>>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Welcome back. This
is the 17th Annual Isaac Asimov Panel Debate.
And we’ve been going strong ever since the
year 2000,
when an idea surfaced in the hearts and minds
of the family of Isaac Asimov, exploring a
way for his
memory to be preserved in the programs of
this institution. And Isaac Asimov was a friend
of the American Museum of Natural History.
Much of the research for so many of the books
that he wrote took place in and around the
halls and in our libraries. And so perhaps
there’s no more fitting
tribute to him and to his memory, than to
keep this celebration going. So, thank you
for attending.
We are also streaming live on the Internet.
And I’m your host for this evening, Neil
deGrasse Tyson. I’m the Frederick P. Rose
director of the Hayden Planetarium.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: Just a couple of newsy notes.
This year we sold out in three minutes. And
it’s not a particularly sustainable model.
So, we’re going to have top people looking
at how to improve that next year.
We don’t know how yet, but the least we
can do is offer it live streamed on the Internet
on amnh.org. So, I welcome everyone
from the Internet universe, as well as the
universe gathered here.
Tonight’s topic is: Is the Universe a Computer
Simulation? Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Do you want it to be a computer simulation?
I mean, this topic is—we’re going to—you’ll
see.
We’ve got some highly thoughtful, talented,
respected people to weigh in on this. I will
introduce them individually, and then we will
start the panel.
By the way, unlike most debates you might
have heard about or read about, where there’s
point/counterpoint and an argument is presented
and attacked,
that’s not what’s going to happen here.
We’re using the word debate loosely. Think
of yourself as eavesdropping
on scientists at a break-out room in a conference
on this topic. So, we’ll all be sort of
arguing with one another, and you’re listening
in. That’s really what’s going on here.
And you get to see how scientists think. You
get to see how arguments are contested.
You get to see how resolution arrives, if
it arrives at all.
So, afterwards we will have a brief time for
question and answer before we adjourn before
9:00 Eastern time zone—Eastern daylight
time.
So, join me in welcoming my first panelist
this evening. He is a professor of philosophy
at New York University, where he’s also
director of the Center for Mind, Brain and
Consciousness, David Chalmers. David, come
on out.
[APPLAUSE]
>>DAVID CHALMERS: Hey. Looking forward to
this.
>>TYSON: Thank you. Next we
have a nuclear physicist, who’s a post-doctoral
research associate at MIT
up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And let’s
give a warm welcome to Zohreh Davoudi. Zohreh.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: Next, we have someone who is actually no stranger to this panel. This may be his third visit
to it. In part, the topic of this year
was selected because he brought it up a couple
of years ago. And I said, man, we could do
a whole subject on that alone.
Let’s give a warm welcome back to James
Sylvester Gates.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: Another non-first timer is professor of physics up at Harvard,
a specialist in nuclear particle physics.
Give a warm New York welcome to one of our
own,
a graduate of Stuyvesant High School, Lisa
Randall.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: Did I do this out of order? No, we didn’t.
Good.
And last among the five—yeah, I did do it
out of order. My bad. Yeah, sorry. You guys
know where you need to sit. Talk among yourselves
while I do this.
There’s a friend and colleague, an astrophysicist,
also from MIT,
who’s done some deep thinking about this
very subject and has even written a book on
the topic.
Let’s give a warm New York welcome to Max Tegmark.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: By the way, we are lit for live streaming.
And the intensity of the lights on the stage
is such that
two of our panelists—I think they just want
to look cool, but they said they need to wear
sunglasses for this event. And that’s cool.
Later on I might join you. I brought my pair
with me as well.
If I’m feeling cool I might do just that.
So, Zohreh, I’d like to start with—no.
who should I start with here? Yes, let me
start with you, Zohreh.
Could you tell me why this topic interests
you? Just give a couple of minutes just as
an introduction here.
>>ZOHREH DAVOUDI: Sure. So, as Neil said,
I’m a theoretical physicist.
My interest is in nuclear physics. In fact,
I got my PhD in 2014 from Institute of Nuclear
Theory in University of Washington.
And the research I was focused on there, and
at the moment, is trying to use the knowledge
of the laws of nature and,
in particular, strong interactions to start
from a bottom-up approach and try to see what
comes out in a physical system.
And that’s actually relevant to why I got
interested in the simulation idea. And, in
fact,
by just watching the progress that researchers
in this field of simulating a strong interactions
have made in several past few years,
we started to wonder how could we not think
about the universe itself based on the laws
that we’ve discovered not simulated.
So, that the way that we actually simulate
the universe, it might actually give us hints
that the universe itself could be a numerical
simulation. And then
you would start thinking, well, let’s make
assumption that if that scenario is the case,
and if that simulation is actually—has similarities
with what we do in our research
and just drawing parallels between our algorithms
and techniques that we use to simulate laws
of nature, and making assumption that they
are similar,
then what can we actually conclude about the
universe as a simulation.
Can we actually make predictions for the signatures
that we should go after and test?
So, that’s that approach we took. And it
was a fun idea and fun paper became of it
with my collaborators Martin Savage and Silas
Beane at the University of Washington.
And that’s basically why I’m here. I’m
trying to—
>>TYSON: So, the prospect of
this being true didn’t freak you out at all?
>>DAVOUDI: No, I think it’s a fun idea.
>>TYSON: Okay. Just it’s fun for you?
>>DAVOUDI: Yes.
>>TYSON: Okay. Fine. So, Max,
you’ve got a book on this, too, right?
So, what’s going on with you?
>>MAX TEGMARK: Yeah. Well, already as a kid
I was always very fascinated by these very
big questions
about what’s really going on with this reality.
I remember actually
lying in this hammock I had put up between
two apple trees back in Stockholm, Sweden
when I was 13, reading Isaac Asimov actually.
I’m very honored to get to be here.
It really makes you think about these big,
big questions. And the more I learned about
later on as a physicist, the more struck I
was
that when you get deep down under the hood
about how nature works, down to looking at
all of you as just a bunch of quarks and electrons,
the rules—
>>TYSON: And you, too. It’s not just us. Yeah.
Looking at you as a quark, no, you would come
under this category as well.
>>TEGMARK: Yes. I am a quark blob, too, I confess.
But if you look at how these quarks move around,
the rules are entirely mathematical as far
as we can tell. And that makes me wonder,
if I were a character in a computer game,
who starting asking the same kind of big questions
about my game world,
I would also discover eventually that the
rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical.
I would just be discovering the computer program
in which it was written.
So, that kind of begs the question: How can
I be sure that this mathematical reality isn’t
actually some kind of game or simulation?
>>TYSON: So, you’ve analogized
yourself to Super Mario in a—that’s who you are?
>>TEGMARK: I don’t know if that’s
a good thing or a bad thing.
>>TYSON: So, Jim, I just remembered
you started all of this a few years ago, in
my mind at least,
just triggering the idea that in your research
you found things that forced you to consider
the likelihood that somebody programmed us.
Could you—
>>JAMES GATES: Well, first of all, I would
disagree with you. I’m not sure somebody
programmed us,
but that’s—you and I had a conversation
where I pointed out that in my research I
had found this very strange thing. Physicists,
I like to say
we all belong to a company called Equations-R-Us
because that’s how we make our living, is
by solving equations. And so I was just going
through solving equations, and I was then
driven to things that Max knows about,
these things called error-correcting codes.
Error-correcting codes are what make browsers
work. So, why were they in the equations that
I was studying about quarks and leptons and
supersymmetry?
And that’s what brought me to this very
stark realization that
I could no longer say that people like Max
were crazy.
>>TEGMARK: Okay.
[LAUGHTER]
>>GATES: Or stated another way, if you
study physics long enough, you, too, can become
crazy.
>> TYSON: That’s a corollary to that idea. Yeah.
>>GATES: And I’m also a science fiction
fan like Max, who talked about his encounter
with Asimov.
I was reading at age eight, as opposed to
13, sir.
>>TEGMARK: I hang my head in shame.
>>TYSON: Snap.
>>TEGMARK: Got off to a slow start.
>>GATES: I was reading at age eight
a science fiction book by an author named
Paul French. And some people in the audience
might know
that’s a pseudonym for Isaac Asimov.
>>TYSON: Oh.
>>GATES: So, science fiction drove me
into science in some sense. And then now in
my 65th year of life, I find out I have to
make friends with Max and people like that.
>>TYSON: So, Lisa, I kind of
brought you on the panel because I knew
you—I mean, you’re a rationalist in all
this. And so I was expecting—I don’t know
what to expect.
I just needed to anchor this in somebody who
I knew was not going there. So, where—
>>LISA RANDALL: Yeah. So, actually—well,
I can’t say I decided to be on the panel
because I think I said what date is it, and
they were like, “Thank you for agreeing
to be on the panel.”
But I have to say I’m curious not so much
about the question of whether we’re a simulation
because I think it’s only interesting
insofar as there are ways to test it.
And we can come back to that, I think, very
much in terms of how the laws of physics operate
and whether we can actually distinguish that.
But I actually am very interested in why is
so many people think it’s an interesting
question. Like why is the audience here? Why
is this panel here?
Because really to first approximation we can’t
really distinguish it.
So, I think the interesting question is: Why
do we feel compelled
to want this to be true, or even think this
could be true? And how do the laws of physics
operate? And are there really ways that we
could eventually
test whether there is something that distinguishes
just a true universe?
But I have to just say if the inference is
simulation, I don’t understand why it gave
me a cold today.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>RANDALL: So, my voice might go. But
I also think sometimes some of the ridiculous
things in the universe and think,
really, why would that be part of the simulation?
And I realized that if I was doing a simulation,
I would definitely put those things in. So,
there you go.
>>TYSON: Okay. Well, thank you
for that. Now, we couldn’t have a panel
without a philosopher. David, we needed some
philosophical—
>>DAVID CHALMERS: I know how you love philosophers,
Neil.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: I’m on record for
some comments about philosophers that got
him a little ticked off.
Buy, anyhow. So, David, what do you—philosophers
have been at this for a while, yourself included.
So, how do you see all of this
happening or fitting in to the worldview?
>>CHALMERS: Well, philosophers like
to ask the big questions
about the world; the foundational questions.
And this is one of them. Actually, I blame
Isaac Asimov for all this, at least in my
case.
I got into thinking about these big questions
when I was a kid. I read just about everything
that Asimov was writing. Not just the science
fiction, but the science fact, the history,
the detective novels. I read multiple volumes
of his autobiography. But throughout Asimov’s
work, this was a guy that was just interested
in the big questions about the nature of reality
at all levels. And that, ultimately,
drove me to think about questions about consciousness
and the mind, which I could approach as a
philosopher
because philosophy allows you to step back
and say what is the science here telling us.
But this question about the simulation corresponds
to another of the great questions of philosophy,
which is basically how do we know anything
about the external world at all. And Rene Descartes said how do you know you’re not being
fooled by an evil genius
into having an impression of this world around
us? Even though none of it really exists.
Well, the contemporary version of that question
is: How do you know you’re not in a simulation
like The Matrix? In which case, allegedly,
none of this really exist. And, to me, that
question is just extremely interesting because
it seems
nothing we could know could rule out the hypothesis
that we’re in a simulation.
But you also want to think about what follows.
Some people think if we’re in a simulation,
then none of this is real. I think if you
adopt the kind of perspective which,
say, Max was suggesting a second ago, where
the universe is all mathematical or informational,
this allows us to reorient
our attitude to this question and say, okay,
maybe we’re in a simulation. But if we are,
all this is perfectly real
because all the information is there in the
simulation.
All the math is there. All the structure is
there in the simulation.
So, I’d say, well, maybe we’re in a simulation.
Maybe we’re not. But if we are, hey, it’s
not so bad.
>>TYSON: If I do this, you feel
that.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah.
>>TYSON: Okay. So, that’s real. That was a real punch. Yeah.
So, Zohreh, let me ask you, I see you coming
to this almost from the most pragmatic side.
You’ve done experiments with your colleagues.
Or you’ve had
hypotheses with your colleagues. Could you
just detail for me where you landed in one
of those papers that you guys published?
>>DAVOUDI: Sure. So, what we did is
not actually doing the experiment. We proposed
that experiments could go and
look for the signs of possible underlying
simulation for the universe.
And the reason we thought about this, as I
said, is because we’ve been simulating strong
interactions, which means that
instead of just looking at the larger structures,
we’d start from the underlying degrees of
freedom of our theory, the quark, gluons,
and that we understand. And there are very
simple laws governing the interactions among
these particles.
However, when you think about all these complex
systems
of atomic nuclei and larger systems in the
universe, the ordinary matter in our universe,
it all emerges from those
simple, fundamental building blocks and these
interactions.
So, we’ve been trying to just input those
simple mathematical structure with a few degrees
of freedom, these quarks and gluons,
and then see how these, for example, atomic
nuclei emerge from these simulations.
>>TYSON: So, you’re building
the universe from the ground up?
>>DAVOUDI: Exactly. But what are the
limitations? We don’t have infinite computational
resources. We have
very large super computers in the national
labs, for example, that we can compute these
interactions basically
and build up these systems.
However, we are still limited. And the reason
is that if you’re interested in simulating
the universe, and you don’t know what the
size is—
it could be finite or infinite. However, we
are limited to a finite size.
On the other hand, if you think about even
a finite side, there are infinite numbers
of points on these
in this finite size that you have to simulate
to get the physics right. However, we are
not capable of inputting infinite number of
information in our computers.
Also, we want the simulations to be quantum,
which means that there is not just one single
path of evolution from one point to the other.
There are infinite number of paths.
Some are more important than others. And,
therefore, there’s another type of infinities
that we have to implement in our simulations
to get the answer right.
>>TYSON: Yeah, but just because
you can’t—we can’t do it because we’re
limited,
why should that mean the whole universe is
limited?
>>DAVOUDI: So, wait. So, this is the
point.
>>TYSON: I’ll wait. I got
time.
>>DAVOUDI: All right. So, we can do
it,
and then you—based on assumption that if
there is an underlying simulation for the
that has this problem, that has the problem
of finite computational resources—just as
that has this problem, that has the problem
of finite computational resources—just as
that has this problem, that has the problem
of finite computational resources—just as
we do—then what happens?
Then the laws of nature, the quantum mechanics
and whatever interactions have been going
on, has to be
put on a finite set of space-time points in
a finite volume, and then just a finite number
of quantum mechanical paths to a process can
be evaluated.
So, these are the assumptions. So, if the
simulator of the universe, in whatever form
it is, is just finite computational resource
and not infinite,
then it’s limited to simulate the universe
in this kind of limited scenario, just as
we do. And then by making that assumption,
and then going back and look at our simulation
and see what kind of signatures we see in
the observables we calculate,
that could tell us that we started from a
non-continuum space-time.
Then apply it to an underlying simulation
of the universe and make the same assumption,
then what would you see? And that’s basically
what we look for,
and list a few observables in our universe
that might lead to actually constrain this
scenario under this assumption.
And one of which is looking at the spectrum
of cosmic rays. Because what happens if these
very high energy cosmic rays that approach
the earth,
they are actually traveling in a discrete
space-time, as opposed to a continuum. Then
their equations
that basically special relativity that would
describe the relation between the energy and
momentum of this particle is modified.
And then you would ask what would that modification
mean
in terms of the observation we make in our
observatories, for example, spectrum and distribution
of these cosmic rays.
And if we see something that would be hint,
that would be consistent with the scenario
of a limited computational resources of the
universe. And then you might think about
other signatures and maybe taking this scenario
more seriously and think about external—
>>TYSON: So, cosmic rays, it
would be your pathway to the limits of what
has ever been measured.
>>DAVOUDI: Exactly.
>>TYSON: And then seeing at
that limit you’re probing the limits of
the programmer of the universe.
>>DAVOUDI: Right. Because these cosmic
rays are the most energetic particles that
we’ve ever been able to observe.
We can’t even produce them in laboratories.
These are very high energy cosmic rays.
>>TYSON: They’re higher than
anything we produced in our particle accelerators.
>>DAVOUDI: Exactly.
>>TYSON: Yeah.
>>DAVOUDI: Yes. By orders of magnitude.
And, therefore, because these are very energetic,
they can actually probe
the fabric of space-time. This is our way
of probing if the universe—if the underlying
space-time is discretized or just a continuum.
>>TYSON: So, Max, like I said,
you’ve written a book on this. Yet, you
told me offline that you have an argument
that would argue that—
>>TEGMARK: That maybe we’re not simulated
after all?
>>TYSON: Yeah. Maybe we’re
not a simulation after all. So, where does
that land?
>>TEGMARK: Yeah. So, before giving a counter
argument, let me give the pro argument. Of
course—
>>TYSON: So, you can give arguments
in both directions here?
>>TEGMARK: It’s fun to argue with yourself.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>TEGMARK: Of course, we all—as David
mentioned—have seen the argument,
the idea, of us being simulated in The Matrix
and in science fiction going even far beyond
that. But the guy who really started
foreseeing scientists to take this a bit more
seriously, and gave this idea a bit more scientific
street cred, I think,
is Nick Bostrom, my fellow Swede—Nick Bostrum—who
published this very dry academic article that’s
pointing out that—
>>TYSON: He’s a philosopher?
>>TEGMARK: Indeed, indeed.
And he pointed out that it seems like the
laws of physics allow us to build amazingly
powerful computers
way beyond what we have now; solar system-sized
things, which could simulate minds that would
feel just like us. And then he went on to
say
it seems overwhelmingly likely, if you don’t
wipe out here on earth, that in the future
the vast majority of all computations and
all minds
will be inside of such a computer. And, therefore,
he said if almost all minds are simulated,
we’re probably simulated. So, that’s the
pro argument.
Now, it sounds good, but—
>>TYSON: So, just to clarify,
so what you’re saying is
if simulating universes becomes a pastime
among those who have access to high powerful—
to highly powerful computers, and we are in
a universe, we’re probably in a simulated
universe, even if one of those universes is
actually real.
>>TEGMARK: Right. That’s basically—
>>TYSON: Is that a fair—
>>TEGMARK: That’s a fair summary, yeah.
And if you’re not sure at the end of the
night whether you’re actually simulated
or not, my advice to you is
go out there and live really interesting lives
and do unexpected things so the simulators
don’t get bored and shut you down.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Is that the cause of
death? Okay.
>>TEGMARK: But now in terms of the counterargument,
if you just take Nick seriously—
>>TYSON: That’s the cause of death.
>>TEGMARK: There’s something fishy here.
Because suppose you buy into this and you’re
like, okay,
I’m sold on Nick’s argument. We are simulated.
Let’s talk then about our simulated universe.
We’re measuring the laws of physics here
in the simulated world. And we find that in
the simulated world we can build all these
supercomputers in the future,
and there’ll be all these simulated minds
and so on. And we can make the same argument
all over again and convince ourselves that
actually
we’re doubly simulated. And then we’re
a simulation in the simulation, and then you
can repeat the argument again and say, well,
okay, we’re in a simulation in a simulation.
But in the future, there’re going to be
all these simulated, simulated computers and
they’re going to have all these minds. So,
we’re actually triply simulated. No, we’re
quadruple simulated,
and it goes on and on all night.
>>TYSON: So, the turtles all
the way down.
>>TEGMARK: Turtles all the way down. And
at this point, I get this sinking feeling
that there’s something
rotten at the core of this argument.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>CHALMERS: The answer is we’re at level 42.
>>TYSON: Good answer.
>>GATES: No, no, 137.
>>TYSON: One-thirty-seven. That’s
the fine structure constant.
>>GATES: Of course.
>>TEGMARK: And I think where the problem lies
is that when you make this argument about
what kind of minds are really the most common,
the most simulated and non-simulated,
it assumes to answer that you have to know
what the actual laws of physics are.
But if you start making these other arguments,
we have no clue as to what the laws of physics
are. It doesn’t matter what the laws here
in our simulation—
if it is one—are. We need to know what the
real laws of physics are in the basement universe
that’s the foundation. And, if so, we don’t
really have access to that.
So, that’s the philosophical nitpick, which
seems to be swept under the rug here.
>>TYSON: Jim, where—
>>GATES: Where am I?
>>TYSON: Yeah.
>>GATES: Well, first of all, I have
a finger. And I look at it, and it seems to
be real.
And so my point of view is very conservative.
It was Carl Sagan who once said that, “Extraordinary
statements,” and I’m paraphrasing—
>>TYSON: Claims, yeah.
>>GATES: Right. “Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.”
Now, Zohreh has told us about a kind of evidence.
And that’s the kind of evidence that would
convince me as a physicist. But what I do
is sort of a mathematical model of physics.
And in our previous encounter here on this
stage, I had a chance to tell you about these
error-correcting codes,
which are very specific kind of digital data.
It’s not just general digital data. It’s
a very specific kind that seem extraordinarily
unlikely.
And I have to tell you that one of the reasons
I enjoy talking to audiences like this is
they get us experts out of our comfort zone.
And so one of the first non-physicists that
I talked to,
or that I read reflected on my comment, said
effectively—
this is not exact words, but effectively he
said if the simulation hypothesis is valid,
then we open the door
to eternal life and resurrection and things
that formerly have been discussed in the realm
of religion. And the reason is really quite
simply. Because if you think about a computer—
if we are a simulation, then we’re like
programs in a computer, as long as I’m a
computer that’s not damaged, I can always
rerun the program. So, if you really believe
that we are in a simulation, and there’s
some structure that runs that simulation,
unless something damages that structure, then
we can be repurposed. And so it starts to
break down a very funny barrier
between what people often think as the conflict
between science and the conflict between faith.
>>TYSON: So, what you’re saying
is that if we are simulated, that means there’s
a code that’s doing it,
and that code was started at some point. And
in principle, it could just be rebooted, and
then all of this would happen exactly the
way it happened before
because it’s running the same computer program.
In principle.
>>GATES: If one accepts the simulation
hypothesis as an accurate description of nature—
>>DAVOUDI: I would say that’s a useless
exercise.
What would be more interesting is to actually—
>>TYSON: The word was useless,
Jim, in case you missed that.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Okay, you heard that. Okay.
Emphasis on useless exercise. Go, Zohreh.
Go.
>>DAVOUDI: Trying to repeat what you’ve
already done with huge computation resources
is useless. What is more interesting
is to go and change the parameters of the
simulation—the input parameters. Just put
the same laws of nature, and then just change
a little bit
the value of the parameters—the very fundamental
parameters of our universe. And then let it
run and see what happens. It’s actually
very interesting idea—
>>TYSON: It’s a fun thing
to do, as a scientist.
>>GATES: But in changing those parameters
you might cancel out my existence, in which
case I don’t think that’s very useful.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: The universe without
Jim. So, Lisa, isn’t this some of the foundation—
couldn’t we account for a multi-verse in
this very way? That multiple-verse is multiple
universes as I understand them
will have slightly different laws of physics.
Maybe they are themselves the experimenter’s
search.
>>RANDALL: Okay. So, let’s slow dow a bit here.
So, first of all, I actually want to address
some of the things that have come up already.
One of the questions is probability;
Bostrum’s argument or whatever,
that we’re likely to be in a simulation.
I mean, part of the problem is that probabilities
have to have a well-defined meaning, or are
only useful when they have a well-defined
meaning.
So, among all possible scenarios we can actually
say which one is more or less likely. When
we run into infinities, when we run into—
it stops making sense. I mean, I could say
really by probability I’m very likely to
be Chinese
because there’s a lot more Chinese than
Americans. But I’m clearly not Chinese.
So, probabilities are tricky, and you have
to be careful what you mean when you’re
saying them.
Another thing is I actually find the egotism
of thinking that if there was simulators around
that they’d come up with us
kind of audacious and ridiculous. I mean,
I think it’s a very self-centeredness to
this whole thing that kind of I find hilarious.
[LAUGHTER]
>>RANDALL: But in terms of feedback—in terms of error-correcting
code,
I think it’s very likely that there were
going to be feedback mechanisms in whatever
universe survives because if there aren’t,
I mean, there’s always going to be mistakes.
And if mistakes can propagate and just cut
things off,
those universes don’t survive. So, there
have to be—I mean, for any universe, simulated
or non-simulated, there has to be error correction.
So, that has to be part of it.
>>TYSON: Right. That assumes
that the programmer makes the same kind of
programming—is susceptible to programming
errors and programming bugs that we are.
>>RANDALL: It’s not even intentional.
It could be just that the computer itself
is subject to error. I mean, it’s only firing
things somewhat random—I mean, ultimately,
there’s uncertainty in everything. Nothing
is created perfectly.
>>TYSON: Quantum uncertainty.
>>GATES: Can I jump in here?
>>TYSON: What?
>>GATES: Because she’s raised—in
fact, I think an incredible point about this.
>>RANDALL: As long as you come back to me afterwards.
>>JAMES GATES: May I take up your time? I’ll cede minutes back later.
>>TYSON: Yes, okay.
>>GATES: This point about error correction
is something that
when people have—general public has looked
at my work, they say, “Oh, you must believe
in simulations.” And I’ve said, no, actually
I don’t.
And the reason is because precisely the point
the Lisa points out.
If you look in all of nature and ask are there
any other places in nature—not in engineering,
not in computers, not in the things that we
build,
but in nature herself, is there a discussion
in science about error-correcting codes?
It turns out there’s one place and one place
only that I have been able to identify. That’s
in evolution and genetics. And there’s been
a discussion—
>>RANDALL: Or any biological system.
>>GATES: Right. Or any biological—right.
And it’s not that we think life is some
kind of programmed simulation. It’s because
the universe itself,
as Lisa had said, has to have feedback mechanisms
that basically sustain a structure that propagates
faithfully forward in time. And I think that’s
in fact the most critical point. And you have
your time now.
>>LISA RANDALL: Thank you. And anyone who
wants to take my time to agree with me—
[LAUGHTER AND CROSSTALK]
>>RANDALL: But as far as the multi-verse
theory goes,
so we have to be careful by what we mean by
that. I mean, at some underlying level we
still think it’s
physics in action. Now, what might change
in different universes, we might actually
have different forces. We might actually have
different strengths of interactions;
the kind of thing that gets simulated. I mean,
we simulate strong interactions the way that
were described.
>>TYSON: Just to be clear, strong
interactions are the forces that bind atomic
nuclei.
>>RANDALL: So, protons.
>>TYSON: Yeah, protons that
are the same charge
that are sitting right next to one another
in a nucleus. And how’s that even possible
when we were taught that like charges repel?
So, there’s got to be a really strong force
down there holding it together. And there
is a really strong force. It’s called the
strong force. Okay, so go on.
>>RANDALL: Which is strong.
>>TYSON: Yeah. Okay.
Just to be clear.
>>RANDALL: So, and there can be different
possibilities for what these parameters can
be. It’s still underlying you still believe
that there’s the laws of physics that are
operating.
So, the question—I mean, so it’s not a
simulation. It’s just—
I mean, it’s in principle possible that
there are universes we don’t communicate
with
that are so far away we’ll never send a
signal, they’ll never send a signal. So,
for all intents and purposes, there just are
different universes. That doesn’t mean they’re
simulated. It just means they’re different
from ours and they can have different properties.
To really distinguish a simulation, you really
do have to see
just our whole notion of the laws of physics
breaking down, or some of the fundamental
underlying properties. So, it would be extremely
interesting to look for the kind of
violations of Lorenz invariants that
were discussed earlier, or things like quantum
entanglement no longer hold it. Not because
of interaction of the environment, but just
the computer just couldn’t keep track of
stuff. I mean, that’s stuff that gets so—
I mean, a lot of the simulation idea—I mean,
to simulate the universe, you need the computational
power of the universe. So, all of the simulations
are based on the idea that there are some
approximations that we don’t see,
but you have to be able to hide them. So,
what we’re really looking for is the breakdown
of the assumption that those approximation
s are valid.
>>TYSON: But, David, what do
your philosophical circles say about proposing
an experiment that might falsify these ideas?
>>CHALMERS: Look, I don’t think you’re
going to get conclusive experimental proof
that we’re—we’re certainly not going
to get conclusive experimental proof that
you’re not in a simulation. I suppose we
could get some kind of various—
>>TYSON: Well, why not? You
just declared something. Why can’t a clever
person come along and—
>>CHALMERS: Because any evidence that
we could ever get could be simulated. That’s
basically the reason. Sorry. Maybe—
>>TYSON: So, if I find evidence
that we’re not simulated, the great simulator—
>>CHALMERS: They could have just planted
that for you.
>>TYSON: —put that in.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. They’re one step
ahead. However—
>>TYSON: We’re done. We’re
done here.
>>CHALMERS: Maybe we—we probably could
get pretty strong evidence
that we are simulated. If someone wrote up
in the sky, “Sorry, guys”—the stars
suddenly rearrange themselves into, “Sorry,
guys, it’s all a giant simulation.”
And then they took over the Internet and—
>>TYSON: Except it would be
in Chinese to get the most number of people
to read it.
>>CHALMERS: Then we’d probably have
a pretty good reason to think
we’re in a simulation. Either that or the
weirdest non-simulated universe that anyone
ever imagined. So, for a philosopher anyway,
it’s not fundamentally a matter of experimental
proof. It’s cool. I really like Zohreh’s
experimental evidence that we’re in a simulation.
But I think around here it’s really important
to make a distinction
that there’s a hypothesis that we’re in
a simulation. There’s a hypothesis that
the universe is computational.
Those are closely related. If we’re in a
simulation, the universe is fundamentally
computational. But it’s not true that this
universe is fundamentally computational we’re
necessarily in a simulation.
Because the simulation hypothesis is a combination
of two things.
>>TYSON: That’s an official
thing, the simulation hypothesis.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. The simulation hypothesis
says we’re in a computer simulation. A computer
simulation’s a computation
that was created by someone for a purpose.
So, basically the simulation hypothesis is
that computation hypothesis,
plus something else about someone who created
it. And around here is where you might be
able to get a little
theological and say, okay, well, it’s a
naturalistic version of the god hypothesis.
But, anyway, my worry about Zohreh’s stuff,
which is really cool, it’s really evidence
for the much weaker hypothesis that the universe
is some form of discrete computation and is
completely neutral
on the question of whether this is actually
a simulation in the sense of something that
was created—
>>TYSON: With intent.
>>CHALMERS: —by a simulator.
>>TYSON: So, Max, do you mind
if I call you Mario from now on? Because if
you’re Mario in the computer game—
>>TEGMARK: Starts with M-A, so you get the two letters, yeah.
>>TYSON: I imagine Mario—someone
coming into a Mario game
and calculating how high he jumps and how
fast he runs and coming up with the laws of
physics of the game, and possibly then questioning
why is it that and not something else perhaps.
And so, fine, but is there—why would that
allow someone in the game to have any understanding
of what’s outside the game?
>>TEGMARK: Yeah, that’s a really deep
and good question. Mario might—if Mario
can ever—even if he figures out exactly
the rules of his world—
>>TYSON: Then he just figures
out the rules.
>>TEGMARK: —he won’t even know if
he’s running on a Mac or a Windows box or
a Linux box
because all he has access to is this higher
level of this sort of emergent reality. And
we might, at some level, be stuck
in that situation in physics also. It’s
quite fascinating to think that so much of
what we’ve figured out, for example, about
how a glass of water works
with waves and vortexes and things, we figured
out already without having a clue about the
substrate. We didn’t even know there were
atoms. But the same kind of questions that
you’re asking,
which I think are awesome, the kind of questions
where you ask suppose this is actually somehow
simulated,
suppose the simulators cutting corners, how
would that show up?
Actually, it has been incredibly useful in
the past. If you imagine going back 200 years
and trying to simulate this water as an infinitely—
a continuous liquid where there’s a pressure
and a density that has to be defined with
infinitely many decimal places and
infinite points,
that sounds horrible to simulate. So, maybe
whoever did this cut corners. Maybe there’s
a smallest kind of chunk of object—let’s
call it atom or something—
you can figure out then what are the departures
from this simplified continuous physics that
I’m guilty of teaching my undergrads at
MIT about this morning?
And you would figure out a way there’s this
one little thing, which is different.
>>TYSON: He trained down a few
hours ago from Cambridge.
>>TEGMARK: Yeah.
>>TYSON: Thank you for coming
and for—
>>TEGMARK: Brownian motion that things
should jiggle around in a weird way. And Einstein
found that,
got the Nobel Prize for it importantly. And
I think that the sort of thing you’re doing
is awesome.
Look for corner-cutting evidence. I suspect
that whether we’re simulated or not there
are a lot of things that are wrong about what
we assume today.
I am very skeptical that we really have a
continuous space that can be stretched infinitely
many times. It seems like some sort of simplification
that we came up
because it was easier to do the math.
>>DAVOUDI: But do you ever ask why
should that be the case? Why do we need a
discretized universe? I mean,
if you put away the simulation hypothesis
or a computational hypothesis,
why should we even think about a discretized
universe? Why not continuum?
It’s [unintelligible].
>>TYSON: So, this is an important—
>>TEGMARK: Yeah.
>>TYSON: I don’t want to call
it a problem in physics, but a reality of
physics
that our macroscopic world looks continuous
to us. And that has a certain simplicity of
modeling. And then as you get smaller and
smaller and smaller, it’s no longer continuous
and it’s discrete, which may be easier to
calculate than being able to be divisible
all the way down to an infinitesimally small
bit.
Because now you need that much bigger computer
to do it. By the way, we have—
>>RANDALL: So, you know something that
none of us actually know.
This is actually a real question, whether
space is discrete at really small scale.
>>TYSON: Well, we run into this
problem when we do flyovers in the Hayden
Planetarium. We have a data set for a planetary
surface—
let’s say Mars—and you had a given distance.
And from that distance you can see Olympus
Mons, the biggest mountain around, and Valles
Marineris,
and you say, fine, now I want to get closer.
Well, to get closer, and have more information
come to you, you have to swap in a higher
resolution map. And we try to do that continuously,
so you don’t realize that.
So, you keep doing this, and then you reach
a point where we don’t have more resolution
to give you. So, we actually hold you back,
so you don’t go closer. But if you did,
all of a sudden you see these discretized
pixels of the Martian surface.
And that’s basically because we don’t
have the data. We’re not there. It doesn’t
exist for us.
>>CHALMERS: So, anyone’s who’s used
one of these virtual reality devices, like
the Oculus Rift, knows there’s something
called the screen door effect.
It’s like you can—if you look closely
enough you can see the pixels, so it’s not
a perfect simulation. So, I guess really what
Zohreh is doing is saying, well, we can get
empirical evidence for a screen door effect
in real physics.
>>DAVOUDI: Yeah, I think it’s actually
a deeper question than that. It’s not about
not having enough data to resolve those distances,
but to some extent that’s true.
But the problems is something that even bothered
Feynman a lot
that why do you need infinite numbers of degrees
of freedom, or infinite amount of information,
to describe a very tiny chunk of the space-time?
That just doesn’t make sense.
You can pretty well describe the physics without
actually needing that infinite amount of information.
>>TYSON: What I meant to add
is that when we’re zoomed down to Mars,
it’s not only that we don’t have the data,
even if we did have the data, you would need
that much bigger
disk space to have it ready and loaded to
be able to go from the bird’s eye view down
to any kind of small—
I mean, we rapidly run out of capacity to
calculate.
>>TEGMARK: And that’s a great controversy
that even mathematicians have been really
arguing passionately about for over 100 years.
Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians
ever, said—or Kronecker actually said God
had created the integers
and everything else was just the work of man.
All this continuous real numbers with decimal
places and stuff.
I mean, frankly, as a physicist it feels kind
of hubristic
to say that you need an infinite amount of
information to figure out the height of my
wine glass or anything. Nature seems perfectly
about to figure out what’s—
>>TYSON: There’s water in
that glass, by the way.
>>TEGMARK: Yeah, what to do. And we have
this toy model that you need an infinite amount
of information to do things.
I think you’re on to something very deep there, Zoreh, and that nature actually—infinity
is just something we made up for convenience.
And as we dig deeper, we’re going to find
that maybe even space and time itself is at
some level digital.
>>RANDALL: So, can I just say something
by way of clarification? Which is just in
physics
we don’t actually prove any theory. We can
rule out theories.
So, we can rule out a lot of alternative theories,
but in any case you can always have the possibility
that you can dig deeper and find
that whatever theory you thought was the most
fundamental has some underlying structure.
And so that’s why all the physics we’ve
done works. That’s why we really don’t
need to have an infinite amount of information
at any time
because we don’t have access to an infinite
amount of information. And we can’t even
ask the question or tell whether or not there’s
this underlying infinite amount of information.
So, it’s not just we can’t just ask the
question whether the universe is a simulation.
We can’t ask if any physical theory is absolutely
correct. We’ll never know the answer to
that.
All we can know is that we’ve tested it
up to a certain level, at a certain level
of precision, over a certain range.
And so these questions all come with it, and that’s why I can describe this
glass of water without knowing about atoms,
because I didn’t have—wasn’t doing an
experiment where the effects of the atoms
became manifest. And the same might be true
of the universe as a whole.
So, we can have in the back of our mind there
may or may not be an infinite number of degrees
of freedom. But that’s not what we’re
actually testing.
>>TEGMARK: Let’s disagree on one thing,
though.
I think there’s one fantastic example where
we can tell it makes a huge difference. I
think the biggest embarrassment we have
arguably in fundamental physics and cosmology
right now is this fact that inflation,
if it goes on forever, makes this multi-verse,
and then we can’t calculate probabilities,
like you so eloquently said in the beginning.
That comes exactly from the infinity assumption;
the idea that you can take a piece of space
and just keep stretching it into twice the
size forever. So, I think you should question
that.
>>RANDALL: Well, it doesn’t have to
be infinite. It could just be a large number.
It could be 10 to the 500. I mean, it doesn’t
really matter if we say it’s infinite. Why
don’t we just say it’s a lot?
>>TEGMARK: But you can calculate probabilities
as long as it never gets infinite. It’s
exactly infinity that kind of, arrrgh, gets us.
>>TYSON: So, he’s cool with
10 to the 500, is what he’s saying, which
seems like a really big number.
>>RANDALL: I know.
>>TYSON: That like equals infinity
to me, I think.
>>RANDALL: But that’s exactly the point.
That’s exactly the point.
>>TYSON: Jim, is there any functional
difference at all
between admitting that we live in a computer
simulation and saying that’s basically a
secular god?
What’s the difference?
>>GATES: Well, first of all, I’ve
decided my name should be Morpheus, not Jim.
>>TYSON: Okay. Well, let me—
>>TEGMARK: I’m Mario. Nice to meet you,
Morpheus.
>>TYSON: Morpheus.
>>GATES: Exactly.
>>TYSON: Yes. You have to see
the movie The Matrix and play video games
to follow this conversation at this moment.
Morpheus.
>>GATES: But as I said, for non-scientists—
because I’m going to make this partition.
I think for non-scientists, an acceptance
of the simulation hypothesis as an accurate
view of our universe
is equivalent, I believe, to the notion of
a deity. I don’t understand how, for a non-scientist,
you can make that distinction. For a scientist,
however, we are [rather] secular.
The definition of science is actually a secular
definition. And, in fact, it’s the definition
that comes to us from Galileo.
Einstein quotes Galileo as being the father
of all science because Galileo—and these
are Einstein’s words—drums into us that
contemplation alone, without observation of
nature,
is totally useless in trying to come up with
an accurate view of nature. So, it’s that
ability of us—our human ability to observe
the universe
that actually defines science. So, if you
can’t give me something that I can observe,
I don’t know how to do science.
>>TYSON: Okay. So, what you’re
saying is
that if in fact there is a programmer who
would be philosophically equivalent to a Creator,
and you can’t observe them,
they’re just outside the realm of science.
>>GATES: I think that’s the definition.
>>TYSON: David, do you have
to be defined by that?
>>CHALMERS: Well, I think there’s
a theological reading, if you like, to the
simulation hypothesis. It says all this was
created,
but what’s interesting is at the same time
it can be seen as a kind of a naturalistic
theology. A naturalistic hypothesis—from
the point of view—
>>TYSON: Is that the first time
the phrase has ever been uttered? A naturalistic
theology.
>>CHALMERS: I think it’s out there
already.
>>TYSON: Oh, it’s out there.
Okay. All right.
>>CHALMERS: Simulation theology, you heard it here first.
Simulation theology is the coolest kind of
naturalistic theology, from the point of view
of the—
>>TYSON: Actually, there’s
a book in 1750—or who was it?
>>CHALMERS: Yeah, David Hume was into
naturalism.
>>TYSON: No, there was—who
was the fellow who wrote the book Natural
Theology?
There was a book with that very title.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah.
>>TYSON: But not natural simulation
or simulated theology.
>>CHALMERS: If you think about is from
the point of view of the simulated—
I mean, we in this universe can create simulated
worlds, and there’s nothing remotely spooky
about that. People are already doing it with
virtual reality and the Sims and Second Life.
And whatever this is is just a far more sophisticated
version of that.
So, we just need to move that picture to the
next universe up and say,
hey, maybe that’s what’s happening to
us. So, we got a creator, but our creator
isn’t especially spooky.
It’s just some teenage hacker in the next
universe up
whose mom’s calling him in to dinner.
>>TYSON: Working in the basement,
yeah.
>>CHALMERS: So, I think you could be
led to at least entertain this idea
by perfectly naturalistic ideas as, say, Nick
Bostrum was and say, okay,
maybe this is the kind of theology which even
someone who’s got no sympathy for spooks
and gods and ghosts, needs to object to.
>>TYSON: So, that’s an interesting
point
because we don’t think of ourselves as deities
when we program Mario, even though we have
all power over how high Mario jumps.
Because that’s a line in the code. So, you’re
right. You just take it up
a few notches. There’s no reason to presume
they’re all powerful other than just they
fully control everything we do, say and think.
>>CHALMERS: Could be they’re all powerful.
I got into this from watching my five-year-old
nephew
playing with one version of the Sims or Sim
Life or something. He’d make a whole town.
He’d build up the buildings,
and you got the trees and the jungles and
the creatures. And then he’d say now comes
the good part,
and he’s send down fires and floods and
such. I was like, finally, I understand the
God of the Old Testament.
>>TYSON: Because it is true
in our world we have fires and floods.
I played one of those Sims—Sim City because
I’m a city kid. And—the early, early low-res
simulation. And there’s a feature,
you build up the—you need money. You’re
mayor of a city, and you construct buildings
and you need the schools and the fire departments.
And then every now and then Godzilla stomps
through your city
and you say that’s not real. I’m trying
to be real. But then it’s kind of real in
the sense that some major disaster can—
you will confront like Hurricane Sandy or
9/11. Now, you’ve got to redistribute resources.
So, I look at our real world, and these things
actually do happen. So, are they just trying
to mess with us? Is that—
>>CHALMERS: The way I think about—I
mean, who knows if there’s actually a simulator
who’s actually doing any of this. But if
you do take the simulation hypothesis seriously,
it’s got a couple of elements of a traditional
god. This person could be all knowing about
our universe, could be all powerful. The one
thing which is probably missing is
wisdom and benevolence. If there’s a simulator,
I refuse to worship you. You may be out there,
but you have not established yourself as being
worthy of worship. I refuse to—
>>NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Right. Because they’re
all powerful and all knowing, but not all good.
>>CHALMERS: There’s no reason to think
they’re all good.
>>TEGMARK: Cut him some slack. He’s
only five years old.
[LAUGHTER AND CROSSTALK]
>>CHALMERS: You’re going to be maturing
one of these days.
>>TYSON: Zohreh?
>>DAVOUDI: Yeah. So, I think there
is a big danger in trying to compare
our idea of simulation with what comes with
computer games, whether you’re talking—at
least in my point of view and I think a physicist’s
point of view.
What’s called the simulation is you just
input the laws of physics,
and nature and universe emerges. You don’t
actually try to make it look like it’s something
going on. You don’t try to—
the same as with computer games. You don’t
interfere with what you’ve created. You
just input something that is very fundamental
and just let it go, just as our universe.
>>TEGMARK: Like deism.
>>DAVOUDI: Yeah.
>>TYSON: In other words, you
set the laws into motion
and let the universe unfold.
>>DAVOUDI: Exactly.
>>TYSON: However those laws
prescribe.
>>DAVOUDI: Because a priority—you
don’t know what happens because the universe
is complex. The laws of physics are simple,
but you don’t know what kind of complexities
you should expect. And then you just get it
wrong
and things emerge, and we just watch.
>>TYSON: But, Lisa, in the search
for the Theory of Everything,
isn’t that got a little bit of this in it?
Once you find the Theory of Everything—and
you’ve been on two of our Theory of Everything
panels here—
you’re going to find out the one equation
that the five-year-old working in the garage
wrote down that made our entire universe.
>>RANDALL: Well, you might recall, since
I’ve done this a couple times, that the
Theory of Everything,
I think, is very badly named for a lot of
these reasons. Because even with the equations,
as was pointed out earlier,
you could start your system in very different
ways. You can have different conditions. And
there’s a lot that we don’t understand.
I mean, even if I understood quantum gravity
at a fundamental level and could derive all
the equations,
that’s still not going to help me predict
waves at a practical level. I mean, the computer
simulation will never be that detailed,
in my opinion. It’s much better to go to
different levels and figure out what’s going
on at what I would call an effective theory
approach. So, even with the fundamental equations—
now, I mean, clearly if you had infinite computing
power, then you would just be literally mimicking
the universe. And possibly you could do that.
But short of that,
you’re going to have to find these approximations,
these descriptions that are sort of somewhat
in between. They’re still science.
They’re not something I’m just making.
There’s still equations that work, and they
ultimately are attributable
to whatever is that fundamental equation.
But that doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally
how we’re computing it. It doesn’t mean
it’s fundamentally how it’s working.
>>TYSON: But, Zohreh, you started
this whole discussion by
describing—trying to obtain an understanding
of the basic forces of nature and the particles
and build up from there.
But isn’t there surely a gap between what
you know drives the behavior of individual
particles
and what might be emergent features in a macroscopic
system. Isn’t that true with the gas laws?
We learn gas laws in the first week of chemistry,
but I don’t know that you can get the macroscopic
gas laws by knowing every single particle
at every single instant.
I don’t know that they’re fully reducible
to that. So, can you admit the possibility
that there are gaps
and that there’s emergent phenomena that—so,
starting at the very basic level won’t get
you there?
Is that possible?
>>DAVOUDI: I do admit to that, and
it is in fact—
>>TYSON: Okay, good. Thank you.
You admit to it.
No, go ahead.
>>DAVOUDI: No, this is indeed a field
of research now, for example, in nuclear physics
we know that these microscopic features about
particles
and building blocks of that would contribute
in strong interactions,
but we don’t know exactly how to get these
complex system of nuclei.
And we have very good microscopy and phenomenological models that describe all these
larger-scale phenomena,
but we still don’t know how to get them
from this phenomena.
So, that’s what, as physicists have to—
>>RANDALL: In principle, if you could
do it—I mean, if you had infinite computing power.
>>DAVOUDI: Yeah.
>>RANDALL: In principle, you could actually
see a system that exhibited the gas laws.
The question is whether we as scientists would
call them—deriving the gas laws. It wouldn’t
be a very useful description.
It would mean that we’d have to have these
enormous computations every time to do it,
rather than solve an equation that, as you
know [unintelligible]—
>>TYSON: Oh, so I never heard
that before.
You’re assuming that if in fact we could
compute the behavior of every single particle
in a gas,
that out of that would emerge the macroscopic
gas laws.
>>RANDALL: Well, it would behave according
to the gas laws. That doesn’t mean that
you would know what those gas laws are.
>>TYSON: Okay. That’s confident.
So, what you’re saying is it’s not emergent
Because I’m intrigued which of you mentioned
the water—
>>RANDALL: No, emergent means that it
emerges from the fundamental laws.
>>TYSON: But because we understood,
to a very high degree, a fluid dynamics
long before we knew that fluids were made
of atoms.
>>RANDALL: Right.
>>TYSON: And I don’t know
how much the public knows that atoms are—though,
the idea is old,
evidence that atoms are real is relatively
recent.
And even as recently as the year 1900, it
was still kind of not sure.
And it wasn’t really until Einstein and
Brownian motion in 1905 where there’s really
good evidence that atoms were real things.
Yet, we had full understanding of fluid dynamics
in any way that mattered for us.
>>RANDALL: Right. But we also now can
derive fluid dynamics from the atomic description,
in certain cases.
Not all fluid dynamics, but some of the properties
of condensed matter physics
we can derive by that.
>>TYSON: Okay, I’m glad to
hear that. So, we’re still talking about
reducible things.
>>TEGMARK: They’re two separate things,
though. We mustn’t conflate.
On one hand, I think in principle it can derive
all these higher level things,
I think, even ultimately even consciousness
like David Chalmers is working on, from starting
out with a quark since that—
>>TYSON: You’re going to bring
consciousness into this?
>>TEGMARK: In practice, on the other
hand, whether we humans are smart enough to
figure it out—
that’s a whole different story. And I think
that’s—
I’m guessing that’s what you were getting
at there. You weren’t saying that there’s
some mysterious epistemological gap
that we can’t—
>>DAVOUDI: Oh, no, no. That’s not
what I meant.
>>TEGMARK: But that we might be able to
understand.
>>DAVOUDI: We haven’t yet have the
resources and probably enough tools and understanding
to fill that gap.
But the phenomenal equations are there. It’s
just a matter of when we actually get there.
>>TYSON: So, I’m curious—this
brings me to a point that we did not discuss
earlier in the notes that we shared.
You can know everything you can about cell
biology, about how life works.
And it’s not obvious to me that by just
studying a single life form
that you can derive evolution by natural selection.
That that’s an emergent phenomenon given
the system.
So, if it’s emergent, then no one actually
programmed it in to do that.
That’s just something that resulted.
>>RANDALL: Right. So, the way I would
describe it is I would say that the fundamental—
whatever’s fundamentally there—that substrate—is
essential to whatever happened,
but is not necessarily essential to your description
of what happened.
And so the laws are following from this, but
it’s not giving an explanation.
So, I can note that there’s atoms, but it
doesn’t help me predict
what will happen when I throw a ball. I mean,
in principle I could probably figure it out
based on that;
put it all together, but it won’t help me.
It’s so inefficient.
So, it’s much better to have a description
of a solid ball, even though it’s made of
atoms,
which are actually mostly empty space. So,
that solid ball description
leaves all that out, and it works just fine.
It tells me exactly where the ball will land
[unintelligible] measure it.
>>TYSON: David, you and your
consciousness cronies,
is it generally recognized that consciousness
is an emergent phenomenon of a complex brain?
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. Well, this word emergence
is kind of word that people used to cover
a huge variety of sins.
I mean, sometimes I think it’s kind of a
magic word we use to make ourselves feel comfortable
with things we don’t really understand.
So, ah, that’s emergent.
There’s different kinds of emergence. There’s
the kind you get with, say, complex systems
like the Game of Life;
Conway’s Game of Life where the cells blip
on and off,
and you get complex phenomena like gliders
that move along.
You know it’s surprising, and you wouldn’t
have expected it, but you can put together
the equation that it’s totally predictable.
You run the game of life over and again with
simple computational rules,
it’ll be predictable again and again.
Evolution is interesting at the immediate
case. Maybe given the laws of physics in certain
initial conditions.
You can run them again and again. I don’t
know.
Maybe you’ll get—maybe it’ll turn out
evolution arises 60 percent of the time.
If so, that’s incredibly cool, and then
that ought to be explainable in principle.
Now, for consciousness, people sometimes say
consciousness is emergent,
but there’s a gap there of a kind that we
haven’t even begun to close in the gap of
consciousness.
People can tell stories about life. People
can tell stories about evolution.
No one’s even begun to tell a story that
enables you to predict the existence of consciousness
from any number—
any amount of underlying physical dynamics.
It explains the behavior. It explains how
we walk, how we talk, but why that should
actually feel like something from the first-person
point of view,
that is emergent in a much stronger sense.
I’d say that’s strongly emergent in the
sense of it might require new principles to
explain.
>>TYSON: Max, is there any role
of chaos theory in this?
Because we know that in principle and in practice
there’s some systems that are so complex,
that you cannot accurately predict its future
behavior.
Now, is that true even if you had an infinitely
powerful computer?
>>TEGMARK: No matter how powerful a computer
we build on earth,
we can certainly not predict—we could not
have predicted that the Red Sox were going
to win the World Series right after I moved
to Boston.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>TEGMARK: Because precisely of chaos
theory, where tiny
changes in the position of some particle made
a huge difference later on.
But—
>>TYSON: Just the Butterfly
Effect.
>>TEGMARK: Yeah. If things—
>>TYSON: I’ve got to tell
you real quick, there’s the Journal of Irreproducible
Results,
which is if you’re a scientist and you come
up with something that you know isn’t right,
but it’s a really cool calculation, you
publish it there. And it’s like in there
you’ll find the calculation of what happens
if you strap a jellied toast to the back of
a cat.
Since toast always lands jelly side down,
and cats always land on their feet,
what would happen if this dropped? Okay.
And so in the paper, they hypothesize that
the cat falls, and then hovers over the—
so, it’s stupid fun calculations. One of
them was—
sorry for this interlude, but one of them
was there was some major storm system that
happened that hit the
East Coast of the United States, and someone
said, “We found the butterfly that caused
this.”
And they killed it and it was on display.
So, go on. So, this Butterfly Effect—
>>TEGMARK: Yeah, yeah. I was just- apropos of complicated emergent phenomenon related
to chaos and such,
I just wanted to come back to what David was
saying about consciousness here,
and kind of connect it with what you opened
with here. How can we test with scientific
methods
these ideas of whether we’re simulated or
not? Or at least update our odds in one way
or the other. I think one thing that’s great
to do is what
you’re doing. Again, looking for this evidence
of a simulator cutting corners to make the
simulation easier to run.
I think another thing we should do is if you
want to test this computation—
hypothesis that everything is a computation,
or that everything’s mathematical,
we should look precisely at the things where
we’re the most clueless right now about
how we would actually describe it mathematically.
And I can’t think of anything we’re more
clueless about
right now than consciousness.
And try our very best to see if we can bring
also that in under the type of things that
we can describe with math.
If we fail spectacularly on that, and can
realize why, we’ll see, wow, our universe
is not mathematical.
Boom, done. Death to the simulation hypothesis.
Whereas, if you and your cronies,
as we’re told that they’re called, succeed,
that would I think be a big boost
for the simulation hypothesis.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. And there are people
who are pursuing the idea.
As you know, the consciousness is fundamentally
about information processing in the right
way
when information, for example, is integrated
in just the right way. Maybe you get a kind
of consciousness.
That’s still a very controversial idea,
and a lot that it doesn’t explain. But if
something like that is right,
it goes very naturally, at least, with the
simulation hypothesis
because it’s very natural to suppose that
in a simulation there could be all that information
being integrated and giving you consciousness.
Certain other views—just say, for example,
consciousness requires a certain very specific
intrinsic property
like a certain specific biology. Then there
could be a simulation of the whole universe.
But if it didn’t have that biology,
then no consciousness. It would just be a
world of—
>>TYSON: A world.
>>CHALMERS: —unfeeling zombies.
>>RANDALL: I have a question, though.
>>CHALMERS: Unfeeling physical dynamic.
So, it really makes a difference.
>>RANDALL: How do you ever show that
something can’t be described mathematically?
You’d have to believe you understood fundamentally
what the degrees of freedom are.
So, you might just have the wrong description.
I mean,
even in physics, I mean, we know classic examples
where people thought certain things were impossible
until just a new law of physics was discovered.
I mean, Darwin got the age of the world—
our world closer than the greatest physicists
of the time because Darwin just looked around,
and Kelvin thought he knew the laws of physics,
and he didn’t get them right.
So, I don’t see how you’re ever going
to be able to show that something has no mathematical
description.
>>TYSON: But, Max, you’re
big on the mathematical concept here. What
you’re saying is
everything is mathematics. And if everything
is mathematics, then everything is programmable.
>>TEGMARK: That’s right. That’s right.
And so I think as an answer to Lisa’s question,
David put it very well in the beginning. In
physics, we aren’t ever able to really prove
that something is true.
The only people who prove stuff are mathematicians.
But if David and Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch and
others succeed in this endeavor to try to
actually explain consciousness mathematically,
it wouldn’t prove that things are purely
mathematical, but it would certainly be yet
the great boost.
>>RANDALL: I asked the other question
of how you [unintelligible].
>>TEGMARK: Because if you just go back—let’s
go back to Galileo again.
We were eulogizing him earlier, right, for
his great insights. When he wrote that our
universe is a grand book written in the language
of mathematics,
that was 400 years ago because he was so impressed
that things moved in parabolas and things
like that.
He had no clue why oranges were orange and
hazelnuts were hard and some things were soft.
That seemed like it was beyond what he could
do with math. Then we got Maxwell’s equations,
the Schrodinger’s equation, the standard
model of particle physics.
More and more has been explained by math.
I think Galileo would be really impressed
if he were on stage.
So, it’s really cool to look at what are
the things left.
>>TYSON: I’ll invite him next
time.
>>TEGMARK: Awesome. Well,
you can reincarnate him and bring him on.
>>GATES: Just simulate him.
>>TYSON: We’ll just have to
simulate him. That’s what we’ll do.
>>TEGMARK: So, it’s really cool to look,
well, what’s left. Like consciousness, for
example,
and see if we can also make some progress
there. There’s no better way to fail on
anything, including consciousness understanding
than to tell ourselves, oh, we know it’s
impossible because of some principles, and
let’s not try.
>>TYSON: Yeah, those aren’t
good scientists who behave that way.
>>CHALMERS: I think we have to distinguish,
though, between the two claims that you can
give a mathematical description of everything,
and you can give a complete mathematical description
of everything. Even consciousness,
obviously, give many mathematical descriptions
of color space has certain geometrical properties,
the light,
the feeling of the light is more or less intense.
You can give a very rich mathematical description
of it.
And that’s what, say, someone like Tononi is doing. But can you give an exhaustive
mathematical description of it
once you’ve given a full mathematical specification
of consciousness, have you understood everything
about it, or is there some further nature
like the redness of the red,
or the blueness of the blue?
>>TYSON: What Max is saying
is that previous frontiers in that question
were ultimately breached when enough smart
people came along
to figure it out. So, whatever’s our state
of mind today, it would be unwise to suggest
that it somehow transcends any access that
the future of math might—
>>RANDALL: I mean, on some level we don’t
have an exhaustive description of anything
because we understand that there can always
be something more fundamental,
something we haven’t seen yet.
>>GATES: I agree.
>>TYSON: In fact, the very word
atom in Greek means indivisible.
>>CHALMERS: Yes.
>>TYSON: So, yeah, with that—how
long did that last?
>>RANDALL: And unchanging.
>>TYSON: Yeah.
>>GATES: While we have been all bowing
at the altar of mathematics,
[LAUGHTER]
>>GATES: a number of us are aware of this result by
Gödel called the incompleteness theorem.
And it even says in some sense mathematics
is incomplete. There are things in mathematics
that you cannot prove.
That’s what the theorems say. And so we,
as humans, I think—
>>TYSON: In fact, Gödel proved
it.
>>GATES: Yes. Yeah, right. He proved
it. That’s exactly right.
>>TYSON: Gödel proved that
math cannot be proven.
>>GATES: That’s right.
>>TYSON: Yeah.
>>CHALMERS: If it’s consistent.
>>GATES: Right. If it’s consistent.
[CROSSTALK]
>>TEGMARK: In defense of our universe
here—
>>TYSON: Somebody’s got to
defend our universe, so go ahead.
>>TEGMARK: Standing up for our universe.
There’s actually no evidence that our universe
is inconsistent,
or that mathematics is inconsistent. Gödel
said that we humans,
we cannot prove ever that mathematics is consistent.
>>TYSON: Right.
>>TEGMARK: We cannot prove that—that’s
impossible to prove that one equals two.
But I think that’s probably more of a reflection
of our own limit—of the limitations that
thinking beings have,
rather than our universe has some kind of
identity crisis. Our universe seems to know
exactly what it’s doing.
It doesn’t seem very inconsistent except
when I watch the Presidential Debates.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>GATES: Oh, boy, I’m not going there.
But, Max, that was precisely my point,
that maybe what we’re talking about is in
fact part of our limitations. Not limitations
on the universe,
but—in science it’s very funny because
the way we do science—
well, when I give public talks, I like to
say if you look at family in their house,
you might be an anthropologist and record
what they do,
and they turn the appliances off and on. And
you might come up with some big record book
of this.
But then when everybody’s out of the house,
you might just go to the house and watch how
it behaves.
The thermostats go up and down, and maybe
you have a timer that does other things.
And so the house has a set of rules for operating
when you’re not there. And in some sense,
in science, that’s what we’re doing.
And when we do this split between science,
non-science, in some sense we’re talking
about how the universe behaves as if we could
take our consciousness outside of the universe.
And that’s a very sudden point to appreciate.
And so maybe what this whole discussion has
been about
is actually just our limitations.
>>TYSON: So, we’re all stupid,
is what you’re saying.
[LAUGHTER]
>>GATES: Actually, the universe made
us very clever, at least most of us.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: So, Jim, I got to ask
you something.
Your discoveries of the checks—error-correcting
code within the laws of physics themselves,
at the depths that you’re researching them,
what I wonder is we live in the age of IT,
of information technology. So, we all have
a certain fluency.
So, it’s in our brains to think that way
at some level.
Could it be that how the saying goes, if you’re
a hammer then all your problems look like
nails,
and you solve them by hitting them.
If now we are in an IT revolution, and you’re
finding IT solutions to your problems, maybe
it’s just the fad of the moment.
And you’re forcing a solution that is either
not real, or there’s a better one awaiting
in a revolution that has yet to occur.
>>GATES: Sure. So, the last time I was
here I actually misspoke.
I used the name of Shannon when I meant Hamming
code instead.
So, first, let me correct that for this wonderful
audience and mention it—
>>TEGMARK: Error correction in action.
>>GATES: That’s right.
>>TYSON: Error correction—
>>GATES: Error correction in action,
absolutely.
But in—look, in our work, first of all,
we don’t know it’s the physics of our
universe.
There is a large experiment underway that
Lisa knows a lot about in Geneva because she
has written papers about possible outcomes
in these observations.
>>TYSON: Lisa, are you flying
to Geneva tomorrow?
>>RANDALL: I am, but not for that.
>>TYSON: Not for that, okay.
>>GATES: So, the Large Hadron Collider
is going to explore more of the structure
of the universe.
So, first, the mathematics that I have done
will only become physics, or relevant to nature,
when the LHC or some other observational device
says the idea of supersymmetry is correct.
Then it will kick in.
So, that’s a big if. There are lots of physicists
who don’t believe the universe will be supersymmetric.
In which case, all I’ve done is an interesting
mathematical fairytale.
>>TYSON: So, supersymmetric
proposes a whole other regime of particles
that are counterparts to the particles that
we’ve come to know and love?
>>GATES: Correct.
>>TYSON: Okay. And they’re
yet to be discovered, but they could be describing
a whole other parallel reality,
awaiting our discovery?
>>GATES: Well—
>>RANDALL: But even that—I mean, I
just want to clarify.
We may or may not find evidence at the Large
Hadron Collider, which is what’s being discussed.
But that doesn’t even mean that supersymmetry
doesn’t exist. It means that we can’t
find the evidence at the scales that we can
probe.
>>GATES: Exactly.
>>RANDALL: So, it could be that there
is some fundamental symmetry,
and it’s broken at such a high scale that
we cannot access any of the evidence of it.
And that’s the world we live in. I mean,
that’s what we do as scientists. We try
to simulate what we can.
We try to derive what we can. We try to measure
what we can. And then we have to allow for
the possibility that we just haven’t had
the accuracy.
We haven’t had the cleverness, or we haven’t
had the resources—
>>GATES: Technology.
>>RANDALL: —to be able to test certain
ideas.
And so I think that’s right, that it’s
a combination of what’s out there and what
we can actually do.
>>TYSON: So, I don’t who among
you to ask this direction, so I’ll just
put it out there in front of you like a piece
of raw meat, and you can chase after it, if
you—
>>RANDALL: You think we’re dogs?
>>TYSON: Or you vegetarian—some
raw carrots. Okay. So, you can chase after
it. I don’t know if any of you are vegetarian.
>>RANDALL: Can you cook the meat at least?
>>TYSON: I’ll cook the—okay.
We’ll cook the meat.
My question is I remember physics 101 and
102 and 201 and 202,
and as you learn the laws of physics, every
now and then something pops up that’s just
kind of weird.
All right? You learn Maxwell’s equations,
which describes the behavior of electromagnetic
radiation, the behavior of light,
and they’re really beautiful except there’s
an asymmetry in there.
There’s like you can have particles that
have electric fields like electrons,
but you don’t have isolated particles that
are their own magnetic fields. There’s always
a plus and a minus stuck together.
So, they’re not symmetric that way in the
equations. And it’s like you cringe when
you see that because part of us wants some
beauty and symmetry to the universe
if it is—I don’t know. We’re holding
it in very high—holding very high expectations
for what we
want to find.
And then you go back to the early universe,
and you find out that one out of 100 million—
one out of 100 million photons did not become
a photon because symmetry was broken,
and it made only one matter particle. Whereas,
all the other interactions had matter and
antimatter they annihilated and became photons.
And we are made of this one in 100 million
stuff that’s left over. Something broke
in the early universe.
And I ask you why aren’t these bugs in the
program that we’re dealing with?
>>RANDALL: So, I’m going to actually
answer that.
>>TYSON: You’ve got an answer
for that? Very cool. Very cool.
>>RANDALL: So, it’s definitely not
a bug in the program because in both these
cases,
the underlying laws actually do exhibit symmetry.
As Jim knows really well, that it has to do—
in our description of electromagnetism, you
have electrically charged particles.
There’s an alternative description where
the fundamental particles would be magnetic.
That’s not the universe we find ourselves
in. So, a lot of the symmetry is broken by
the actual state of the universe we live in.
So, it could be that the laws of nature have
some underlying symmetry that gets broken
at some point.
>>TYSON: So, who’s breaking
it?
>>RANDALL: Who’s breaking—the universe.
The universe is [unintelligible]—
>>TYSON: No, that’s not the
answer.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: I’m looking for a little more insight into
who’s breaking the laws of the universe
than just the universe.
>>RANDALL: Well, here’s a simple example,
okay.
>>TYSON: Well, just to be clear,
we come up with what we saw are laws,
and then if we see an exception we say that
there’s a case where the law is broken.
>>GATES: No, no.
>>RANDALL: Okay. Let me give you a simple
example.
>>TYSON: And we’re okay with
that.
>>GATES: It’s the symmetries that
are broken.
>>RANDALL: Suppose I have a pencil—
>>TYSON: Oh, sorry. Symmetries
that are broken.
>>RANDALL: So, say I have a pencil standing
on end. I have rotational symmetry, right?
We’d like to believe everything’s rotationally
symmetric. Why should one direction be different?
So, I have a pencil standing on end. It’s
going to fall down. It’s going to fall down
in some direction.
Now, who made it fall down in that direction?
No one made it fall down in that direction,
but it was going to fall down in some direction.
So, the symmetry is broken.
We didn’t ask the symmetry to be broken.
The fundamental laws were perfectly symmetric,
but the symmetry is broken.
And there’s many things in the universe
that are like that. The fundamental laws are
symmetric,
but the actual universe we live in has broken.
>>TYSON: So, we can’t look
for weirdness because if it is a program that’s
running,
which came up earlier, and we’ve all had
programs that crashed, what happens if our
program crashes? Do we all disappear like
instantly?
What are the consequences to this being a
program if someone unplugs it, if there’s
a bug that crashes the entire system?
Is there any piece of the universe where that
part of the program failed?
>>CHALMERS: I have it on good authority
[unintelligible]—
>>TEGMARK: A big spinning wheel here on
the stage going round and round and round.
>>CHALMERS: I have it on good authority
it’s crashed five times during this panel
discussion,
but, fortunately, it rebooted perfectly and
we have no memories of it. That’s just good
error correction.
>>GATES: No, no, but, Neil, the point
you raised, in fact, is for me one of the
most uncomfortable ideas about the simulation
hypothesis.
That it’s running on some device, and that
the errors would then—how would it manifest
itself?
Well, in the way that I think most of us think
about it, it’s kind of the end of the universe.
And, for me, the universe that I have studied
for 50 or 60 years is a kind of a—it’s
a place of mystery,
but it’s not a place of the fundamental
kind of insane, unleashed chaos that kind
of end.
Now, we know that—we talk about, for example,
false vacua. That’s something, again, that
Lisa knows a lot about because it was pioneered
largely by Sidney Coleman,
a professor at Harvard before Lisa got there.
We know that these possibilities are out there,
but the breaking of the symmetries are so—
one thing that’s really odd about this is
if you don’t break the symmetries you don’t
get us. You don’t get a universe with creatures
like us in it unless you break these symmetries.
And so maybe the question we should—
>>RANDALL: [Unintelligible 80:46] why
did I break those symmetries?
>>GATES: That’s right. The simulation’s
like why am I breaking those symmetries?
So, the fact of our existence says something
very deep about the mystery of this place
we call the universe because the laws—the
symmetric laws,
they’re beautiful. We write them with simple
equations on one or two lines.
But if those laws held exactly, we’re not
here.
>>TYSON: In fact, it’s just
a universe of photons.
>>TEGMARK: I think that’s a very good
point you bring up there.
At first, it looks like if someone’s simulated
this, they have been drinking too much or
whatever,
or really wasteful because you might ask why—if
they just wanted to simulate us, did they
bother simulating all this dark matter? Six
times as much matter, obviously, increase
their CPU cost, what they had to pay for their
über cloud services, whatever.
Who needed that?
>>TYSON: Plus we came really
late in the universe.
>>TEGMARK: But every single thing we’ve
discovered, like dark matter, for example,
that seems superfluous, we’ve since discovered
that if it weren’t there we would be dead.
Or, in fact, we wouldn’t even have evolved
in the first place.
If there were no dark matter, for example,
then its gravity would have not been there
to help pull our galaxy together,
and the Milky Way wouldn’t even have existed.
So, it’s an interesting question, I think,
to ask is this the simplest kind of simulation
you could run that would actually get some
interesting life?
Or is there something in our universe, which
is really just bells and whistles that you
could
optimize out?
>>CHALMERS: Someone was just doing—this
kid was just doing a science experiment.
He ran a million simulations overnight, and
exactly one of those universes produced—
broke the symmetries in the right way to produce
conscious beings and, hey, here we are.
>>RANDALL: Why did they make chiral fermions so difficult to simulate on the lattice?
>>GATES: That’s a scientific question,
guys.
>>TYSON: So, Zohreh? Yeah.
>>DAVOUDI: So, maybe just adding something
to this.
If someone was just looking at the weirdness
that we observe in the universe, maybe more
fundamental question to ask—
again, we can ask why the parameters of our
universe, mass of the electron or the cosmological
constant and things like that,
why should they have the value they have?
In terms of the simulation scenario, you can
sort of start to think this is just an input
as many other input.
Or the other way to interpret it is that we
don’t know, at a fundamental level, what’s
going on. Maybe there is embedding theory
that would arise to—
that is simpler. It has fewer input, or maybe
just one, and then gives you the values of
the standard model and all these theories
that,
no, to be exactly the same that we observe
in nature.
>>TYSON: Well, just to be clear,
when we—if any of us program a computer,
a simulation of anything, there’s a set
of parameters that are established up front.
And then you watch what happens thereafter,
and then you sometimes tweak the parameters
if necessary.
Some other parameters are non-tweakable. Almost
all of our codes, there’s a line that gives
the value of pi that’s not tweakable.
>>DAVOUDI: We don’t have any mathematical—sorry.
>>TEGMARK: My sons tell me, for example,
that in Minecraft when you create a Minecraft
world,
I’m taught by Philip and Alexander, you
have to input a world seed.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>TEGMARK: Yeah. And if you put in a different
one, different universe.
>>DAVOUDI: Basically, it means that
we don’t have the mathematical equations,
for example, to say that the mass of the electron
should be what we measure
and things like that. So, we don’t have
yet a description as why these have these
values.
>>TYSON: But why should we be—this
might have to go back to David.
Why should we be the measure of what an intellect
is,
and then judge what is hard or what is easy?
So, in other words, just because we think
something is hard because of all of these
physical constants that come together,
so that we exist many billions of years after
the universe forms, maybe that’s just trivial
for anybody who’s programing the universe.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah, I mean, it probably
is trivial. They’re probably got Sim universe
technology.
Everyone’s running it on their desktop. I mean, someone at Google in the next universe up.
>>TYSON: The next universe up.
That’s now a phrase.
>>CHALMERS: Create a Sim universe by,
okay, set a few parameters around the universe.
No big deal.
Some of those universes produce nobody. Some
of those universes produce somebody.
And those somebodies have to reverse engineer
their universe,
and it turns out reverse engineering is really
hard, whether you’re in a simulation or
not.
But that’s just—if you look at it this
way, it’s just a matter of perspective.
>>TYSON: Because when I think
of the game Tic-Tac-Toe, to a child this
is a challenging game.
They don’t know what move to make next,
and then they might win or lose, and then
they cheer, or they’re sad.
And then you realize this is a pointless game
you can play so that you’ll never lose,
or win. But then it’s no longer fun.
But to a child, it is a complex—it’s a
game that challenges them. And then we have
the game of chess,
which challenges us, but you go up an intelligence
level, and then it’s just a trivial exercise.
I don’t care how many possible moves there
are. It’s trivial if the brain is a greater
brain than ours.
And I’m reminded, which one of you may remember—just
to correct me if I don’t get it right—
was it Feynman who first analogized the laws
of nature to our attempt to understand the
laws of nature
would be like coming upon a game of chess
and you know nothing of the game, and you’re
just watching people move, and you don’t
have the rule book.
And you have to deduce what the rules are.
And so pretty easily you can see, well, this
piece moves this way and this only goes diagonal.
You get that, but occasionally one of the
pieces jumps two squares instead of just one.
Well, why did it do that? So, you make a note
of that, right? And then later on that little
piece that jumped too,
it reaches the other end of the board, and
then it becomes a whole other piece. That’s
kind of freaky.
It’s rare, but it happens, and it’s an
important rule of the game that most of the
time you don’t see.
And so I’m left wondering how much of a
chess game, without the instruction manual,
is the very universe in which we live.
To get your answers one each from that. Yes,
Zohreh?
>>DAVOUDI: Maybe starting from the philosopher side.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: All right, David, you
led off with that.
>>CHALMERS: I would say that’s basically
the situation we’re in.
We call that—this is the game of reverse
engineering the universe, and we call it science.
A little bit for philosophy, too.
There are clues we could get about the—we
certainly get the equations and so on, but,
hey, there are clues we could get about the
grander structure.
Hey, maybe at a certain point we’re going
to find one of those constants that has an
arbitrary value,
and find there’s a coded message in there
in the simplest possible language saying,
yeah, you guessed right.
It’s a simulation.
If so, then that’s part of the reverse engineering,
too, but it’s actually a miracle we can
understand anything about the world we’re
in from this perspective.
The world could have so much complexity, which
is completely beyond us. And it could be that
we are simply scratching
the surface. But I think to do science, you’ve
just got to take the optimistic.
>>TYSON: But you left me very
disappointed earlier in saying that anything—
I was trying to find evidence to show that
we’re not,
and that evidence that we’re not could be
put in by someone who is.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah, I’m afraid—
>>TYSON: So, that was disturbing.
So, I’m getting back to Zohreh’s point.
What’s the point of thinking that way?
>>CHALMERS: Well, you might take on
board Occam’s razor, which
is if we don’t need the hypothesis that
we’re in,
a simulation, then we should just do without
that hypothesis. Maybe science is going to
tell us a bunch of math.
It’s a bunch of equations. Yeah, that could
be combined with the further hypothesis we’re
in a simulation.
It’s a lot simpler if we’re not. So, Occam’s
razor at least says why bother.
Then, on the other hand, you’ve got Bostrum’s
statistical argument. We might actually produce
a whole lot of simulations,
and have very a good reason to believe there
are a lot of simulations in the universe,
at which case you can just raise the question.
We know some people are in simulations. We
cannot assign at least probability of zero
to us.
At that point it becomes a statistical question.
So, I think the standard scientific reasoning
of Occam’s razor might give some reason
to reject it,
but the statistics starts to maybe balance
that in another way around. At a certain
point, you’ve got to start doing some math
about the probabilities.
>>TYSON: So, Occam’s razor
actually goes very far back, I think, to the
14th century,
where it was the Earl of Occam who suggested—
>>CHALMERS: William Occam.
>>TYSON: —that of all explanations,
perhaps the simplest has the best chance of
being correct.
And that was well before the methods of the
scientific method and others. So, we’ve
been using it an invoking it ever since.
So, Lisa, is the universe a chess board and
we’re—
>>RANDALL: So, I was very much with you
until the very end.
[LAUGHTER]
>>RANDALL: So, I think it is indeed true that we don’t
know the answer, and we’re just going to
keep doing science until it fails.
And it hasn’t failed yet. Seems to—we
make progress, and so we’re going to keep
doing that.
In terms of are we trying to figure out, I
actually love the idea
that we’re a simulation where they actually
kind of saved in efficiency by making us not
quite smart enough to figure all this stuff
out.
[LAUGHTER]
>>RANDALL: So, [unintelligible] a lot of it.
>>TYSON: That’s a built in—
>>RANDALL: But, really, that’s too
much computational power, so let’s make
them a little bit dumber.
But I do have—I understand it’s a possibility
there’s a simulation,
but there is a problem with the statistical
argument. I mean, I think if you asked any
statistician,
there’s just not based on well-defined probabilities
here.
And actually one of the key—so, Bostrum’s
argument would say that also that you have
lots of things simulating, lots of things
that want to simulate us.
And I actually really have a problem with
that. Why simulate us? I mean, there’s so
many things to be simulating.
None of us actually get together and say—I
mean, we simulate processes or whatever, but
we mostly
are interested in ourselves. I don’t know
why this higher species would want to bother
with us.
>>TEGMARK: maybe they don’t care about
us. They just simulate a bunch of physics,
or a bunch of laws. And, hey, we came along
as a by-product.
>>RANDALL: Yeah, it’s in the realm
of possibility.
>>TYSON: So, we grew out of
their Petri dish.
>>RANDALL: But I do think that, again,
ultimately what—as physicists, as scientists,
we’re interested in the things that we can
actually test.
So, to the extent that it gives us an incentive
to ask interesting questions like do we see
cosmic rays at different energies,
or from different directions, going at slightly
different speeds, or anything of that nature.
Or do we find the laws—I mean, that’s
certainly worth doing to see what is the extent
of the laws of physics as we understand them.
But that is what we’re doing anyway, but
maybe we’ll frame—maybe we’ll be presented
with a bunch of other questions.
But that is—I mean, so it’s a little bit
of a systematic way of figuring out the chess
game because
in the case of the chess game, you have many
games. You can watch many games.
Here, we have this one universe, and we can
try to make little tests within that universe
to try to test laws, but those apply in those
little realms.
I mean, one of the brilliant things about
Galileo was he realized there’s many ways
to do science. There’s thought experiments,
observations. But he actually came up with
the idea of experiments themselves. The idea that you'd simulate—
>>TYSON: We're bringing him
to the next panel.
>>RANDALL: Yeah, I know. I know. I’m
totally excited about that one, too.
[LAUGHTER]
>>RANDALL: So, that’s just the nature of science. So,
I think we are trying to figure it out to
the extent that we can.
>>TYSON: Jim?
>>GATES: I think you nailed it with
the chess game analogy.
One thing that I think that a lot—often
times, when I talk to people—and Lisa alluded
to this very well, is that a lot of people
think it’s all about them.
They really do. They think it’s all about
them. They have to understand things
that’s somehow related to them.
It’s all about them. And I think that one
of the things that science actually teaches
us is that it’s not all about us.
We may be struggling with the description
that we’re trying to construct, but the
universe doesn’t care whether I understand
or don’t understand.
The universe doesn’t care whether I exist
or not exist. The universe, at least as I
have studied it, is I’m going to retreat
into Einstein,
and at the end of the day it is an extraordinary
mystery. That’s the sense that I get from
having studied science for now 50 years almost.
That we live in this place of mystery, and
we need to accept a humbleness about our efforts
to go out and explain
that chess game that you described.
>>TYSON: Ooh. Max?
>>TEGMARK: I fully agree with you that
the world would be a better place if we humans
could be a bit more humble.
At the same time, I also feel that the very
soul of physics
is this audacity to look for hidden simplicity
in things. So, I think the metaphor of chess
is a beautiful one.
We have as a goal in physics to look at this
very complicated and messy seeming universe
and look for hidden simplicity, look for rules
of chess, which are actually simple. Not the
list of one googleplex different possible
things.
We’re not just saying it’s all random.
And, of course, we don’t know yet whether
there are rules that are simple enough that
our human minds can understand them or not.
But I’m an optimist, and I feel it’s actually
much healthier as scientists if we have this
innate optimism
instead of saying, well, it might be they
were too dumb to ever figure this out, so
let’s just not try.
I think it’s much healthier to say there
is a real possibility that there is this hidden
simplicity,
and, in fact, Galileo and Einstein and so
many before us have found simplicity far beyond
what their ancestors every dreamt to.
So, let’s keep looking for even more hidden
simplicity.
Maybe this is actually all computational mathematical,
which that’s anyway the ultimate audacity
to hope for that because that would mean that
in principle, at least,
it really is possible to figure out the rules
of the game.
That’s that attitude I’d like to take.
Consider the possibility that it is possible,
and then try our very, very best to actually
figure it out.
>>TYSON: Thank you, Mario, for
that and, Morpheus. So, Zohreh?
>>DAVOUDI: So, yeah. I would like to
deviate a little more from your question very
quickly because it didn’t came up in the
discussions,
but I wanted to distinguish between the idea
that we can simulate a universe, as opposed
to the universe being a simulation,
because there are fundamental limits to our
capacity to actually compute things.
And these are based on the physical laws that
govern our universe. Basically, we can’t
have infinite power, the energy, the laws
that govern
basically the uncertainty principle
can limit the rate that we can process logical
operations, and also the entropy and thermodynamic
laws can limit
the amount of memory that can hold in a given
amount of the space-time.
And things- ideas like this that were discussed
by [unintelligible] and other people,
and therefore we might not be able to actually—and
there are other actually limits when you think
about larger-scale expansion of the universe,
whether or not it can ever casually connect
to parts of the universe. It’s expanding.
And, therefore, store and process those information
to be able to actually re-simulate the universe
that we have.
So, it’s a different idea. I don’t think
that based on the physical laws of our nature
this could be possible,
but that doesn’t mean that our universe
could not be a simulation inside another universe
that has another laws of physics
that doesn’t actually limit the amount of
computation that is required to simulate a
universe. So, these are two different ideas.
But just to come back to your question, I
think as a physicist and thinking about the
simulation idea,
I think it doesn’t change the way I think
about the science, and I do my every day job
as a scientist.
I think just the notion of whether or not
we’re real or just simulated, it’s kind
of irrelevant because what we are observing
is no different from being real or imaginary.
We just go and discover things that we already
don’t know about the universe, that laws
that we haven’t
discovered. But at some point, maybe we find
some sort of more strong evidence that could
connect us to
a higher level that says something about whether
or not the universe is computational based
and there is some simulator besides us.
These are the ideas that require more thinking
and more thinking out of the box, I would
say, at the moment,
but maybe at some point in future when we
have more understanding of the laws of our
universe,
we can have more rigorous way to go and look
for those evidences and say something meaningful.
At this point, there is not such evidence.
We’ve just started to make assumptions by
just comparing our simulations of the universe
and see
what would be the consequences of those kind
of assumptions. But at the moment we don’t
have such evidence,
and it would be wrong to put a lot of focus
on this idea. But it’s definitely a very
fun and curious idea to think about as a scientist
and,
therefore, I think that’s why I do science.
>>TEGMARK: I just have to alert you she
knows the answer to your chess question,
and she’s just not telling us because you’re
Persian and you Persians invented chess.
>>TYSON: Okay.
>>DAVOUDI: Yeah. I actually played
that game when I was very, very young.
>>TYSON: So, she does have the
answer.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: So, let me just end before we transition to
Q&A. I want to get the likelihood that you
think we are in a simulation.
Ten percent chance? Twenty percent? Just give
me a number. Just a number. Go.
>>DAVOUDI: I can’t give you that
number. I don’t have any answers.
>>TYSON: No.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: She’s not authorized to divulge that information. Okay, so you’re giving no answer. Max?
>>TEGMARK: Seventeen percent.
>>TYSON: Seventeen percent.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Jim? Morpheus?
>>GATES: One percent.
>>TYSON: One percent chance.
>>RANDALL: I’m going with effectively
zero.
>>TYSON: Effectively zero. David?
>>CHALMERS: Forty-two percent.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Um, I think the likelihood
may be very high.
And my evidence for it is just it’s a thought
experiment, and it’s simple.
We’ll just end with this reflection—and
I’m elsewhere like on YouTube saying this,
so you can check it out later, if you choose.
I just think when I look at what we measure
to be our own intelligence, and we tend to
think highly of it,
getting back to Jim’s point, there’s a
certain hubris just even in how we think about
our relationship to the world.
And that’s understandable perhaps, even
in the search for intelligent life in the
universe.
It comes with the assumption that we’ll
find life that also thinks we are intelligent.
Well, if we look at other life forms on earth
with whom we have DNA in common,
there is none that we would rank ever in the
history of the fossil record, or life thriving
today,
that we would rank with us and our level of
intelligence.
So, given our definitions, we’re the only
intelligent species there ever was because
we have poetry and philosophy and music and
art.
And then I thought to myself, well, if the
chimpanzee has 98-whatever percent identical
DNA to us—
pick any animal. It doesn’t matter. Dogs,
it doesn’t matter.
Mammals have very close DNA to us. They cannot
do trigonometry.
Some people can’t do trigonometry. Certainly
not these animals. So, if they cannot do trigonometry,
and they have such close genetic identity
to us, let’s take that same gap and put
it beyond us and find some life form that
is that much beyond us that we are beyond
the dog or the chimp.
What would we look like to them? We would
be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence.
The smartest chimp can do maybe some sign
language and stack boxes and reach a banana,
put up an umbrella, like our toddlers can
do.
Our toddlers do that.
So, maybe the smartest human—bring Stephen
Hawking forward in front of this other species,
and they’re chuckling because they’ll
say, oh, this happens to be the smartest human
because he’s slightly smarter than the rest
because he can do astrophysics calculations
in his head, like little Timmy over here.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Oh, you’re back from preschool? Oh, you’ve
just composed a symphony. That’s so—
let’s put it on the refrigerator door. We
just derived all the principles of—oh, that’s cute.
And so that is not a stretch to think about.
And if that’s the case, it is easy for me
to imagine that everything in our lives is
just the creation of some other entity for
their entertainment.
It is easy for me to think that. So, whatever
the likelihood is: zero percent, 1 percent,
17, 42, no answer,
I’m saying the day we learn that it is true
I will be the only one in the room saying
I’m not surprised.
Thank you all for coming tonight, and thank
the panel.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: We will bring up the lights,
and in this transition between the formal
part of the panel and the Q&A that we’ll
be taking from you,
I just want to tell you what it takes to run
this thing.
As I told you earlier, it was formed by an
endowment created by Isaac Asimov’s widow,
Janet Asimov,
and friends of Isaac Asimov.
And we’ve been going strong ever since.
And so I just want to say we have people who
run this thing.
We have Susan Morris, who’s director of
Hayden programs.
We have Susan. Susan is out there.
And we have Emily Haidet. She’s also part of this team that make this work.
We have my executive assistant, Elizabeth
Stachow.
We have Laura Jean Checki, who’s our stage
manager.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: We have some fans of Laura in the audience.
Good.
We have Miriam Poser, who has been with us
like forever and is a die-hard supporter
as a volunteer of our programs.
Lydia Marie Petrosino—did I pronounce that
right, Lydia? I only ever call you Lydia Marie.
Lydia Marie is good. And, of course, we have
Betty Walrond.
These are people who make this happen every
single year. I just want to collectively give
them applause.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: We have about 15 minutes for Q&A, so let’s
go straight to it. We’ll go back and forth,
left and right.
No one will hear you unless you speak into
the microphone, so let’s start here. Let’s
go.
>>QUESTION: Okay. So, my question is does
it really matter—
would you view the universe differently if
we knew it was simulated? Could we do the
math differently?
>>TYSON: Ooh, I like that. To
make this efficient, we’ll pick one person
to answer,
so how about Max because your book is tilted—what’s
the title of your book?
>>TEGMARK: Our Mathematical Universe.
>>TYSON: Yeah. So, he’s the
guy to answer this question. Okay.
If you knew, would your math be different?
>>TEGMARK: Well, I’ll take your question.
I mean, if I knew, would that make me super
depressed or super excited?
Would it change the way I feel about everyday
life? My answer is absolutely not.
I feel that when we look at these rather sterile
equations or the computer code, or whatever
it is that’s running this,
there’s no meaning or purpose built into
that. We shouldn’t look through our universe
creating the meaning for us.
It’s we who give meaning to our universe.
So, the way we feel about things,
and the meaning we create, is the same regardless
of whether we’re simulated or not. And I
think this is very much the point that David
was making earlier also.
We shouldn’t diss things just because they’re
simulated.
>>CHALMERS: The math is a little bit
different if we’re simulated, on the other
hand,
because there’s also the math of the simulating
universe.
>>TEGMARK: Right.
>>CHALMERS: There’s a math of our
universe embedded in a bigger one,
which raises some exciting prospects like,
hey, maybe we could get out and explore that
one. So, that would be cool.
>>TYSON: Wait. So, you’re
swaying—can you embed a complete system
of mathematics within a higher system of mathematics?
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. Maybe the embedding
universe is a vastly higher level of complexity
than ours,
in order to have the computational power,
for example, to simulate ours. Maybe they’ll
let us out one day.
We’re just computers in their world. They’ll
give us input devices.
>>TYSON: So, you feel like you’re
in prison?
>>CHALMERS: No. it’s just like earth
is cool, but the galaxy’s even cooler.
>>TYSON: Okay.
Yeah, a quick one here.
>>RANDALL: I think it would feel different.
It’s always interested me that if you miss
a basketball game
and you know it already happened,
it’s less interesting to you to watch, even
though you know it happened already
because it’s not happening in real time.
And you might not even know the result, but
I think there is a sense in which psychologically
the idea that it is preprogrammed would be
disturbing, at least to me.
>>TYSON: My analogy to that
is if you go to the Smithsonian Air and Space
Museum in Washington,
and you see the Apollo 11 Command Module that
went to the moon and came back, and there it is,
if you made an exact replica of that and put
it on display anywhere else and say you cannot
really tell the difference except microscopically,
but it’s a fake, it means—it’s different
to you even though you can’t tell the difference.
The knowledge that it’s really seems to
matter to us
than if it’s a simulation or a model, in
that case.
So, I have to agree. I reluctantly agree.
I don’t want to agree, but I have to agree.
>>GATES: I disagree for one reason.
I don’t do science to make me feel something.
I do science because I think it’s an investment
in the long-term survival of our species.
Our science underlies our technology.
If our environment changes, we will use that
technology to survive,
whether that’s true if we’re simulations
or not. That’s why I do science.
>>TYSON: Are you also running
for president?
[LAUGHTER]
>>RANDALL: No, because they can’t talk
about science.
>>TYSON: Who, by the way, Jim
Gates is on the President’s Committee of
Advisors of Science and Technology, PCAST.
And you’ve been there for almost the entire
administration, so keep up the good advice
that you’re giving.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: Let’s go right here. Hey, how are you doing?
>>QUESTION: Good.
>>TYSON: What grade are you
in?
>>QUESTION: Eighth grade.
>>TYSON: Eighth grade, cool.
So, what do you have?
>>QUESTION: So, you were saying about bugs
in the code of the universe, if it is a simulation.
How come if it probably statistically would
not be perfect, how come we have not so far
seen any
corruption or glitches maybe in the far-looking
like the cosmic background radiation? How
have we not seen anything that just seems
like it couldn’t be there?
>>TYSON: Great question. Jim,
what do you got?
>>JAMES GATES: That’s an easy one to answer.
Up until September of last year we have never
seen gravity waves either. The point is that
our technology was not sufficient,
and might not be sufficient now.
>>TYSON: Okay.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: So, what he’s saying is that it may still
be there. We just haven’t found it yet.
That’s a cop-out answer, I think, between
you and me. But don’t tell him that I said
that. Yes, Zohreh? Yes?
>>DAVOUDI: Yeah. So, exactly the line
of investigation that we have in our favor is
whether or not the simulation is imperfect,
as you say.
So, given that we haven’t already seen something
doesn’t mean that we might not see something
and therefore, as I said, we look for evidences
that tells us that there are some imperfection
in the universe because the simulator
or the amount of computation that could be
done to generate our universe has been finite,
It hasn't been infinite, and therefore,
there might be some evidence. But
it doesn’t mean that the fact that we haven’t
seen it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go and
look for it.
It’s been difficult, but—
>>GATES: But I thought the question
was why haven’t we seen it. That’s what
I answered.
>>TYSON: Well, yeah. And don’t
you both agree?
You’re saying if you haven’t seen it,
it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Keep looking.
>>GATES: Absolutely.
>>DAVOUDI: Right.
>>TYSON: Good. I’ve got a
question from Twitter
that came in. Evan Quinter from the Twitterverse
asked— I think I’ll direct this to Max.
"If the universe is a simulation, does that
mean there’s a limit to how far our universe
can reach?”
Because we speak of an infinite universe beyond
our horizon all the time. So, you’re ready
to say if it’s a simulation, it can’t
be infinite,
and there is the limit to the code.
>>TEGMARK: It’s a great question. If
we are being simulated in one universe up
on finite computational resources,
yeah, then either the size of our universe
is actually finite, or there’s some other trick
like it just keeps repeating itself over and
over again.
>>TYSON: Like the background
in the Flintstones when they’re riding in
the car?
>>TEGMARK: Precisely.
>>TYSON: The background just
repeats. I was so angry.
I said you can’t draw me a—what’s with
your budget?
>>TEGMARK: That’s right.
>>TYSON: Have you ever seen
the backdrop of cartoons when people are running?
It just repeats. When I was a kid, that disturbed
me.
>>CHALMERS: Maybe it’s a just-in-time
simulation. It’s kind of like the Truman
Show or something.
They started off simulating me in Australia
where I was born [unintelligible].
I came to New York, so suddenly they had to simulate
all of you guys and—
>>TYSON: For you?
>>CHALMERS: Yeah, exactly. Or for whoever.
Or maybe they started off with the Earth,
and then we go to—
the Voyager just reached—the thing just
reached Pluto, so now they had to simulate Pluto.
>>TYSON: I see.
>>CHALMERS: Just like that. So—
>>RANDALL: Let’s not start with Pluto.
>>CHALMERS: Start small and go bigger.
>>TYSON: Yeah, don’t get me
started on Pluto, first of all.
But what you’re saying is they might just
be laying down the bricks in the road as we
drive along.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. Just-in-time simulation,
they call it.
>>TYSON: Just in time.
>>CHALMERS: Yeah. Simulate only as much
as you need.
>>TYSON: Okay. Right here. Yes?
>>QUESTION: Hi. So, we briefly discussed infinity
and how it relates to this topic.
But I was just wondering on the other end
of the spectrum why is nothing not a thing?
Is there not nothing when you come down to
the fundamental question?
>>TYSON: We had an entire Asimov
panel on that very subject. Where were you?
The title of that was The Existence of Nothing,
and we had all the experts on nothing
on the stage at the time. I’m just saying.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: So, okay, maybe he didn’t know that, so—
>>RANDALL: I actually have a probabilistic
argument.
>>TYSON: Okay. So, we’ll entertain
it, but go online. The whole thing is there.
It’s called The Existence of Nothing. Okay,
yes?
>>RANDALL: So, in my book Dark Matter
and the Dinosaurs I have a section on cosmology,
and I actually talk about the probability
of nothing. And I think nothing is just very
unlikely.
I mean, first of all, we wouldn’t talk about
nothing because we wouldn’t be here. But
nothing is just one—
if you think of a number line, zero is just
one point on it,
and nothing is just—I would say it’s very
unlikely. And if you have an explanation of
why there’s nothing,
then there’s something there that allowed
you to have the rules to explain it.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: So, you’re saying
the act of posing the question of why there’s
something is proof that there could not have
been nothing?
>>RANDALL: Right. So, there’s two answers.
>>TYSON: Okay. Crystal clear
now.
>>RANDALL: That’s one. And the other
answer is probabilistic.
>>TYSON: Okay. Yes, sir?
>>QUESTION: Hi, Neil. How are you?
>>TYSON: Hi. Good.
>>QUESTION: So, I think I’m going to say
this every day now after this. I’m going
to say computer end program when I wake up
in the morning.
But the question is say we assume that we
are in a simulation—we don’t try to prove
it anymore—
would it be possible to come up with equations,
knowing what we know from the past, to predict
what inputs might be in the future,
assuming that this is an original idea and
it’s not an input from the programmer and
we’re not on a holodeck within a holodeck
within a holodeck within a holodeck.
You think that would be possible and maybe
escape the simulation?
>>TYSON: David, what do you
have?
>>CHALMERS: Well, I think we’re probably
stuck for now with the laws of the actual simulation
of the simulated universe. If it’s a perfect
simulation, we’re not going to be able to
do better than that. We’re not going to
get information about the character of the
simulated universe.
Now, if it’s a buggy simulation, or if it’s
interactive simulation—if they’re sending
messages down here in the way that God was
supposed to and so on—
then all bets are off. All I can say is so
far I’ve not seen evidence that we can use
to make predictions, hey, tomorrow the simulators
are going to call the whole thing off.
So, all we can do there is speculate as far
as I can tell.
If Zohreh’s work pans out, maybe we’ll
suddenly have a lot more evidence.
>>DAVOUDI: And I would add that at
the end of the day we are living in this universe.
So, we are constrained by the laws of this
universe. So, the concept of escaping from
this universe
doesn’t seem logical to me because we are
bound to be evolving according to the laws
of this universe,
and not something beyond that.
>>TYSON: Plus, some other universes
have slightly different laws of physics. I
don’t want to be the first to visit them.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Send something else then, and we’ll figure
it out. We only have time for a couple more
questions, one of which I’m going to take
from our Twitter list.
So, let’s go right here. Sir, yes?
>>QUESTION: Sorry, Neil, I tend to disagree
with your conclusion about the universe simulation
percentage,
and more agree with Lisa’s zero percentage.
Here’s why.
Using your chessboard analogy, yes, there
are 64 pieces on a chessboard. You can assign
numbers to each piece.
>>TYSON: Sixty-four squares.
>>QUESTION: Sixty-four squares, right. And
you can assign values—
numerical values to the chess pieces, and
then use computers to see into the number
applies: 3, 4, 5,
and then run the simulation, and you get the
end result of who’s going to win and so forth.
However, just look at the humans on this earth.
We have seven billion people now on earth,
and even if we can mathematically model one
person, when we have interactions of each
other, we have interactions of more than each
other
because every action there’s a reaction,
and then we have seven billion people.
So, the result is going to be totally unpredictable.
In fact, it doesn’t look too good because
the earth’s with its limited resources,
and the earth population growing at a logarithmic
rate.
>>TYSON: Exponential rate.
>>QUESTION: The conclusion—exponential rate.
>>TYSON: Yeah.
>>QUESTION: It’s going to be one conclusion,
and that is—the result is not going to be
good.
>>TYSON: But it may be that
these multiple interactions that transcend
our native ability to compute
are no different from the Tic-Tac-Toe game
being played by the five year old.
We’re just too stupid to know.
>>QUESTION: Well, that’s true.
>>TYSON: Okay. That’s right.
>>QUESTION: But, again, when you look at the
complexity and try to mathematically model
seven billion people’s characteristics—
>>TYSON: Yeah, we can’t do
it because we just have human brains.
>>QUESTION: Absolutely. Thank you very much.
>>TYSON: Yeah, sure. Forgive
the rest of the people online. The last question
is going to have to be from our Twitter stream
here.
And this one I’m just going to send to Lisa.
Lisa, you will take us out with your answer
to this question.
This is from Ashley Cannino. “Is dark
matter—there are multiple ways you could
probably get to this, but let me say how it’s
written,
“Is dark matter transparent where simply
rules of the game a computational structure?”
Like an operating system.
And think of dark matter and dark energy,
these permeating elements of the universe
that we don’t understand at all.
We don’t know what’s causing them, but
we can measure their existence. Could that
be the blood of the operating system throughout
the universe?
>>RANDALL: So, it’s an interesting
question, and people have asked that question.
And you have to take a little bit of an Occam’s
razor approach here.
So, first of all, dark matter is indeed transparent
matter. It’s matter that just light just
goes through.
There’s evidence for it not because we see
it, because it doesn’t emit or absorb light,
but because it has gravitational influence.
And we can observe the gravitational influence.
Now, you can ask is that because we got the
laws of physics wrong and there really wasn’t
matter, and the we got the laws of physics
wrong.
First of all, it’s a lot simpler to believe
this matter that we have no reason to believe
shouldn’t be there is there,
than to think we got the laws of physics wrong.
Because the laws of physics work incredibly well
over many distant scales. So, there’s no
evidence that those laws of physics are wrong.
But, furthermore, there’s actually—there’s
more and more evidence that makes it look
just like it’s matter.
One of the things is known as the bullet cluster,
or other clusters,
which are really mergers of clusters of galaxies.
Clusters of galaxies are bound states of many
galaxies held together.
And when those things go through each other,
a cluster of galaxies has gas in it and it
stores in as dark matter. When it goes through
it, you see the gas get stuck in the middle.
You can see that through x-rays. Through gravitational
lensing, you can see the dark matter just
pass through.
It acts just like you would expect matter
that’s not interacting to act.
It goes right through, the gas stays in the
middle. Now, you can try to mock up equations,
or some simulation or something that does
that, but it looks just like matter would
look. It’s exactly what you would predict.
>>TYSON: Except we established
earlier that we don’t form our own galaxies
without the existence of dark matter
creating the womb in which we collect. So,
isn’t that kind of like an operating system,
enabling matter to do its thing?
>>RANDALL: Well, gravity is, in some
sense, the operating system. But gravity is
responding to the existence of the dark matter.
And dark matter does play a big role. There’s
more of it. It collapses. It doesn’t interact with light,
so it can form structures more easily than
normal matter.
>>TYSON: I like that. Gravity’s
the operating system. Well, how about dark energy?
>>RANDALL: Dark energy is another just
thing that’s in there that’s responding
to gravity.
So, dark energy is—for those who don’t
know—smoothly distributed. It’s not like
matter that clumps together.
>>TYSON: It’s the operating
system.
>>RANDALL: It’s not the operating system
either.
>>TYSON: Operating system is everywhere you touch on a computer. So is dark energy.
[LAUGHTER]
>>RANDALL: I’m just getting confused
now.
It’s part of what I put in, at least in
my initial state, and then I let the gravity
equations work on it.
So, you have this distribution of energy.
You have this distribution of matter.
And then you can ask what is the effect of
this energy that we don’t observe directly.
In some sense, we observe the fact that it
is responsible for the acceleration of the
expanse of the universe.
But gravity is the only law there. The other
stuff is just stuff. Dark energy is stuff.
Dark matter is stuff.
The gravitational equations are acting on
that, and it’s actually creating the gravitational force.
>>TYSON: Well, so if gravity
is the operating system of the universe,
I can’t wait for Universe 2.0.
[LAUGHTER]
>>TYSON: Thank you all for coming this evening. Thank
the panel.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TYSON: Zohreh, Max, Jim, Lisa, David.
[APPLAUSE]
>>TEGMARK: It was so much fun.
>>DAVOUDI: Thank you.
>>TEGMARK: That was really—
>>TYSON: Thanks for coming out.
That concludes the 17th Annual Isaac Asimov
Panel Debate.
Goodnight to you all here in New York. We’ll
see you next year.
