Do we care about "real" reality if we can, more or less, make sense of some of its manifestations through our senses?
That there is something deeper and unknowable and "informationally huge" seems obvious. We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies (which are themselves a result of us becoming comfortable enough with our immediate reality, as a sort of positive feedback loop).
There is every reason to suspect that this deeper reality does not stop where our technologically extended abilities peter out. Our imperfect and tentative understanding when reaching the extremes of scales (of time, space, complexity, etc) is perfectly understandable. Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.
On the other hand over millennia of brainstorming (literally) we have collected some interesting datapoints about this deeper reality: it is not "malicious", and somehow it agrees to be mapped by us (mathematically), even if in disconnected parts.
In fact this benevolent aspect of deeper reality has made us unusually cocky. Imagine the existential angst if the universe changed its laws at whim. We'd be back to praying. E.g., that gravity remains stable for a while so that we don't drift into space. This premature self-assuredness explains repeated scientific episodes of proclaiming "we have explained everything". This also feeds the sterile chase of "a theory of everything".
In fact the limits of our understanding are in front of our eyes, everywhere. We haven't really explained a single phenomenon in the so called "complexity science" domain. Deeper reality is all around us and the most dramatic and impactful scientific revolutions are still ahead of us.
> Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.
Have asked that and have a guess: Darwin-style selection rewarded getting some rational understanding of the most important parts of nature -- fire, rock tools, clean water, agriculture, staying warm in winter, basic geometry, bows and arrows, the Pythagorean theorem, levers, wheels, boats, etc. -- we encountered. Well, it so happens that in this universe such "rational understanding" is enough to understand basic math, physics, chemistry, biology, ... back to the Big Bang, the 3 K background radiation, cells, reproduction, nutrition, diseases and immunity, ....
I gave up on the US education physics community when my teachers couldn't give a valid proof of Stokes' theorem, explanation of Young's double slit, or the beginnings of quantum mechanics.
So, now I have several polished treatments of each of Stokes' theorem, Maxwell's equations, and special relativity. Got a good background in probability (Neveu, Poincaré recurrence, martingales, etc.), enough to get a good path through thermodynamics. From Rudin, etc., got enough solid Fourier theory to check carefully the uncertainty principle in physics (doubt that what physics does there is fully justified) -- also carefully treated in a great course in "Analysis and Probability". For differential geometry, an Andrew Gleason student gave me some lectures and explained that the keys are the inverse and implicit function theorems, proved in a book by W. Fleming and just exercises in a Rudin book -- local nonlinear versions of what is easy in linear algebra. So, now I attack physics as a curious amateur!
I do remember a remark from a good mathematician: "Physics abuses its students." Well, they can abuse me no longer, and I can still do high quality study of physics.
>We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies
Did we? If we're in a simulation instead of base reality, it's possible that simulation have actually created them for us when we started looking, depending on the scope and paramaters of simulaiton scenario.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The idea that the act of observation impacts an experiment (or how particles behave) is one of the most counterintuitive and surprising “truths” I’ve ever heard. I would love to hear a logical explanation of why (not just a description of it).
Observation doesn't impact experiments. Interaction does. In fact, it is quite difficult to formulate the "collapse" of the wavefunction as a physical interaction and to the extent that we can, the experimental evidence seems to suggest that it is not. This is a common misconception about quantum mechanics, partly because even undergraduate texts conflate the uncertainty principal with observation.
The logical explanation: "observation" has nothing to do with conscious woo, it's just that in order to have a definite answer we build experiments so they collapse the wavefunction.
It's like asking someone on a date: maybe they were in a superposition before, but now they have to answer, and having answered ("been observed"), that answer is highly likely to stay constant in the short term.
(when you think about it from this point of view, it's classical physics that's counterintuitive: why should we expect that asking questions about one projection of state doesn't affect the answers we get from later asking about others, not even in the slightest?)
The point I was trying to make is that if we are indeed in a simulation, and I'm not saying that we definitely are, but if we are - one possibility to design such a simulation in a way to make it more efficient is to actually make computations depend on the observer, meaning that sorry, but in this case it would have conscious "woo" built in.
Just in the same way as that only visible from current perspective objects are being drawn on a frame of a 3D game.
Currently unobserved parts of the simulation might exist in different form.
It's okay to disagree with simulation theory, but it is a perfectly valid possibility according to everything we know.
Personally, I don't think it's the only possibility, but i think it's quite probable and should be taken seriously.
One problem is that gravity is universally coupling, so no part of the universe is technically "unobserved." I suspect that we could look back at the dynamics of large scale systems and see deviations from GR if the simulation were neglecting any part of the universe in the absence of observation/interaction.
If I were building a simulation I would just have not made gravity universally coupling because it makes it hard to chunk reality up into parts. Thus it seems like the universal coupling of gravity is evidence against a simulation hypothesis.
The reason for my personal choice to not take simulation theory seriously is because simulations are an instance of Russell's Teapot. Anything which can be explained as S simulating T can be explained more simply as just T (or, in the opposite direction, even more complicatedly as R simulating S simulating T, etc. Can* we go all the way to a countably infinite tower of simulations?).
* if yes, then I'd have to admit that the omega-tower could be as interesting to study as the 0-tower, but if no then I'd maintain the 0-tower is way more interesting than any of its successor towers.
If you were to believe the universe was a simulation, would you do anything differently? could you?
(this line of approach, less formal and perhaps more congenial to CPS' other culture, is inspired by Dewey and James' pragmatism, in which philosophical problems are only well-posed if they have "cash value". We hackers don't make comparisons without subsequently using the flag value; they didn't ask questions whose answers are moot)
If we were in a simulation, due to the hard problem, it would be impossible for the simulators to know whether anything in their simulation had qualitative experiences, so they could not make conscious observation a prerequisite of detail rendering, only interaction. No woo necessary.
I had an experience where I knew(not believe) I was the kind of the screen in which everything appears(including the human body). Lasted for a couple of hours.
After the experience all the religious teaching started to make sense instantly.
I think the thing is Self, Soul, Consciousness, Atman, Reality, Simulation, Screen or whatever you call it.
It's what all the world religions point to.
Though teachings has been made so hard to grasp by culture and dogma.
It's something you(the ego) cannot know without experiencing it. You can try to believe it. But the ego will not let you.
I don't think the ego has any intent. I think it's a collection of memories and emotions that you have accumulated over the past. Like a cache that is outdated.
Imagine your knowingness as an information stream of images (memories included), smell, feelings, sound etc.
For most people the information stream has the ego dominating.
When the ego is strong people identify themselves with the idea of them based on their memories, beliefs, culture etc.
When the ego goes away I think you are left with who you really are which when you experience feels eternal and permanent and is a placeholder in which everything appears.
That there is something deeper and unknowable and "informationally huge" seems obvious. We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies (which are themselves a result of us becoming comfortable enough with our immediate reality, as a sort of positive feedback loop).
There is every reason to suspect that this deeper reality does not stop where our technologically extended abilities peter out. Our imperfect and tentative understanding when reaching the extremes of scales (of time, space, complexity, etc) is perfectly understandable. Why should a finite carbon brain be able to map out a coherent and finite model of something much, much bigger than itself.
On the other hand over millennia of brainstorming (literally) we have collected some interesting datapoints about this deeper reality: it is not "malicious", and somehow it agrees to be mapped by us (mathematically), even if in disconnected parts.
In fact this benevolent aspect of deeper reality has made us unusually cocky. Imagine the existential angst if the universe changed its laws at whim. We'd be back to praying. E.g., that gravity remains stable for a while so that we don't drift into space. This premature self-assuredness explains repeated scientific episodes of proclaiming "we have explained everything". This also feeds the sterile chase of "a theory of everything".
In fact the limits of our understanding are in front of our eyes, everywhere. We haven't really explained a single phenomenon in the so called "complexity science" domain. Deeper reality is all around us and the most dramatic and impactful scientific revolutions are still ahead of us.