The Simulation Hypothesis

 

Well, I'm unemployed again.

Not bad news, just inconvenient. You see, I would have had to re-apply for the job that I am finishing up now, and there would have been no guarantee of getting it. Also, they're upping the hours without upping the pay, and I believe they're going to raise the class size as well. Next semester, if the almost 1000 new cases of Coronavirus in Korea today is any indication, will be online again, and although the classrooms at the uni where I teach, can't hold 40 students comfortably, Zoom can. What I DO know is that there will be a writing element added to all classes. That means writing assignments from all your students. Probably weekly. That's a huge amount of my least favourite part of teaching: correcting writing. 

At any rate, I won't need to weigh the pros and cons due to the fact that much like many other places around Korea, Gongju University is accepting only advanced degrees next semester. So no master's, no doctorate, no job. This proves they have less interest in quality of teacher and/or teaching, than just ease of operation. People with advanced degrees can get E-1 visas and I've had one of those before, they make things much easier. Even KOREANS are suffering from the mistreatment of foreigners by their immigration laws and workers. I believe they purposely try to make things more difficult for foreign teachers here and it hasn't subsided in any way since my first year, 1997, it has increased. But only for us lowly bachelor's degree holders. In 1997 when I came here for the first time, there was a palpable academic respect that was shown by my adult students, and taught to be shown by my youngsters. That level of respect is what is now only offered to master's and doctorate holders over here teaching English. They are rarely better for the job in any way but the simplicity of getting all the paperwork done to legally hire them. And I suppose less bureaucracy-induced stress. So schools are getting tired of dealing with their shit. Not ours. 

So, I went out with the other three teachers on Thursday night after we found out at least three of the four of us won't have our contracts renewed. We sat at a pub and talked for a while. Two of the other teachers left early and two of us stayed late. We continued drinking and talking. One of the issues we stumbled upon in our increasingly philosophical discourse, was a guy he brought up named Claude Shannon, who in the late 40's had a massive impact on technology, and still impacts the tech we use today. Either Kevin had had too many glasses of wine to explain it fully, something a sober person would have difficulty with, or I had had too many beers to understand it fully, something a sober person would have difficulty with. Or a combo of both. But I knew it intrigued me and I wrote his name down on a piece of paper so I could look it up. Fascinating! This is something that remains a fun topic being discussed by physicists, philosophers, writers, scientists, and just regular people who are curious about what the hell we're doing here.

This is gonna get technical, but don't worry, you don't need to understand the technical part. I don't really think I do, myself, but I'm gonna do my best to describe, or at least give the broad strokes about what is blowing everybody's minds about this Claude Shannon and his error correcting source codes. What he did was he took the intuition behind information, formally defined it as a mathematical quantity, then plugged it into the idea of entropy within nature and he came up with what became known as Shannon's Entropy. What is entropy? I'll let Ted explain it.

It's a measurement of disorder, or probabilities of natural, physical processes. Energy in objects is constantly being rearranged inside the containers, the bonds, between particles. These containers are called "quanta," the quantums in quantum physics. It may seem random, but scientists noticed that it tends to happen in patterns which favour high entropy, the spreading out of energy. Low entropy, high concentration of energy (more energy=more heat). Statistically, energy movement can be predicted to an accuracy of close to perfection in most objects with lots of particles, bonds and energy. In this way, Claude Shannon devised a way to theoretically use the notions of entropy as a guide to compressing information into codes (1's and 0's) in the most efficient way in order to enable its recovery without distortion. For example, if a Shakespeare play were to be coded, presumably the letter E would have the simplest code, like 1, and Q might have the most complex code, like 10011010 or something. In actuality, a person could probably work out a system of blocks of several letters together that would be even more efficient, such as "ion" or "tion" or "ing." 

Now comes the fun part: Jim Gates. Ever hoid of him? Me neither. But he's the face of the theory that we may be living in a computer simulation. He's finding the exact same kind of correction coding built into natural biological processes! Could our universe just be a giant computer simulation? I KNOW! It's crazy, right? I was joking Thursday night about the Matrix and that I must be some kind of glitch in that computer. Maybe we're all viruses that are eventually deleted. You can imagine where the conversation went. 

I actually listened to about half of a 2-hour long rap session between David Chalmers, a philosopher, Zohreh Davoudi, a quantum physicist, Jim Gates, Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist, Max Tegmark another physicist, and the moderator was Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was quite proud that in our drunken state, we covered a lot of the same ground these highly qualified thinkers did while they were, presumably, sober. The arguments I was making were closest to Lisa Randall's. She is the rationalist in the group and began by saying that it's quite an unbelievably audacious assumption that if there were simulators, they'd come up with US. Similar to my glitch comment. She also asked a question I asked in, "Why do we want this to be true?" I mentioned Thursday that it probably goes back to the secularization of science, which many believe began in the 1960's but I'd say it was long before. So would Tesla. 

I also mentioned that it was just an update of Rene Descartes' questioning of how one can know if one exists or if life is a dream being controlled by an outside force. His conclusion, of course, was the famous, "I think, therefore I am." I told my fellow conversationalists Thursday night of my favourite philosophical graffiti I scratched on the wall of a Lakehead University toilet stall: "I stink, therefore I am." You gotta up your graffiti game at university. David Chalmers comments that this whole theory is not really new, just Descartes 2.0. 

Mixing God and Nature (which I believe to be the same thing) scares some scientists. Zohreh mentioned that if all of this were actually a computer simulation, it would be finite and imperfect. Lisa, and I agreed. So in order to verify a computer simulation, we'll need to find some glitches. Dave commented that, well... any glitches in the simulation could be simulated. Sigh... philosophers! 

I found it interesting when she brought up cosmic rays and said they have far more energy, BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE, than anything they've come up with at the hadron collider at CERN in Switzerland. And she oughta know, she specializes in that sort of thing. I think she believe they won't find any flaws though. She seemed to believe in the irreducible complexity of the universe and infinity both ways. Tyson accepted our infinitely expansive universe, but he didn't explain very well why he doesn't buy its infinite reductability. Because we can't take photos of them there can't be any smaller particles? Haven't scientists been proven wrong several times about that? Atomic, sub-atomic, sub-sub-atomic... who can say it's not endless? Lisa made a pretty snide (but cool) comment about that blunder. Something like, "Oh do you know something we don't know?" I think she was expanding on that point when she commented that in physics, we don't prove theories, we rule them out. We'll never be able to rule out infinity either direction because we'll never have the data. Basically for the reason Tyson gave for not believing there are infinitely smaller and smaller particles, she believes there could be. Here's the diff: I think she's okay with that. I don't think Tyson is. I don't think a LOT of scientists are. And I think THAT'S pretty audacious. And, detrimental to science. The non-physical, the next great frontier in Science. If it ever gets there.

By this point in our conversation, the bar was closed and the owner was drinking and philosophizing with Kevin and me. I brought up something that I think they just might have gotten around to in the second hour of the panel discussion above: The idea that could have a panel discussion all on its own: can there be "soul" in a computer simulation? I brought it up carefully using music as the example, but I believe things like writing, art, love, and laughter are things that can't, and I dare say never will be reproduced artificially. 

Other than apes and rats, humans are the only species known to laugh. Why? Author and teacher, David Foster Wallace says that both great stories and great jokes depend on what communications theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is when a certain amount of information is withheld, but evoked in a kind of communication designed to create an explosion of associative connection. Get it? 

How about art, music, movies? A good song is a good song. How can you tell? Would it even be possible for something so uniquely human to be mathematized or scientificated? There's art being created and papers being written by computers that LOOK original. But I think the originality is in the programming, myself. Alphago beat the world champ at Go, a highly intuitive game (so I'm told). So is it intuitive or just programmed to appear so? Are our feelings, personalities, hearts and souls, mere lines of code? This is where the whole thing falls apart for me. 

We ended the evening downshifting to talk about our common work experience, mostly disgusting work experience. Dirty jobs. Then we all went home. But it was an interesting evening.