Otoño

El suelo se cubre de ocre
sin pudor los árboles se desnudan
la brisa violenta las cabelleras
en la pasión de un rojo
que ya anuncia la noche

Camino o floto,
nunca lo sabré
sobre un mosaico de hojas
que crujen y ya no sufren
tras mi pasar apurado

Infinitas hojas de oro
como galletas vegetales
en cuyos surcos está escrito
nuestro porvenir

En el Otoño
debajo de cualquier piedra
de seguro se encuentra
la cifra del Universo

Visiones

El tiempo siempre añade un espacio
Sabio y equidistante en todo
Tan trágico o maravilloso
Es un amanecer en el mediterráneo
Como un maremoto catastrófico

Es invierno
Y la grama se viste de terciohielo
Sentado en un sofá de terciopelo
Absorto por la chimenea
Con tizones que se consumen caprichosos
Donde más de uno se ha perdido
Donde más de uno encontró la cifra del Universo

Una pinta de cerveza media vacía
Y en la calle los zorros reafirman su vida
Ajenos totalmente a ese monstruo
Que llamamos ciudad
¡Londinium!
En las laderas de tu río
Odín se despidió de Munin

Atiendo mi casa
Gélida y parca
En la primera luz del día
Un cuervo parece congelarse
en lo alto de una celosía
Jamás he visto animal salvaje
Protestar

Visión
El universo no es más que otra cosa
Y tú
No más que una exhalación

On why we are not living inside a simulation

What today is called the simulation hypothesis has a philosophical precedent in the works of Berkeley and Schopenhauer, among other thinkers. For them, the Universe is not a material phenomenon that can exist independently from the mind (for Berkeley) or the Will (for Schopenhauer). It’s very revealing that both did extraordinarily original works on the human vision: An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision by Berkeley and On Vision and Colors by Schopenhauer. This is not coincidence as I believe the concept of reality, whether it’s a projection of the mind, a consequence of a blind Will, or a product of computational power has always gravitated around what we perceive through our eyes. In fact, if we were all blind these lines of thought would have rested in oblivion or in the esoteric. Reality would have been that “thing” out there which we could not perceive it properly but just exists. We could only touch or smell; just imagine figuring out the shape of an elephant by touching it. Reality would have been out of our visual event horizon, obviously as we are blind. Only an obscure branch of esotericism, perhaps, could have raised the possibility that reality existed as a projection of sounds and smells and it could only exist as a derivation of that realm. In many ways to see is to create.

This is very relevant in the simulation hypotheses. In fact is Nick Bostrom himself that mentions computational power as the main enabler of this hypothesis. Computational power that, yes, has brought humanity to the moon but the whole hypothesis really took off with computational power that we can actually see in mind-blowing realistic video-games, animated tv series, and also entire films made completely with the aid of CIG. The fact is that it’s nearly impossible to distinguish them from a “real” film with real people acting, artifacts, mountains, lakes, waterfalls, rain, and the hypnotic but not fully grasped by the Navier-Stokes equation: smoke turbulence coming from the villain’s cigar. And the gap, if any, will only get narrower with increased computational power to completely blur the line between this reality and the simulated one. If that assumption and progression is correct, what can be said about this reality we live in. Is it a simulation? Why not?

The argument is of course unfalsifiable… to an extent. Increased computational power has made us think that super “realistic” worlds resembling ours can be simulated. However, there is still something that cannot, and will not, be simulated. No, I’m not talking about consciousness which according to Penrose, Gödel, etc. is no computable. In fact what I’m referring to is randomness (which actually might be the enabler of consciousness, but this is a different discussion). True randomness (let’s call it hard randomness) cannot be simulated because the mere act of instructing a computer, or more general a simulator, on how specific events are “random” or occur “randomly” defeats the definition of randomness itself. At their core these events are actually following an algorithm that indeed would generate randomly distributed events. But that doesn’t mean they are random. The end result might give the impression that is random such as the random number generator in Excel but in fact they are computationally generated following a set of pre-defined instructions unbeknownst to the user.

The only way to achieve hard randomness in the simulated reality, be Excel, a video-game, or a whole universe, would be to somehow connect the computer to a true random event, let’s say to a Geiger counter detecting the decay of plutonium (conveniently and securely isolated). Specifically beta particles. That could set the pace of some useful inputs to generate hard randomness inside the simulated reality. But here is the thing, that wouldn’t be a self-contained simulation. It’s connected somehow to an external reality, in this case to a Geiger counter, so therefore in my opinion, it’s not a real simulation as it requires constant inputs from an outside dimension. It’s like running a program that in every possible instant requires an input from the programmer. Or inputs from some element of the programmer’s reality that is considered random. The point is the same: from the perspective of the simulated reality the randomness is coming from “somewhere else”, from a “different dimension” utterly outside of the event horizon of such simulation. So it’s not a self-contained simulation, or to put it in other words, it’s not a program that can be kicked-off and let it run for eons while one does some other more interesting stuff. It’s (heavily) dependent on inputs outside the event horizon of the simulated reality.

And this poses the unavoidable paradox: If we are in a self-contained simulated reality then randomness doesn’t truly exist. It might appear random to us but ontologically speaking, randomness is just a degree of ignorance from the perspective of the observer. The problem with this line of thought is that it will be in frontal contradiction with one of the most successful scientific theories ever devised and thoroughly tested: Quantum Mechanics. Not only that but given our impressive progress in understanding the universe and given enough time and effort, we should be able to crack how this randomness works which, paradoxically, will compromise many of the premises that are the basis of our understanding of the physical reality.

So is randomness simply ignorance or an intrinsic right of the Universe? Or to put it differently: if we were living in a completely deterministic universe we would have already come to the (verifiable) conclusion that undoubtedly we must be living in a simulation. But we are not living in a deterministic universe. At least not at a fundamental level.

It’s either that or it gets even more concerning: we live in a “simulation” that is not self-contained. Hard randomness permeates the whole universe but it is coming from an extra dimensional reality. Probably from an extra dimensional Geiger counter which readings set the pace of how randomness works here.

To recap, either we live in a self-contained simulated reality, which will contradict many of our most successful theories and principles to explain this reality. Like the fact that at a fundamental level reality is not deterministic but probabilistic (i.e.: random). Or our universe is plugged to an extra dimensional Geiger counter (or alternative device) and what we perceive as random is really a decoding of random events coming from outside our event horizon. In which case I don’t consider this as a true simulation given that a fundamental part of it, this is randomness, comes from outside the universe’s causal realm. Not only in this case randomness is not a fundamental property of this reality but arguably the concept of simulation starts falling apart. Nobody runs a simulation of the solar system for instance by throwing a real planet or star here and there to see how it works. How useful would it be a map of a country with a scale of 1:1? Simulations have to be self-contained, independent, and coherent. They have to be like fractals. Otherwise what exactly are they simulating?

So because there seems to be some hard randomness in the fabric of this reality, it seems to me that we must not be living in a simulation.