The Cage
PJ Media,
by
Richard Fernandez
Original Article
Posted By: Hazymac,
8/21/2019 10:55:36 PM
The notion that the world might not be real may seem like madness but it is a serious proposition at least in academic circles. Max Tegemark, an MIT physicist invited to a debate over whether the universe was a simulation, finds it suggestive that everything we see is driven by information. (Snip) That weirdness may have impelled Preston Greene, an assistant professor of philosophy at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, to opine in the New York Times that we would be better off not finding out. "I am writing to warn that conducting these experiments could be a catastrophically bad idea —
Reply 1 - Posted by:
DVC 8/21/2019 11:17:23 PM (No. 158706)
Very dangerous technology, esp with leftists in charge.
7 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
janjan 8/21/2019 11:22:07 PM (No. 158709)
Non-believers trying to explain the mysteries of the universe. It is not possible.
30 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Trigger2 8/22/2019 2:44:57 AM (No. 158770)
The moronic so-called academia have watched the Matrix so much that they believe it's real. That lends proof to the fact that if you repeat (watch) something enough times, you believe it.
8 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
cube 8/22/2019 4:23:11 AM (No. 158798)
Some people have way too much time on their hands. Navel gazing isn't productive. I would counsel them to use their talents in different directions.
7 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
KatieJo 8/22/2019 4:52:23 AM (No. 158803)
Or you could just believe in your Creator. I tried to read the article, I am a mechanical engineer so I was curious. it just made my head hurt.
15 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
sw penn 8/22/2019 7:33:37 AM (No. 158879)
So, It's not there until it's measured.
As measuring technology improves, we discover more.
Chicken or egg?
One always tries to remember that physicists have been about half right throughout history.
Remember Einstein, Newton?
They were absolutely correct,
right up until they weren't.
5 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
TLCary 8/22/2019 7:38:44 AM (No. 158883)
Simulation: ridiculous. Grand illusion: necessary. We are on a rock moving at 67,000 MPH around a giant nuclear ball of gas but it feels perfectly still. The world appears flat and the desk appears unmoving, thought its molecules are anything but. And its all information... When a bat hits a ball its transferring information. Fascinating, amazing, brilliant, but not bizarre or nefarious. What else can it be in a universe created from the thoughts of God? In fact, "In the beginning was the Word". We are just discovering the beautiful "how it works".
14 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
bgarrett 8/22/2019 8:17:29 AM (No. 158918)
When I was a a kid,it occurred to me that our entire universe might be in a speck if water on a slide under a microscope
0 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Strike3 8/22/2019 8:52:02 AM (No. 158954)
Attention millenials, this is where your parents' tuition money goes. You thought it was buying you an education, didn't you?
3 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
walcb 8/22/2019 9:01:02 AM (No. 158960)
So a bear doesn't $_it in the woods unless someone sees it. What if another bear sees it?
7 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
davew 8/22/2019 9:33:50 AM (No. 159011)
I think the physicist Sean Carroll had the best take on reality in his book, "The Big Picture On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe itself". He describes what we call reality as stories that we tell to explain what we can observer or measure from the simplest most fundamental scales of particles and forces to higher scales that describe molecules and chemistry, to biological scales that describe living processes and evolution, to the social scales of human thought and meaning and finally to the cosmic scale of the universe and its origin and future. The stories are "real" in the sense that as humans we can abstract them in symbols like words and mathematics that other humans can interpret and reproduce in their own experience thus taking them from subjective experience to objective shared facts. These stories aren't necessarily "true" in the absolute sense but they are useful and scientifically coherent. Tegmark confuses the abstraction of mathematics which is like the source code with the actual computer which is whatever the Universe actually is doing.
The idea that we live in a simulation makes the same mistake that people who believe life on Earth was transplanted from somewhere else in space make. It just pushes the question out one level but doesn't explain how the simulation (or extraterrestrial life) was created or why. It also falls into the human trap of seeing intentionality when only random causality based on the fundamental relationships of time space and energy.
2 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
RAMrancher 8/22/2019 10:09:16 AM (No. 159049)
Just another vain attempt to demonstrate their "superior" intellect! We just don't understand it because we are inferior in every way to them. What a chuckle!
1 person likes this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Quigley 8/22/2019 10:36:43 AM (No. 159088)
My name is Dr. evil. I intend to acquire all tape measures, yardsticks, rulers, and other measuring devices – by whatever means necessary. I will then contact the united nations and advise them that I will destroy all these items – and reality along with them – unless they pay me $1 million.
“Uh, Dr Evil .........”
4 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
PlayItAgain 8/22/2019 10:38:22 AM (No. 159093)
Well, gosh. Death is real.
When physicists can take us beyond death, and prove that they've done so, I'll take them seriously on their other nutty-ball "ideas" about life and existence.
In his book "Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life", Eric Metaxas makes the point that science describes things, science does not explain anything.
I take these intellectual notions from physicists as purely prideful and arrogant. Nothing more.
3 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
PChristopher 8/22/2019 10:59:10 AM (No. 159130)
At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," Yeah, well, you can slice that baloney up however you want but I know with absolute certainty that although I am not looking at them, Commucrats like Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler, Schiff, The Squad and others absolutely exist and are absolutely working to turn us into their slaves. All this Academia is great at the subatomic level but I'm more concerned with the level we live on.
5 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
DVC 8/22/2019 11:17:24 AM (No. 159154)
#10, you missed the key point....."in the world of subatomic particles".
All this is true, as far as a photon being "able" to be either a particle or a wave (to deffract or not) depending on how it is being measured. It blows our minds, since in OUR world, things are "concrete" and unchanging, and of a single nature. We have discovered something which we can prove as often as anyone wants to run the experiment, but which, according to all other "laws of the universe" that we know on larger scale, is clearly impossible. The paradox is unsettling at the least. OTOH, we cannot fathom it, so spending too much time on it is chasing our tails.
There are better things to do, in my opinion. Soon enough we will be gone, don't waste too much time on the unfathomable.
3 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
mattinak 8/22/2019 11:30:29 AM (No. 159167)
42
4 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
mc squared 8/22/2019 11:57:05 AM (No. 159210)
'One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small..' Wake me when one pill puts me on a yacht big enough to drive my Corvette on,and beer taps on every deck. Oh, and dozens of giggling young models diving off the sides at my Island.
3 people like this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
little guy 8/22/2019 12:04:07 PM (No. 159226)
Yawn! So tired and old hat, really.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well .. define "sound". If you mean a human ear must be there, then yes the tree fall is "silent". But what about the birds, deer, squirrels, etc all the way down to the microbes who are there? They "hear" it ... without man needing to be near by. So self-centered!
Just because these idiots don't understand something, doesn't mean that it can't ultimately be explained by someone else of higher I.Q.
Here's the last lines from Edgar Allan Poe's great Poem "A Dream Within A Dream" from the 1840's:
"Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"
1 person likes this.
Reply 20 - Posted by:
TLCary 8/22/2019 12:45:20 PM (No. 159273)
#19 The root of this isn't a philosophy debate from 400 B.C.,
it's Young's Double Slit Experiment from 1801.
Look it up on Wikipedia or Youtube. It's more baffling than a magic trick and very very real.
2 people like this.
Reply 21 - Posted by:
udanja99 8/22/2019 12:49:46 PM (No. 159278)
#18, is that you Jeffrey?
(Typed with tongue firmly planted in cheek.)
2 people like this.
Reply 22 - Posted by:
kono 8/22/2019 3:46:20 PM (No. 159422)
What may have begun with a genuine desire to understand and disseminate a compelling area of study apparently abandoned that aim, producing a collection of related fragments drowned in sensationalism and innuendo.
If you are interested in this stuff, bypass the lay efforts to distill it into simplified bites and go straight to the scholarly studies and reflections. It's both more complicated than you might think and less fascinating than this incoherent narrative presents.
Even Scientific American's effort to explain these areas of research to mainstream audiences (from about 15 years ago) were better, more informative, and more relevant than this.
1 person likes this.
Most science was discovered looking into some quack-pot theory.
Electricity and magnetism were first explored and exploiting trying to contact spirits and raise the dead -- hence Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.
Much chemistry was invented trying to turn lead into gold.
Let them explore. It will lead somewhere -- unexpected.
2 people like this.
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