[ad_1]
When the film "The Matrix" was released 20 years ago (its premiere in March 1999), many film buffs claimed that his film was entertaining but totally improbable.
The protagonist of the movie, Neo, discovers that his reality is not really real. Instead, the world of Neo is a vast simulation orchestrated by a hyper-evolved artificial intelligence that exploits humans for their energy.
While this vision of robot lords probably strikes most people as a stretch, the idea that we live in a simulation is totally plausible, according to some philosophers, and perhaps even probable.
Although Neo's gravity-defying sketches may seem now dated to moviegoers, the concepts put forward in "The Matrix" remain unchanged. Here's why some scientists think we live in a simulation.
The chances of living in reality are a billion to one, say some
In 2001, Nick Bostrom, Oxford University philosopher, released the first draft of an article suggesting that a very advanced supercomputer – with a mass of the order of the planet – would be able to achieve a simulation on the human scale. ladder. (Bostrum told Vulture that he had not seen "The Matrix" before publishing the newspaper.)
Bostrom said that this computer would be able to do 10 42 calculations per second, and it could simulate the entire history of humanity (including all our thoughts, feelings and memories) using less than a millionth of its processing power for just one second.
According to this logic, all of humanity and our entire physical universe are just fragments of data stored on the hard disk of a gigantic supercomputer.
He concluded: "We are almost certainly characters living in a computer simulation."
About 15 years later, Elon Musk – the founder of Tesla and SpaceX – echoed Bostrum's ideas. Musk said at a 2016 Recode conference that he thought "the probability that we are in basic reality is one in billions".
Today, Bostrum still thinks and talks about the difficult relationship that exists between humans and computers. In a speech at this year's TED conference, he advanced the scary idea that humanity could be destroyed with a technology of our own creation.
Read more: An Oxford philosopher who inspired Elon Musk believes that mass surveillance could be the only way to save humanity from misfortune
Bostrom then suggested that the way to save ourselves was simple: mass surveillance using AI.
A scientist argues that our reality is like a giant multiplayer video game
Rizwan Virk, computer scientist and author of the new book "The Simulation Hypothesis" told Vox that he also thought "there is a very good chance that we are actually living in a simulation."
Virk imagines this as "the video game of life", which he calls "the great simulation".
"You can think of this as a high-resolution or high fidelity video game in which we are all characters," he told Vox.
Virk, who is also a video game designer, said that the simulated world of the video game we live in – which is indistinguishable from reality – is far more sophisticated than the giant multiplayer online games that humans create. currently, like World of Warcraft and Fortnite.
He admitted, of course, that no one can trust me 100% that we live in a simulation, but said: "there is a lot of evidence going in this direction".
Some researchers try to test Bostrum's theory
Since the publication of Bostrum's paper, academics have been trying to test the idea that humanity lives in a simulation.
In 2017, a study by Science Advances magazine claimed that a limited type of simulation could not work due to hardware issues. According to the authors of the study, conventional computers do not have enough memory to simulate certain scenarios in our lives and store information.
A group of physicists also attempted to answer these questions by studying cosmic rays. Physicists simulate the space and subatomic particles that it contains using the coordinates of a grid. For example, nuclear physicist Silas Beane and some of his colleagues suggested in a 2014 article that mass simulation in which we could live might use the same coordinate system. Their logic was that if some particles – such as high-energy cosmic rays – still have a maximum energy level (which is the case), the constraints on their behavior could then be due to the underlying network of the simulation.
"There is still the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators," said the authors in the article.
But we will never know the answer
However, many scientists say that we will never be able to determine whether or not we live in a simulation.
Marcelo Gleiser, a physicist and philosopher at Dartmouth College, told New Scientist that trying to answer Bostrum's question based on our current knowledge and technological capabilities was rather hopeless. Indeed, if we really lived in a simulation, scientists would have no idea of the laws of physics in the "real world" outside. They also do not know what kind of calculations would be possible outside the limits of our simulation, Gleiser said.
So, everything we think we know about what is possible in terms of computing power or laws of physics might be just another aspect of the simulation.
Beane expressed similar skepticism.
"If we are indeed a simulation, then it would be a logical possibility that what we measure is not really a law of nature, but rather a kind of artificial law that the simulators came up with," he told Discover. Magazine.
Bostrum, however, remains convinced of his theory that we are very likely in a simulation.
"At the meta level, I have not really seen any convincing objections or refutation attempts," he told Vulture. "So, I guess the absence of that also reinforces my confidence that the reasoning is valid."
[ad_2]
Source link