Quantum mechanics, specifically, the role of the observer in controlling the behavior of particles. What is that? How would any non-living system have the slightest idea whether or not it’s being observed?
Relativity, specifically the speed of light. Why would nothing be able to exceed it? Light is massless.
I can’t think of any logical explanation for the observer effect, which tends to make me think that the controller of the supposed “Matrix” is avoiding using too much processor speed by keeping quantum interactions in an undetermined state until observed.
In addition, I’d say that the speed of light could be another good way to conserve computing power, by avoiding the larger number of complex interactions that would happen if light had a higher speed, or no speed limit at all.
The problem is, I can’t think of a good reason for the supposed “Matrix”…unless it’s how children in some high-tech society are taught, maybe…
I don’t see why the Matrix’s reason for such wouldn’t apply, considering we’re apparently dealing with a world whose physics differ greatly from the one we know, meaning perpetual motion machines may actually be able to exist.
Quantum mechanics is weird. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we are living in the Matrix.
Of course, it doesn’t mean we aren’t. (Ominous music.)
As for the observer effect, particles don’t “know” anything. It’s just that, in order to detect these things, we have to build a measuring device of some kind. And in order for the measuring device to work, it has to interact with the particle somehow. And that interaction changes what the particle is doing. So we can’t measure things without messing with them somehow. That doesn’t apply just to quantum physics.
You wanna really blow your mind, consider this: nothing can travel faster than light, yet the universe itself is expanding faster than the speed of light.
But we are going faster than light, relative to galaxies in other parts of the universe. That was friedo’s point. If you lived in Galaxy X, then I would be moving away form you at 1.5 * C. Relative to you, I am *already *be traveling faster than the speed of light. Never mind whether I am massless, entire galaxies are moving faster than light relative to us, and I hope we both agree that galaxies have mass.
Of course the trick is in the wording. There’s nothing prohibiting objects traveling faster than light. The prohibition is against massive objects being *accelerated *past the speed of light, and against information passing between them once they do exceed c.
The whole point of various strains of Buddhism and Hinduism (and in some senses Scientology) is that if you can accept that you are in The Matrix, you are able stretch, and ultimately break, the limitations of he program. IOW, even if you can’t leave the Matrix you can get super powers, or at the very lest become much happier because you know that none of it is real.
One way to come to terms with this is to view quantum mechanics merely as an extension of ordinary probability theory: there, if you have a box, in which either there is a red ball or a green ball, you would describe the system by a state like 50%red + 50%green. Then, if you open the box, this state instantaneously changes to, say, 100%red. How does the system know whether it is observed? It doesn’t, but nevertheless, your description of the system invariably changes.
Yes, and that’s the reason why nothing can go as fast as light. Consider again an analogy: take a medium, like, for instance, a crystal. Within this crystal, waves – like sound waves – may propagate; to them, the crystal will look like empty space. There will then be a maximum speed, simply given by the speed of sound, which derives from the microscopic details of the crystal. With respect to this speed, any excitations (waves) of the crystal will experience a special relativistic world.
Of course, there’s an important disanalogy: at some point, say if you create waves of too high energy, the whole thing will break down, literally, because the crystal will shatter – technically, this is a kind of ‘Lorentz invariance breaking’. As far as we know, this does not occur in our universe.
Actually, quantum mechanics is extremely hard to compute on any classical system; Feynman has shown that a classical computer experiences an exponential slowdown simulating quantum effects. This has to do with the fact that the quantum state is an extremely complicated object, being exponential in the number of quantum systems. This is also (part of) the reason that quantum computers can perform feats beyond the capacity of classical ones. So, the fact that our universe is quantum should count as evidence against the ‘Matrix’-view, if at all.
However, the philosopher Nick Bostrom has put forward an argument establishing that either we live in a simulation, or almost no civilizations progress much further than ours, or, if any do, they do not have interest in running simulations. But this is probably more GD territory…
I had always thought that relativity only said nothing can travel AT the speed of light and that most people just assume that in order to travel faster than light you must first accelerate through that speed. Is that common assumption correct or does the theory permit FTL travel if you’re able bypass c by some means?
Special relativity straightforwardly admits faster than light solutions – these are the so-called tachyons, particles of imaginary mass with the puzzling property that they get faster the less energy they have, so with a tachyonic vehicle, you have to brake to accelerate! However, ordinary (real) massive particles are always constrained to below c speeds.
However, those particles are problematic in most theories of physics: in quantum field theory, they cause a destabilization of the vacuum, since you can always go to a lower energy level by the emission of tachyons.
This is a good idea that I think a lot of physicists have probably thought of at one time or another. One clear flaw in the reasoning is that Quantum Mechanical calculations can outperform classical computers.
One way of seeing that a universal speed limit is not arbitrary is by noticing that the Lorentz group is a rather simple and beautiful spacetime symmetry that is actually broken when trying to discretize spacetime in order to do numerical computations.
So in both cases your idea is cute, but the truth is rather the opposite.
Another way of coming at this is to make several assumptions and see where they lead:
Assume that the speed and power of computers continues at about the same pace as today for the foreseeable future…
Assume that AI in its original conceptual form of self-awareness is possible with a Turing Machine…
Assume we do not blow ourselves up…
I’m too lazy to crunch the numbers right now, but I’ve seen the result by others who were less lazy than I am. Basically, with the assumptions above, the ability to create a virtual environment and AI’s to fill that environment will be within our grasp in the next 50 years or so. And according to assumption 1, we will be able to build more and more of these environments as time goes on.
The upshot is: if the assumptions above are true, we will be able to build countless environments and AI’s to fill them. Let me add one more assumption:
We do not give our AI creations any hint that they are AI.
So, if we start with these assumptions, and reason about the chances that we are in the One True World rather than one of the “Matrix’s”, we quickly realize that it’s practically guaranteed that we live in a Matrix.
Of course, that’s only if we go along with the assumptions above. Maybe computational power is about to hit the brakes. Maybe AI on a Turing Machine simply isn’t possible. And the pessimists’ favorite: maybe we’re going to blow ourselves up soon…any minute now…
Oh, and to the question about why anyone would do this? Ever hear of a little indy software title called “The Sims”?
Don’t make the common mistake of thinking that it takes consciousness to decohere the wave/particle thing. The way you worded the OP, it makes me think that you may have heard some of that. The “observer” in QM can be something as simple and non-conscious as a particle detector.
And there’s nothing spooky about it - the reason a particle “knows” it’s being observed is that nothing can detect a particle without interacting with it. You can’t passively observe a subatomic particle.
The OP posted a silly question. That said, I was looking at it from a secular POV. If my brain was sitting in a pickle jar hooked up to a bunch of electrodes; having knowlege of that isn’t going to help me escape the “Matrix”.
I’ve taken Advil and Aleve. And I’m still stuck here in the matrix.
