Escaping the simulation

It's undeniable that things have been a little weird lately.

To cite one example, just look at the revelations -- if I can use that word -- from the report on the Mueller investigation this past weekend.  At the time of this writing, outside of Mueller and his team, no one has seen the actual report except for Attorney General William Barr.  But this hasn't stopped everyone from having an opinion about what it says.  Democrats are livid because they're assuming Barr's statement -- that the report exonerates Trump from collusion and obstruction of justice -- accurately reflects the report itself.  Republicans are crowing for the same reason.  And Trump, who has been squawking "No collusion!  No collusion!" like some kind of demented, brain-damaged parrot for months, immediately responded via (of course) Twitter that he was now completely off the hook.

I'm feeling dazed enough by the whole thing that I'm planning on avoiding the news for a couple of weeks.  At this point, my desire to stay well-informed is at odds with my desire to stay sane.

But it's the surreal aspect that I'm thinking about.  As a friend of mine put it, "It's like we've been living in a computer simulation being run by aliens.  And the aliens have gotten bored with their experiments, and now they're just fucking with us to see how we'll react."

Apparently he's not the only one thinking this way.  Because according to a guy who spoke at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, we're not only in a simulation, but he's founding a church dedicated to getting us out of the matrix.

His name is George Hotz, and he's a 29-year-old hacker and founder of the self-driving car startup company Comma.ai.  The talk was entitled "Jailbreaking the Simulation," and here's a bit of it to give you the flavor of his claim:

We are in a simulation.  Has it occurred to you that means God is real?  By drawing parallels to worlds we have created, we ask, from inside our simulator, what actions do we have available?  Can we get out?  Meet God?  Kill him?

Well, that escalated quickly.

There’s no evidence this is not true.  It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.

There's no evidence that the universe is not being controlled by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, either.  Because that's not how evidence works.  And I'm a fiction writer, so trust me that I can easily imagine things that would blow your mind, or at least make you wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant.  But my ability to imagine them is no indicator that any of them are real, which is why all of my books have the word "fiction" on the spine.

I’m thinking about starting a church. There are a lot of structural problems with companies — there’s no real way to win...  With companies, you only really lose.  I think churches might be much more aligned toward these goals, and the goal of the church would be realigning society’s efforts toward getting out [of the simulation].

I don't know about you, but I'm not getting the chain of reasoning, here.  "Companies aren't as lucrative as churches, so we need a church to figure out how to escape from the computer simulation we're trapped in" seems like a leap, logic-wise.

He finished up with a bit of a head-scratcher:

Do I actually believe it?  Some days yes.  Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it out loud.

Which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

So I'm of two minds about all this.  The idea of being in a computer simulation has some appeal, because then it would mean that the last two years has been the result of some super-intelligent beings creating bizarre scenarios for experimental purposes, or at least for their own amusement.  I don't know about you, but I'd be much more comfortable in a universe where Donald Trump was fictional, although I must say that even my own imagination is insufficient to dream up a scenario where a grandstanding narcissistic reality-show host not only became president, but was treated by Christian evangelicals as the Second Coming of Christ despite being a walking encyclopedia of sins.

On the other hand, if we are in a simulation, it's a little alarming to consider the repercussions.  In The Matrix it didn't seem like it was all that great a choice for Neo to take the red pill, because the real reality kind of sucked.  You know, giant tentacled monsters trying to destroy your ship, multiple copies of Agent Smith gunning for you every where you go, and creepy albino twins zooming around destroying cars.  My opinion is that he might have been better off, all things considered, to wake up in his own bed and believe whatever he wanted to believe.

So offered the choice, I don't know what I'd do.  I guess it'd boil down to which was worse, carnivorous metallic squid trying to eat you for lunch, or having to put up with Donald Trump.  I guess I'll make that choice when and if it arises.

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I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

A glitch in the matrix

No matter what your views, on politics or other things, I think there's something we can all agree on:

The last few months have been pretty weird.

First, there was the Brexit vote, followed by the revelation afterwards that over a million people apparently voted to leave the EU because they thought "remain" would win, and after the votes were tallied said that they wished they'd voted the other way.  One person actually said, "I feel genuinely robbed of my vote," as if some supernatural power was controlling his hand when he voted.

Then, we had damn near every political poll predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, and election night resulted in an unequivocal win in the Electoral College for Donald Trump, something that left people on both sides of the aisle feeling more than a little stunned.

Then we had the Superbowl.  The Patriots were widely favored to win without any difficulty.  Sports writer Paul Kasabian, of Bleacher Report, wrote that the likeliest scenario was that the "Patriots jump out to an early lead and go to running back LeGarrette Blount consistently in the second half of the game to control the time of possession and keep Atlanta's high-powered offense off the field. It's certainly possible that will lead to success, as the Falcons finished 29th this year in run defense DVOA...  The Falcons' defense has improved over the last couple of months, but it's hard to see them slowing down the versatile Pats too much."

And of course, that's not what happened.  The Falcons hit an early and completely unexpected lead, only to have the Patriots stage one of the most stunning comebacks in football history to win 34-28.

Then there was the Oscars, with the bizarre and now-notorious flub wherein Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner of Best Film, causing a surge of horrified people onto the stage -- and the producer of La La Land, Jordan Horowitz, was the one to make the correction.

"I'm sorry, there's a mistake," Horowitz said, to gasps from the audience.  "Moonlight, you guys won best picture.  This is not a joke."

And that's not even considering the number of times that I and others have looked at what is happening in the U.S. government -- hell, in the whole world -- and said, "I keep thinking things can't get any weirder, and then it happens."

So apparently all of this loony stuff has left people searching for an explanation.  And they've found one.

There are now people who are using this as evidence that we're living inside a computer simulation gone haywire.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote:

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix.  There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win?  How would they react?”  “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!”  And then it happened.  We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

Apparently this isn't just the idle speculation of a handful of woo-woos.  Clara Moskowitz, senior editor of space and physics at Scientific American, wrote about this very idea a year ago.  "A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors," Moskowitz wrote.  "They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds.  So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds."

But now, Gopnik says, the controllers of the simulation have either lost their grip, or else they're just fucking around with us.  And we shouldn't comfort ourselves with thinking that it's going to be over any time soon:

Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands.  Terrible things did happen as the cold-blooded, unemotional machines that ran it experimented with the effects of traumatic events—wars, plagues, “Gilligan’s Island”—on hyper-emotionalized programs such as us.  And yet the basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound.  Things pinned down did not suddenly drift toward the ceiling; cats did not go to Westminster; Donald Trump did not get elected President; the movie that won Best Picture was the movie that won Best Picture.  Now everything has gone haywire, and anything can happen. 

Whether we are at the mercy of an omniscient adolescent prankster or suddenly the subjects of a more harrowing experiment than any we have been subject to before (is our alien overlords’ funding threatened, thus forcing them to “show results” to the grant-giving institution that doubtless oversees all the simulations?), we can now expect nothing remotely normal to take place for a long time to come.  They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end.

I'm not sure how to think about this.  I've always been a hard-headed materialist; what you see in front of you is real, of course it's real; the Ockham's Razorish least-ad-hoc-assumptions model is that what you're experiencing is, at its essence, the real external universe.  But I've run into people who were idealists -- who believed that what we observe isn't real, that it's a construct of our minds, and that our sensory experience is the only reality.  (I actually knew one guy who was a solipsist -- he believed, apparently seriously, that his perceptions were the only reality, and the rest of us were figments of his imagination who ceased to exist when he wasn't directly observing us.  We used to piss him off by sneaking up behind him and whispering, "We're still heeeere.")

But apparently there are some honest-to-goodness scientific types who are seriously considering the idea that we might be part of a big computer simulation being run by an amazingly advanced race.  And I don't know about you, but this creeps me out.  I had a hard enough time, in the days when I was still attempting to be a practicing Catholic, thinking about a god who was watching me all the time.  Every moment of the day.  While I was showering, while I was taking a piss, and... other times.  You get the picture.  I often wondered how people could possibly find this thought comforting; for me, it was like presupposing that the entire universe was being run by a demented stalker.

So now we're back in the same predicament, but here the Perverted Master Stalker is some superpowerful alien race who not only created me as part of their simulation for some unknown reason, but is watching me to see what I'll do, and probably wondering why their creation picks his nose and plays air guitar when Tommy Shaw's "Girls With Guns" pops up on his iPod.  (Not simultaneously.)

On the other hand, if the being running the simulation really is some kind of Loki-like trickster who is just messing around with us, I suppose it serves him right that some of his creations behave in bizarre ways.

Turnabout's fair play, and all of that sort of stuff.

I guess the upshot is that we should all prepare ourselves for further weirdness.  I'm not sure whether to be apprehensive, or just to leap into the chaos with both feet.  Either way, my reaction probably isn't going to make much difference; however the simulation is being run, I highly doubt that the Alien Master Race is gearing their universe to conform to my desires.  So bring it on.  If the world is going to be crazy, may as well enjoy it.