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TEDx Talks
Published: 2014-02-12
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Chfoo9NBEow
thank you it's a pleasure to be here they ask talented right before I came on my ass replying but they give me water so following the speakers I have a change of pace the little fun talk and what I'm going to try and do is convince you you're a simulation and the physics can prove it okay so it's so usual uplifting talk this is a different
kind okay so there's one thing you know for certain that is it you exist as a flesh and blood human being my goal is to convince you otherwise okay so logic is not going to be enough you guys are gonna be simulation deniers but I mean there's just no way around it so my actual goal will be to actually create a sliver of doubt in our
minds so that you actually think about this and what it might mean okay so here's the first check about simulations how many of you ever played a computer game just raise your hands I alright so did you do it again simulated player or stimulate players or in fact was that you saw several people plus simulated people right and what role did you take was upon her
hero what role do you have in life is upon her hero bank are you looking for eggs and yeah I don't see him here but I'm you know now the other thing that asked if you're a social scientist or other kind of science like a cosmologist would you like to run realistic simulations to test and develop your theories like why for political candidates right so they're
not just trying to see this motivation for it and then the question is are computation and servers and simulation cut and capabilities increasing over time so think of by have this thing about Moore's law think about what computer you had when you were young and with what you have when you're now not that you're all about Williams this is setting you up for for having that
out okay so would take a little journey in the policy solipsism is the idea that once on mine is the only thing that sure to exist it turns out people been studying this for decades and realizes both irrefutable and indefensible at the same time to have this going with you and that it's not a falsifiable hypothesis there people who work on this issue so there doesn't
seem to be any image or will disprove that you can have so even if you have a focus and he dies you can't force by his belief because he's not there to do it is a pragmatic dead end it's kinda like what we have on TV now which is you know you know zombie philosophy but there is an obvious that that is philosophical zombies there's a
slight used to fill the couple's obvious so what is the idea here the Phils novels ami is a hypothetical being that's indistinguishable from a normal human being that is everybody you think you are you know what you think you are except that it lacks conscious experience Kalibo or sentence so if you take a field longer lobby and poke it with a dark object doesn't feel any
pain however it behaves exactly photogs you know it say Allison's WTO kind of things so what does what the zombies there for is support the idea that the world includes two kinds of things the mental and the physical but but but but concepts and the physical world around and so that's the idea so we have in cosmology lots of things we have the on topic principle
that is the fills a concept that the universe must be compatible with concepts like that observes it and there's a strong version a weak version one on the says the universe is compel half conscious life emerge Miller says that the universe is fine tuned for life to be necessary and this is pretty much in line with a lot of a even more specific and ideas from
conservative Christianity and and Islam that there's intelligent design or it could be like a simulation I'm I'm working on some and we also have the idea of multi verses but there are many different kinds there's a there's a meta universe under the many possible universes inside of it and they're different reasons for that Kwan mechanics but also a way to explain why the physical constants have
to be the ones that make this auditorium possible and so you know one way is to have that many real universes getaways just make a lot simulations you your choice okay so many move on here's the crux of the arguments and these arguments have been around for more than thirty years and that they were first published thirty years ago and what people went to a lot
of trouble to show that one of these three things is extremely likely to be true so you got your choice between number one number two or number three just like the doors book with behind the store the first one is human civilization is unlikely to reach a level technological maturity Cape overdosing simulated realities right or it's physically possible okay so we made some progress in thirty
years and I'll mention that the second is compatible civilizations throughout the universe are you know which would don't do reach that capability will choose not to make simulations and such a large scale that in fact the probability of being simulated being is much higher than the probably being reopened it's a but so does your choices night there's some other choices but are extraordinarily unlikely and and
we can play Mitchell now and the third choices any entity with our general set of experiences are almost certainly to be living in a simulation that would be us case you guys are paying attention okay so let's talk about making simulator realities by humans so we'll persimmons produce realistic simulations I'm the answer is yes he climbed back because I just wrote this talk and so I
don't remember what all had the same and the so the answer to that is clearly yes you guys are he proved it right because there's a lot of money being made in making computer games simulated realities and the better the simulated reality the more people you can involved there's a lot of entertainment we have a lot of animated movies now we're going to have animated interactive
movies and videos was coming out and pornography so you know you can't rely primarily in the early days of the internet pornography was that the number one commerce it was roughly half the commerce and the internet nearly days and even today fifty percent of the of the bits that are transmitted on the internet transmitted for corn right so you can wonder why is that well originally
stories and then they got three pictures and then I got to be videos reasonably interactive video so it's clearly there is a tremendous financial motivation and especially here on media city where do you like filling out those kind things so how I'm not sure which of the three but okay how do you tell them how accurate will the simulation speed I'm answer turns out as we
know from computation power is the first issue you have to have tremendously good competition to make a really good quality simulation and pro good programming that is good software to explain what's going on that's the size but clearly we're making progress just look at the games the original look upon and look at the kind of video games we have now right and the so we'll see
what about simulations by other civilizations okay so now we know a lot more about this than we did thirty years ago we made tremendous progress we've discovered more than two thousand other stars that have planetary systems around them and that we know there is at least on the order of a billion or more habitable planets in our galaxy and there's about a hundred billion galaxies for
around ten of the twentieth ten of the twenty two depending what your range possible sites for life and then the Vance solutions the universe so what are the chances that the earth is the most advanced the most computationally powerful well the odds you got to be really you know pretty much the king you're special to think that the odds are that where the where the top
ranked and the so then the question is will you know advanced %HESITATION you know beings run simulations and in fact will simulated beings run simulations right it were simulated are we running simulations and are similar since you know the simulations always now you know things so even even the people running are so much and don't know if their simulation or not okay so well that's there's
it's interesting because it creates ethics and a bunch of things because there might be somebody watching you and the so our ethical considerations likely to stop every single civilization from running simulations and running a large numbers of simulations alright well the answer I think is no what if doing simulations like to say what we think our real lives we're going to do the simulations even though
they're being strapped in a simulation conscious being and the other thing you might consider is how human beings treat real what they think are real human beings house the ethical treatment on on earth and how how much more society like advanced before we're doing very vassals nations bet very advanced simulations of civilizations and and beings okay I will probably assimilation lights are not on another here
but look to the left and look to the right if there's anybody here you think is a real person this is a random sample then you're probably not so I will go inhabit the you know if you think you're a social scientist or an anthropologist if you want to run and see how civilizations rise and fall you'll run simulations with up to billions of people and
you will run many of those simulations so it's not so hard to imagine you get up to the level of ten of the twelve to one simulated beings guns and so that's no that's why the probability becomes very likely that any being that has a behavior activities and experience of like us is simulated so I got some some some seem and my opponents on screen this
morning case was unusual day in England and I got a little my I hear okay so let's talk about how how we're going to do simulations on the earth I can't let me conventus is part of going back to convention you that we're going to have realistic simulations and we're gonna have have artificial reality to go with it so can we take a real brain and
make it into a virtual mind and the answer is so here's the purple real brain and the neurons behind assist neural net the regional Marinette as far as we're concerned and then on the left you're left %HESITATION there is the beginnings a mapping of a brain so that I can take a map that brain and just place it into a computer so how how they're going
to work okay the answer is it's gonna work just fine because we are there to the point where we can do it now so here's a here is a high resolution forty five minute brain scans that was done in February okay at forty five minutes that's how long you have to hold prisons had still in order to make a map to this level and what you
can see here are the main if the laser pointer works help so you can see here the main highways in her brain right there are mapped out by this this is this is basically an MRI I I got a scanned my brain done and I was real impressed through that I had a brain one of my friends got fMRI true that his brain worked and so
but look nothing that's impressive about is that the that the PMR eyes are getting so good now you can maps of individual nor on metal level the problem is there's a lot of neurons so you have to hold my head still for a long time and that's an advance in the ability to do the mapping and also in the software for doing that mapping and so
that's where we are today if we can hold the person still long enough we can find a volunteer that we can put you know the little plastic thing on their head to hold my head still for some days which is a little bit of a problem we could probably go ahead in math there math their entire brain and then just transform that map into a computer
model and we would have that person's mind downloaded into computer so that's just coming and this is coming soon just like it's now possible for on the order of a thousand pounds to get your DNA mapped it's going to cost you something in it and about there in about thirty years it's going to be possible to download your brain into a computer for about a thousand
patents plus inflation well I don't know how and you know simply could could go up could go down right but that there's tremendous advances in technology and these are make it possible to do things that before we thought so I have a quote from a rule experts will be uploading entire minds can be yours in twenty forty five he also says who do bodies too I'm
thinking we want two bodies what we'll do is we'll take that mine and keep it from going out of his mind Butler artificial reality right it's in the computer it's gonna get bored once entertainment one social interactions and some so we're going to create artificial realities now in the old days we make a thing like that remember the matrix by one zero us now in fact
we may use quantum computers so we'll have a tangle states but in fact it'll be some kinda complicated environment will we can interact socially because people want to be social so there have to be thousands of people there in Iraq with and they'll have to be all kinds of other things in order to make that our personal violence sort of realistic can keep you going and
remember when you download your brain you can think about a million times faster you can experience life of an intense fast it's going to be a very different kind of a of a situation you know the idea of going back and machines and when the real world things slow slow bats you know you you're gonna get tired you wanna and besides assimilated partisan so when the
real world so okay so now the other thing I have to do is to track your that attack your certainty so I have to point out to you human beings are not good at figuring out if they're real okay so your mind is really not equipped for addressing this and many other important questions so the first question I mean give you is count the number of
black dots okay mother not me it's a still picture there's no video Nash okay so alright here we go you see this picture how many do you see the horse in the picture how many of you cannot see the horse in the picture what you see the horses are not the sewers okay okay I'm sure picture an object master can it be real I'm gonna tell
you it's a photograph the watch Israel the the papers real desk is a real is that object real well it's a photograph so it's a real in some sense as is this for me this objects back and forth okay here's the real version of that made out of out of out of two by fours recall an American which you prefer shift focus of two different angles
and use is an optical illusion where I put it together and here's another example and this is a another example just for fun you know because you know it's just rotated but it the first responses who that's weird okay so here's one you're gonna get the answer to which of these is longer alright so they're the same how come it doesn't really look that way to