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by MessageToEagle,
June 05, 2015
from
MessageToEagle Website
Who says there are no open-minded
scientists at NASA?
A NASA scientist suggests you are living
inside a
hologram created by
advanced
alien species.
What if everything you have ever done or
will do is simply the product of a highly-advanced computer code?
Every relationship, every sentiment, every memory could have been
generated by banks of supercomputers.
This was the
intriguing theory first proposed by
Nick Bostrom, Professor in
the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director
of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Program on the
Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School, there
are several scientists who subscribe to this theory.
MessageToEagle.com has previously
reported on how
Rich Terrile, director of the
Centre for
Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory suggested
our creator is a cosmic computer programmer.
This would imply that we are living in a
holographic world and everything around us, including ourselves
is not "real".
Rich Terrile, still stands by his
opinion.
"Right now the fastest
NASA supercomputers are cranking away at about double the
speed of the human brain," the
NASA scientist told Vice.
"If you make a simple calculation
using Moore's Law [which roughly claims computers double in
power every two years], you'll find that these supercomputers,
inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire
human lifetime of 80 years - including every thought ever
conceived during that lifetime - in the span of a month.
"In quantum mechanics, particles do
not have a definite state unless they're being observed.
"Many theorists have spent a lot of
time trying to figure out how you explain this.
"One explanation is that we're
living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we
need to see it.
"What I find inspiring is that, even
if we are in a simulation or many orders of magnitude down in
levels of simulation, somewhere along the line something escaped
the primordial ooze to become us and to result in simulations
that made us - and that's cool."
The idea that our Universe is a fiction
generated by computer code solves a number of inconsistencies and
mysteries about the cosmos, like for example our quest for
extraterrestrial life and the mystery of dark matter.
However, there also those who think the
Matrix theory is flawed.
"The theory seems to be based on the
assumption that ‘superminds' would do things in much the same
way as we would do them," Professor Peter Millican, who teaches
philosophy and computer science at Oxford University says.
"If they think this world is a
simulation, then why do they think the superminds - who are
outside the simulation - would be constrained by the same sorts
of thoughts and methods that we are?
"They assume that the ultimate
structure of a real world can't be grid like, and also that the
superminds would have to implement a virtual world using grids.
"We can't conclude that a grid
structure is evidence of a pretend reality just because our ways
of implementing a pretend reality involve a grid."
However, Professor Peter Millican does believe
there is worth in investigating the idea.
"It is an interesting idea, and it's
healthy to have some crazy ideas," he told The Telegraph.
Is it possible
to escape the matrix?
Image from movie The
Thirteenth Floor
"You don't want to censor ideas
according to whether they seem sensible or not because sometimes
important new advances will seem crazy to start with.
"You never know when good ideas may
come from thinking outside the box.
"This
Matrix thought-experiment is actually a bit like some ideas of
Descartes and Berkeley, hundreds of years ago.
Even if there turns out to be
nothing in it, the fact that you have got into the habit of
thinking crazy things could mean that at some point you are
going to think of something that initially may seem rather way
out, but turns out not to be crazy at all."
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