Slapping Down The Simulation

I have written previously on what I consider to be the extremely dumb "simulation argument," the contention that the universe we live in could be some sort of computer simulation akin to the world of the film The Matrix. The argument itself, originally formalized by philosopher Nick Bostrum suffers from a basic mathematical flaw that for some reason never gets brought up - classic "gambler's fallacy." Bostrum's argument is essentially that if it is possible to build a true simulated reality, it is likely that a huge number of them would be created. Since that huge number is bigger than one, the number of "real realities," it is more likely than not that we live in a simulated universe.

This is pretty much the same thing as saying that if you do a hundred coin flips and get sixty heads and forty tails, it is more likely that the next flip will be heads. But this can easily be shown to be false with a simple experiment. Each flip is independent, just like each member of the collection of different realities would be. If this were not true, you could use something like Bostrum's math to, say, win a bunch of money at a roulette wheel. If anybody out there can experimentally show this is possible, I'll listen to what they have to say. Otherwise I completely fail to understand how anyone can fall for "the simulation" if they know anything at all about probability.

But according to this article, the probabilitic issues are not even the worst of it. According to a new mathematical proof, it is actually impossible to simulate the physical universe by computational means. It shows that the answer to the first question in Bostrum's argument, whether or not it is possible to create a simulated universe inside a computer, is no. The laws of physics cannot simply be generated by a computer algorithm, no matter how complex that algorithm is.

Dr. Mir Faizal, Adjunct Professor with UBC Okanagan's Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science, and his international colleagues, Drs. Lawrence M. Krauss, Arshid Shabir and Francesco Marino have shown that the fundamental nature of reality operates in a way that no computer could ever simulate. Their findings, published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, go beyond simply suggesting that we're not living in a simulated world like The Matrix. They prove something far more profound: the universe is built on a type of understanding that exists beyond the reach of any algorithm.

Rethinking Magical Metaphysics

This is the text of the presentation I gave at the Leaping Laughter Anthesteria yesterday, February 17th 2024. It reworks and expands some of the previous articles I have posted on this topic here on Augoeides.

Throughout the medieval and Renaissance periods, metaphysics in the Western world was dominated by two primary currents of thought. The first and most significant in terms of its influence upon culture and religion was the school established by Aristotle, which was based on empirical study of the material world. Much like modern physical scientists, Aristotle believed that ultimate reality could be found in the behavior of material objects that could be observed and measured. The second was the school established by Plato, who contended that ultimate reality could be found in the world of Ideal Forms, akin to the world of mathematics.

Both Plato and Aristotle postulated that the fundamental building blocks of reality consist of Matter and Form. Matter refers to the actual physical substance of which objects are composed – atoms, molecules, and elementary particles. Form refers to how these particles are arranged, encompassing every manifestation of substance from a simple block of metal or stone to complex interrelated systems. Form is especially essential to living organisms – if a human body were broken down into its component molecules, the result would be mostly water and collection of complex hydrocarbons. Obviously, mixing these hydrocarbons and water back together will not produce a human being. While the matter of which the original person was composed is still present, the complexity of the person’s original form has been destroyed. Where the two schools disagree is that Aristotle taught that matter preceded form and was therefore more real, while Plato taught that form preceded matter and therefore form was the most real.

Both philosophical schools have their problems. Aristotle's worldview leaves little room for sciences such as psychology in which measurement is difficult, especially when examining the personal experience of spiritual awakening. Plato's worldview, on the other hand, can lead to the conclusion that if empirical data does not support a theory or set of equations, there must be a problem with the data because the theory is “more real” than the process it describes. Neither school can be directly refuted in any empirical manner – show a Platonist the mathematical formula that describes the motion of a falling body and then a ball dropped from the top of a building, and they will claim that the equation is more real than the dropping ball because the equation describes the general case that applies to all falling bodies. An Aristotelian, on the other hand, would claim that the dropping ball is more real because it can hit someone, and that the equation merely describes its motion.

From a spiritual standpoint the Platonic model is more appealing to magical practitioners for obvious reasons. Aristotle's system leaves little room for the results of spiritual practice, especially as articulated by the church. In fact, the medieval church taught that systems like Hermeticism were heresies because they were based on the idea that a person could become closer to God or more favorable in God's eyes through their own efforts. The whole point of Platonism, though, was to deliberately engage in spiritual practices and through them progressively realize the fundamental truths of the universe, which fit easily into the Christian framework as the realization of God and Christ - heretical though such realization theoretically was.

In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant set out to develop what he described as a “Copernican turn” in metaphysics that he believed could resolve some of the difficulties with both schools. Instead of attempting to define the fundamental nature of objective reality, Kant directed his attention to the perspective of the individual and how reality is perceived. Kant proposed two levels of reality, the world of “things in themselves,” or objective reality, and the world of appearances, or subjective reality. He further proposed that objects of awareness must conform to our mode of awareness, meaning that information from objective reality is taken in by the senses and interpreted by the mind to construct a personal subjective reality.

Revisiting Magical Metaphysics

I'm finally starting in on the process of reworking my Operant Magick manuscript for publication. Back in 2006 around the time I started this blog I put the finishing touches on the original version and started sending it out. The occult publishers I sent it to jerked me around for years and never actually published it because it was "too advanced" for beginning readers. At the time I thought that was terrible - there was already plenty of beginner material and I was of the opinion that the market could use at least a few intermediate and advanced works.

When I finally got my Enochian books published and saw real sales numbers I started to understand the reality of the situation better. Magick is pretty much the definition of a niche interest. The reason that occult publishers favor beginner material over everything else is that there's barely enough of an audience to support that, let alone the subset of that audience who reads those books and then goes on to become more "advanced" practitioners. This of course creates something of a vicious circle - no advanced material means that there's likely to be less of an advanced market, and so forth.

But I will say that to some degree I'm glad the original version didn't make it out there. A lot of the ideas in that manuscript were good, and I've tried to elucidate those here on Augoeides. At the same time, the book suffered from working with brain science that is now twenty or more years old. Brain science moves fast - between 2000 and 2010 there are a lot of significant breakthroughs that Operant Magick version one would have entirely missed. Also, many of the ideas, while good, were not developed how I now feel they should be at this point in my magical development.

This post is one example. In the original Operant Magick I proposed a slightly modified version of Kant's metaphysics that I dubbed "Hermetic Metaphysics" as the metaphysical basis for magick. I wrote up a post about my "Hermetic Metaphysics" that you can find here. In revisiting the material, though, I found that in fact Kant doesn't need any changes at all to account for paranormal phenomena. I also am glad I didn't throw something out there called "Hermetic" that is about as "Hermetic" as The Kybalion, but that's a whole other conversation.

More Evidence Against "The Simulation"

I never have found the simulation hypothesis - that is, the contention that we all are living in some sort of artificial reality simulated by computer systems - particularly compelling. As I've pointed out in previous posts, Nick Bostrom's 2003 philosophical argument that we might be suffers from the same logical error as Gambler's Fallacy, which is a proposition that can easily be disproved with a few coin flips. Nonetheless, there are otherwise smart people out there who take it seriously, and that makes me question their smarts. Now yet another test has shown that the simulation idea is unlikely. Specifically, physicists have found that quantum interactions cannot be modeled by classical computers.

Scientists have discovered that it’s impossible to model the physics of our universe on even the biggest computer. What that means is that we’re probably not living in a computer simulation .

Theoretical physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin from the University of Oxford and the Hebrew University in Israel applied Monte Carlo simulations (computations used to generate probabilities) to quantum objects moving through various dimensions and found that classical systems cannot create the mathematics necessary to describe quantum systems. They showed this by proving that classical physics can’t erase the sign problem, a particular quirk of quantum Monte Carlo simulations of gravitational anomalies (like warped spacetime, except in this case the researchers used an analogue from condensed matter physics).

Therefore, according to Ringel and Kovrizhin, classical computers most certainly aren’t controlling our universe.

Now I know what you're thinking - what about quantum computers? The issue there is that quantum computers model quantum interactions as quantum interactions. So you could model the world using a quantum computer and get all the quantum interactions, but only if said computer was the size of the world and contained as many particles and so forth. In that scenario, the world would be its own simulation and basically we would just call it "reality." We perhaps could be left with a Douglas Adams scenario of the world being the computer and all of us being part of it, but that's as far as it goes.

I never have understood what makes the simulation argument compelling. The Matrix was fun as a movie, but it was a Gnostic allegory rather than a world you would want to live in. Likewise, if we really did live in a perfectly simulated universe, what would be the point of knowing? Everything would work exactly the same, and it would confer no advantage upon us. So what's the appeal? That still mystifies me, and I'm going to assume that the world I live in is the world I live in until somebody provides me with compelling evidence otherwise.

Consciousness Truthers

Could anything possibly be dumber than denying the existence of something that you directly experience every single day? I honestly sat here for a bit and gave it some thought, and you know what? I can't come up with anything. But there really are such folks as "consciousness deniers." That is, people who contend that your subjective sense of awareness doesn't really exist. I suppose you can define a world in which "real" and "objective" are synonyms, and since consciousness is by definition subjective it must be unreal, but that's really quite silly.

As the late Stephen Hawking demonstrated in his work on black holes, particles aren't even "objective" in the philosophical sense because their nature is not constant across all possible frames of reference. So that sets up a world in which nothing at all is "real" - and so, in another sense, everything might as well be. The particles making up a baseball bat may not be entirely objective, but they're real enough to hit you in the face. Likewise, your consciousness is real enough to be aware that getting hit in the face with that baseball bat hurts.

The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider these main causes first, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause. But before that, I need to comment on what is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short.

What is it? Anyone who has ever seen or heard or smelled anything knows what it is; anyone who has ever been in pain, or felt hungry or hot or cold or remorseful, dismayed, uncertain, or sleepy, or has suddenly remembered a missed appointment. All these things involve what are sometimes called “qualia”—that is to say, different types or qualities of conscious experience. What I am calling the Denial is the denial that anyone has ever really had any of these experiences. Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

Evidence Against "The Simulation"

I've made no secret of my disdain for the "simulation argument" - the idea that we are actually living in some sort of artificially constructed universe as seen in the film The Matrix instead of a "real" universe. Recently, two physicists have claimed to have proven that we could not possibly be living in a simulation because as least one sort of quantum interaction would take far to much computational power to ever simulate on a large scale.

The pair initially set out to see whether it was possible to use a technique known as quantum Monte Carlo to study the quantum Hall effect – a phenomenon in physical systems that exhibit strong magnetic fields and very low temperatures, and manifests as an energy current that runs across the temperature gradient. The phenomenon indicates an anomaly in the underlying space-time geometry.

Quantum Monte Carlo methods use random sampling to analyse many-body quantum problems where the equations involved cannot be solved directly. Ringel and Kovrizhi showed that attempts to use quantum Monte Carlo to model systems exhibiting anomalies, such as the quantum Hall effect, will always become unworkable. They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased exponentially with the number of particles being simulated.

If the complexity grew linearly with the number of particles being simulated, then doubling the number of partices would mean doubling the computing power required. If, however, the complexity grows on an exponential scale – where the amount of computing power has to double every time a single particle is added – then the task quickly becomes impossible. The researchers calculated that just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.

Now I have read a response to this article pointing out that this result is not "proof" - and frankly, despite my opinion of the whole simulation argument, I have to agree. It is possible that, say, the quantum Monte Carlo method used here is not the most efficient possible algorithm for calculating this sort of quantum behavior. It is often possible to model something that initially looks exponentially complex with something simpler than the most obvious method - and as a matter of fact, professional programmers like me come up with stuff like that all the time.

Weirdness Versus "The Simulation"

Weirdness is everywhere. This past year has seen a couple of unusual events that were considered highly unlikely. Donald Trump was elected president, despite most the polls leading up the election showing him behind. The Super Bowl featured the biggest comeback win in the history of the game. And recently, the Oscars ceremony screwed up the award for Best Picture by handing the presenters the wrong envelope. The New Yorker has an article up that claims this weirdness supports the "simulation argument." That is, the scenario explored in the film The Matrix is true and we are all components in an elaborate computer simulation. I've complained a number of times in the past about how dumb this idea really is. And, I have no problem whatsoever doing it again.

And so both of these bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.

And actually, that's a great big nope. Who says the "real world" isn't weird? Certainly not magicians. We mess with this stuff all the time. It may even be that as more of us work out how to do more effective magick, the weirdness is going to multiply. There were a whole bunch of people who bragged about doing magick to get Trump elected. I've been asked a number of times how to do magick to influence sporting events, so there must be people out there doing it, probably on all sides. And is it really such a stretch that magicians might want to mess with the Oscars? I mean, I personally think the whole thing is silly, but there are apparently a lot of people out there who consider them incredibly important.

Everybody's Got Demons But Me

So yes, it's another one of these.

Fundamentalist Evangelicals have to be some of the most paranoid people in the world. Recently, Colorado pastor and talk radio host Kevin Swanson explained that basically everyone, including Steven Spielberg, Lady Gaga, Charles Darwin, and Aristotle (!) were under the control of either demons or the devil himself.

I know that figures in the entertainment industry get this all the time, and that Darwin is basically an Evangelical punching bag, but Aristotle? I don't think he even believed in "the devil" because, you know, he lived in ancient Greece before Christianity even existed.

Swanson took a rather hard line on the issue, declaring at one point that Steven Spielberg and Lady Gaga, along with Charles Darwin, Aristotle, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, all are or have been “possessed by Satan” or “under the sway of the devil.” Swanson reminded his audience that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age,” meaning that “we’re not fundamentally up against Steven Spielberg, Lady Gaga or Charles Darwin, we’re up against their ideas”—and those ideas are of the devil.

“Now, Charles Darwin, Lady Gaga and Steven Spielberg are under the control of the Evil One,” he explained. “1 John 5:19 says the whole world is under the sway of the Evil One, under the sway of the devil, the devil has absolute control over them. Now, again, these are the presuppositions that are not taken on by those who want to dally with the world’s ideas. They don’t see that Aristotle is under the sway of the Evil One, under the absolute control of this very powerful, malignant force called the devil, and they don’t see that Steven Spielberg and Lady Gaga and Charles Darwin are under the absolute sway, the control, the force and the power of the devil himself. So therefore they absorb any of the ideas that may come their way through these means.”

The modern fundamentalist movement only dates back to about the middle of the Nineteenth Century. If you ever were looking for proof, this is it. Aristotle influenced the philosophy and theology of the Christian church for more than a thousand years. Thomas Aquinas based much of his work on Aristotlean methods. I realize that many Evangelicals have it in for the Roman Catholics, but for the longest time Roman Catholicism was Western European Christianity.

Also, Creationists make the argument from first causes all the time in their tirades against evolution, first proposed by - you guessed it - Aristotle and adapted by Aquinas into the form that we generally hear it today. Seriously, does Swanson have any idea what he's talking about? Let's just say that signs point to "no."

The Simulation Argument is Still Dumb

It always surprises me when smart people believe dumb things. I realize that for some my practice of this thing called "magick" puts me in that category, but I'll venture anyone who thinks that hasn't seen a tenth of the things I've seen. My direct, personal experience supports the notion that magick is something other than nonsense, and while the possibility always remains that I could be misinterpreting those experiences, there's no denying that I have had them.

The latest comments from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, though, are another thing entirely. He accepts the "simulation argument," one of the dumbest ideas to come out of modern philosophy in a long time. Musk is a brilliant businessman and engineer, so the fact that he gives any credence to the concept that the odds are "one in billions" that we are not living inside a computer simulation is quite disappointing.

Put simply, there's no evidence whatsoever, direct or otherwise, that we are actually living in The Matrix. The simulation argument depends on a particular misunderstanding of the laws of probability, and it surprises me that an otherwise highly intelligent person like Musk would fall for it. Here's how he explains it.

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.

Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.

Number of the Beast

According to Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, one of the main differences between liberal-minded and conservative-minded individuals is that conservatives give higher priority to what Haidt describes as the "sanctity/degradation" or "purity" axis of moral reasoning. While Haidt has at times argued that this means the moral framework of conservatives is more balanced, what he largely ignores is that a simplistic concrete emphasis on this sort of purity in many religious contexts is fundamentally stupid. Here's a case in point - a Tennessee man who quit his job twice over the number "666" appearing on routine tax forms.

A Tennessee man is so fed up with getting the number "666" on official forms that he's quit his job—twice. The latest incident occurred when his W-2 tax form bore the number, which the Bible associates with the Antichrist. The number on the tax form was related to the payroll mailing sequence at Contech Casting, but that doesn't matter to Walter Slonopas: "If you accept that number, you sell your soul to the devil," he tells the Tennessean. When he began working for Contech in 2011, he was given the number 666 to use for clocking in; he had it changed. When an alteration to the time-clock system made his number 666 three months later, he quit the job, but came back after the firm apologized. A rep for the company is "completely at a loss for words."

Hermetic Metaphysics

Western philosophy generally recognizes three schools of metaphysical thought, those of Aristotle, Plato, and Immanuel Kant. Platonic metaphysics contends that the ultimate reality can be found in the world of ideal forms, or in modern terminology the mathematical relationships that form the basis of our understanding of the physical world. Aristotle's system, on the other hand, contends that ultimate reality rests in the physical world and material objects, and that mathematical forms are merely descriptive. These two schools dominated Western philosophical thought for more than a thousand years, until Immanuel Kant attempted to resolve the contentions between the two schools in the Eighteenth Century.

European Renaissance Hermetics also developed a system of metaphysics that receives a lot less attention in academic circles, but in fact this system includes many ideas that are similar to and predate those found in Kant's system - with one extremely important difference.