Conclusion Before

i spoke Looking Across A River

Into the Forest Seeing me at age

3 as Leaf of this Entire Living Tree

Yes.. Before

i spoke

At

Age

4 Putting it into

Shells of Words Now

Essence Beyond Measure

It doesn't take a 'Rocket Scientist'

To Figure this Out if a 3 Year-Old Child

Will just see who they really are now...

Then Naked Wordless And Free; Yet,

Layers of

Cultural

Clothes

Sadly

Take This
Away... This 'KNoWinG'

Of All 'the Child' Will see...

True Reborn We Will See too.. as 'the Child' Naturally Sees...

Or a Squirrel With Fur as Part of a Tree Or A Bird on a Wing

As Eagle's See, Be,

And Fly Wind..

Again

For What

The Quiet Child Sees...

And Obviously by Metaphor

the Right Brain Speaks Much

Differently than a Left Brain

Trapped As Neo-Cortex Without

River Flow Into the Rest of the UniVerse and More free...

Again, Within, Inside, Outside, Above, So Below Just

A Few

of my

Favorite

Things and

Part of a Much

Deeper Story

that comes

Free

From Within
And Everywhere
Else True So Free As Wind Sees...

All Around Even More To come

Sooner or Later Science Will Catch

Up to What 'The Quiet Child' Sees....

The Squirrel, And The Eagle too With SMiLes the Living Tree....

Pure speculation, indeed.  It does not even qualify as an hypothesis.