At Large

A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean. – Zhuangzi

What if you could see in four colors? Birds possess that ability, the capacity to see in not only the trichromatic spectrum enabled by the red, blue, and green cones that we are limited to in our human eyes, but also in ultraviolet, which we do not. Yet even that leaves birds as pikers out in the great wide world, where butterflies, for instance, flit from place to place along with their 15 different photoreceptors. Can you even imagine what they might be seeing? One thing’s for certain: We are not all seeing things quite the same way. Turns out, none of us see the same thing the same way even when we are all looking at the same thing. Why?

Amoeba-level IQ

That sort of thing, over time, has oftentimes made me feel like Zhuangzi’s frog, fully aware that tons of stuff is going on over my head and everywhere else around me, yet without the foggiest idea what it could be and no real way, that I’ve yet to discover anyhow, of knowing what it is I don’t know or that might even be possible to know. One of my scalawag buds might step in at this juncture to point out that could be tied to an amoeba-level IQ, which I would happily cop to at times, but this requires a more convoluted explanation than that simplistic approach. 

Is this a simulation?

Contrary to the character I’m playing in this elegant, quixotic, oft-times ridiculous little drama of ours, I’m not even sure where to start here, so let’s go with this: Do we live in a computer simulation? 

My knee jerk reaction to that? Good grief, let’s hope so.

As a towheaded little beast wandering about with my never-very-far-away question box, I was occasionally given to wondering why I could only see something clearly when I looked straight at it, while the rest of what occupied my field of vision became evermore indistinct until eventually dissolving into obscurity and ultimately completely out of sight. In more recent times, this would yield to certain questions, such as, what if what you see only renders when you look at it? Why would/how could that be? How would I know for certain that even what I might think I am seeing with absolute clarity is what’s happening in the first place?

A butterfly dream

This leads me back to Zhuangzi (aka Chuang Tzu and a quintillion other interpretations of his name) and his famous butterfly dream. For the unfamiliar: 

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamed that I was a butterfly flying around and enjoying myself. I had no idea that I was Chuang Tzu. Then suddenly I woke up and I was Chuang Tzu again. But I couldn’t tell if I was Chuang Tzu dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Chuang Tzu now. There must be some difference between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly!”

Oh, boy. If someone possessing the acumen of Zhuangzi couldn’t wrap his head around this, how is little ol’ country boy me supposed to tell if I’m dreaming or awake, in some “real” world or something else entirely? 

And then, with the digitization of our entire lives, along came this bit of tomfoolery to add more questions: Click HEREto verify you are not a fire hydrant. Or a cheese puff disguised as a fire hydrant. Or a fire hydrant disguised as a human being eating a cheese puff. 

C’mon! Stop toying with me. 

Since apparently you are so damn smart, I know you know that I am a fallible being, while you are … what are you? Are you simply a collection of electronic impulses trained to fire in the order necessary to compile and pose that harrowing question of my “humanity?” Or is there more of you behind, or perhaps embedded, in those electronic impulses that just posed that little puzzler, while you knew the answer all along?

Promise me that no one here expects this to devolve into yet another banal discussion on artificial intelligence. Ugh.

Would aliens feel like the frog?

Let’s try this one on for size. Naturally, we anthropomorphize when it comes to the human conception of aliens from outer-outer-outer space, but I’d be willing to bet that’s a fool’s errand. Why? Let’s say you’re one of those aliens and find yourself suddenly plopped in the middle of Dutchess County. The humans you might encounter would undoubtedly be off-putting enough, but what if your first encounter was with a mastodon? Or a velociraptor? How about a colorful mantis shrimp? 

Once upon a time, Carl Sagan, as a guest on The Tonight Show, was asked by host Johnny Carson (this should give a clue or two of how once-upon-a-time this was) what scientist-aliens sailing along in their spaceship would require to make Earth – or any other planet – appear worthy of a stop. Sagan opined that “an implication of intelligent design” would likely be required to pique their interest. As this is not something easily discerned of the planet Earth from, let’s say, 25,000 miles out, chances are the aliens would step outside for a smoke break and that spaceship would continue sailing along, 100% oblivious as to what it had just missed, no different than Zhuangzi’s frog.

Is it still FOMO if you’re not aware you’re missing something?

We are all that spaceship and those aliens, zinging about, ping-ponging off this and that, unsure if we’re missing something or even if there’s something to be missed. There are far too many questions. About everything. 

When the movie, The Matrix, showed up in the late ’90s, “hogwash” was my immediate reaction. Let’s say that in the interim, I’ve washed that hog and attempted to fine-tune why so little is what it seems, in the process beginning to pay close attention to things that folks such as Donald Hoffman, Rizwan Virk, and Nick Bostrom have to say in regards to this whole living-in-a-computer-simulation thing.

The 2003 Nick Bostrom Philosophical Quarterly article, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”, argues that it is quite probable, suggesting that one of these three must be true: One, human civilizations are likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage capable of creating ancestor simulations. Two, posthuman civilizations are unlikely to run many ancestor simulations. Three, we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

If nothing else, this set of observations provoked the world of philosophy into having a think about the “natural world.” Critics of Bostrom’s simulation argument have pointed out that, if indeed true, it in fact cannot be a sound argument based on the fact that, for one, it can’t be tested, which leads me to wonder, through what means do we go about verifying that what we open our eyes to each day is real?

Consciousness

To Donald Hoffman, a professor emeritus in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, “neural correlates of consciousness … are a minimal collection of neural events or mechanisms that is highly correlated with a specific conscious experience, such as an itch or a headache.”

In “Consciousness and the Interface Theory of Perception,” he quotes Thomas Huxley, writing in 1866, “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”

Boiled down, Brad Hook explains in “Donald Hoffman’s Concepts Simplified: Understanding Reality and Perception,” “Hoffman’s main idea is that what we perceive is not the objective reality but a simplified user interface created by our brains. Imagine your computer desktop: the icons you see are not the actual files or programs but simplified representations that make it easier for you to interact with the system. Similarly, our sensory experiences are like icons on a desktop, providing a useful but simplified view of the underlying reality. … We perceive what is useful for our survival and reproduction, not what is necessarily true.”

It’s a 50/50 on the simulation

In a 2020 article, Scientific American declared the odds we are living inside a simulation at “about 50-50.” Paraphrasing astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the magazine would note that if this were the case, “the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time – much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player.”

Four years later, Scientific American was back to proclaim “we will never know if we live in a computer simulation.” As it deemed that question unknowable, the more interesting question from the magazine’s viewpoint was, “Can we model the universe as a computer simulation?” This, the thinking went, would lead to a more scientific approach to the question. Some of us might ask, is that even possible?

To hear MIT computer scientist and video game developer Rizwan Virk tell it, the example of Schrödinger’s cat helps point the way to the understanding that we are living in a computer simulation. Virk points out that quantum indeterminacy, or “the idea that a particle is in one of multiple states and you don’t know until you observe the particle,” is behind it. 

The gist of the cat’s dilemma, so to speak, is that it has been placed inside a box with poisonous materials, but it’s anyone’s guess whether the cat is alive or dead, but instead inhabits both states, until, that is, the box is opened and the answer revealed. 

In Virk’s eyes, this tells us the universe renders only that which needs to be observed. Are we, when all is said and done, Zhuangzi’s frog in the well?