Simulated Reality

We are living in a simulation, says Thomas Campbell, US physicist from NASA, another great expert on fake things. This is not a new idea. The film Matrix developed it in 1999. Inception nailed the nail in 2010. Scientists took a quarter of a century to join the artists! Campbell wants irrefutable experiments to validate his theory.

Clairvoyant Films

The real innovations no longer come from science, let alone technology. They come from movies, comics, popular novels… The minor arts are our greatest assets. We can count on them to plan a future that is eye-opening. The general public has understood this for a good decade. Stand up, scientists! Rub your sleeping eyes.

Education turns honest young people into zombies and hibernants. Everyone can see that. The more time you spend at university, the longer it will take to get back on your feet after graduation. The school of life is much more useful than the big schools, which only make idiots.

A quarter century ago, in Matrix, the Wachowskis placed Thomas Anderson, alias Neo, facing a dilemma proposed by the rebel leader Morpheus. By choosing a red pill or a blue pill, he was given the choice to remain in ignorance or face a fundamental truth: this world is fake. We live in a reality simulated by the Matrix.

Campbell’s experiences

Like Neo, another Thomas has opted for the red pill, deciding to confront himself with this vast and exciting question: are we living in a gigantic simulation? The US physicist Thomas Campbell comes from NASA. A good school of pretense. This Thomas publishes in 2017 an article in which he describes a series of five experiments designed to allow us to obtain a clear answer to this question.

The article, published by The International Journal of Quantum Foundations, has obviously made scientists at the California Polytechnic University (CalPoly) think, of which Futurism tells us that they are beginning to implement the experiments suggested by Thomas Campbell.

The latter did not just write for the scientific journal; he also set up a non-profit organisation, the Centre for the Unification of Science and Consciousness (CUSAC), to help finance the experiments.

Let us note at once that they will have nothing irrefutable. The rational evidence is irrelevant, without interest, without consequence. The real reflection on this question will not come from science, always behind the creative mind. Let’s leave it to the real experts, the naguals of Mexico or their kind. They have a host of facts that corroborate this idea, banal for them, hallucinating for pseudo-science.

Participatory universe

Among the experiments proposed by the physicist is a new version of the double-slit experiment, first carried out in 1801 by Thomas Young. In summary, the original experiment consists of creating interferences between two beams of light from a same source by passing them through two tiny holes drilled in an opaque plane. It is about showing how light and matter can act both as waves and particles.

Thomas Campbell’s hypothesis is that if you remove the observer’s gaze, then the information recorded during these experiments does not exist. In other words, it would be like to say that without any player, a video game does not exist. The physicist sums up his idea by saying that the universe is only «participatory».

The Spirit that creates

Most importantly, it emphasizes the omnipotence of the mind. I say to the Anglo-Saxons and those who speak their idiom that spirit is not mental. And I have not finished repeating this unknown evidence. When you hear a sports columnist say that you win with your mind, I have a syncope.

The mind is a powerful computer, but never will a computer be able to mobilize its intention to achieve an objective beyond its capabilities. The competitor does, in all sports. We have a mind, yes. But we are not computers. There is in us, around us, above us an unequalled power, the Spirit. Castaneda’s Intention and its corollary, Energy.

Simulating the past

Thomas Campbell is obviously not the first to ask himself this kind of question and to make simulation hypotheses. The WachowskiMatrix and Christopher NolanInception sisters did it before him. Long before. But science had to go to the movies. What they did: finally the academics take up the challenge. In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom published a landmark article entitled “Do you live in a computer simulation?”

Bostrom developed the idea that if we make enough technological progress, we will probably end up simulating our ancestors… Who themselves will eventually progress enough to simulate theirs. And so on. Now, according to this idea, there is no reason why we should not also be part of one of these successive layers of simulated reality.

Campbell and Bostrom’s views diverge on at least one point: unlike his Scandinavian predecessor, the American physicist states that our consciousness is not a product of simulation: it is fundamental to reality. And he takes the opportunity to point out that, according to him, the realization of his five experiments could “challenge conventional understanding of reality and discover deep connections between consciousness and the cosmos.”

Total complacency

What Campbell, not without naivety, calls consciousness, I call it Spirit. Castaneda calls it Intention, citing Mexican shamans who use this infinite power in a very concrete way and for millennia. Digest the news, presumptuous scientists: there is more knowledge in the distant past than in all brains today. True knowledge is without the brain. Formal logic is a dead end for mankind.

Holy Campbell! He has no doubt. The warriors of the Nagual will have laughed to death at this news they have known for a lifetime. But the funny thing is that you want to prove it scientifically. Campbell is naive, but he’s mostly presumptuous and full of complacency. This scientist has not yet understood that with reason and logic you can prove anything because they are part of virtual reality. No seer uses it in astral. Nor elsewhere.

This illustrates the unfathomable precipice between these two conceptions of the world. Logic and reason have proved their total inadequacy to approach the great mysteries. Jim Morrison has sung it a thousand times. He had chosen to live in another world, one of controlled madness. But he lost control and it killed him.

Physical evidence?

A physicist thinks he has proved that we are living in a simulation. Even if this idea existed long before they took it, one cannot help but think of the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix saga when anyone dares, after five cocktails or months of scientific research, to say that we are all living in a gigantic simulation.

Indeed, the very serious Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth (south of England), who was apparently sober when he decided to dedicate a book to the subject, chose to title Reality Reloaded, referring to the second part of the saga. Matrix reloaded, played by Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss and Lambert Wilson.

In his book, the scientist states loud and clear that our world is just a puppet theater. And he even drives the nail in by claiming to have proof of what he is saying. As Popular Mechanics relates, his thinking is based on the second principle of thermodynamics, which he explains that he “establishes that entropy – the amount of disorder in an isolated system – can only increase or stagnate, but will never decrease.” A low ceiling of chaos if you prefer.

The reign of chaos

Based on this principle, as stated by the French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824, Melvin Vopson expected the same to apply to entropy in information systems, which he describes as “the fifth state of matter”. By «information», Melvin Vopson obviously does not mean the TV news, it would be too simple.

Scientists believe that the observable matter in the universe has a specific informational content. For example, atoms -containing protons, electrons and neutrons- contain not only the combined masses of these subatomic particles, but also the tiny masses of information needed to interact with each other and with the rest of the universe,’ Popular Mechanics explains. This is the kind of information that Melvin Vopson is interested in.

The physicist showed that, in this case, the entropy was either constant or decreasing to a value of equilibrium. This contradicts the principle of Sadi Carnot, which led Melvin Vopson to create the «second law of infodynamics» (as in «information»). According to him, this new law plays a role in atomic physics, cosmology and biological systems… But it could also help prove that we are living in a simulation.

On the same subject

Maxwell’s demon, the experiment that contradicts thermodynamics, is no longer a mere view of the mind

‘If it were a simulation, a universe as complex as ours would require integrated data optimization and compression to reduce the computing power and storage capacity required,‘ he writes at The Conversation. But “this is exactly what we see around us in numerical data, biological systems, mathematical symmetries and the entire universe,” he concludes.

Is this really sufficient evidence? In reality (a funny expression in this context), Melvin Vopson’s reflection risks to feed an endless debate, says Popular Mechanics. And make a lot of movie-goers want to review the Matrix tetralogy, in case it can help them see more clearly. Including the time with Lambert Wilson.

It’s all very annoying. Instead of Reality Reloaded, I would have titled it Much Ado About Nothing, like the famous comedy by Shakespeare. All that crap stuffed my head. Fortunately it is as empty as my fridge. Let’s get back to the fundamentals of our species. Isn’t that the primary purpose of this site they call awesome?

Like Sadi Carnot, I’m going for the big principles. I found seven, it’s more classy.

First fundamental principle

The mind creates matter and its corollary, physical reality.

Second fundamental principle

With logic you can prove anything.

Third fundamental principle

All theories are equal, so none is worth anything.

Fourth fundamental principle

One can invent an infinite number of different pasts and always find evidence for their veracity.

Fifth fundamental principle

There is no concrete difference between the true and the false.

Sixth fundamental principle

Matter is a trap set by non-spiritual beings.

Seventh fundamental principle

Beyond the Spirit, there is nothing. Below the Spirit, nothing is worthy of human.

I write for twenty centuries from now. And I am setting a date.
Léo Ferré

Stop kidding. The next article will be serious. Or not? More innovative anyway, I promise.