Another Look at the Simulation Hypothesis

Revisiting the Nature of Time and the Role of the Brain

For what follows to make sense, I advise you to first read my post, “10 Signs You’re Living in a Simulation”. You might also check out

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/what-simulation-hypothesis-why-some-think-life-simulated-reality-ncna913926

1) Simulation and the Nature of Time

The simulation hypothesis has some interesting implications for the way time is conceived. In the conventional view, 4-dimensional spacetime is a block, with the past, present, and future all coexistent but separated by their positioning along the time axis. Another way to think of this is to compare spacetime to a book, each page of which constitutes an instant of 3-dimensional reality, with time in the role of pagination. Since the pages are laid out in order, this view is consistent with the time-symmetric nature of classical physics. It is also consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, as long as we define the terms “earlier” and “later” to mean that the earlier page has less entropy than the later page.

Thus conventional physics gives us spacetime as a book, with past, present, and future all real and coexistent. We also have page numbers i.e., a thermodynamic arrow of time. What we do not have, however, is a present moment or a sense of flow. A novel on a shelf is very democratic: all pages are equal, and it makes no sense to ask what is happening to a character “right now”. The answer would be nothing or everything.

Enter the Simulation Hypothesis: If however someone takes the book off the shelf and begins to read, the notion of a present moment suddenly makes sense. It is perfectly acceptable to ask someone what part of the story they are up to, by which we mean, what page are you interacting with (directing your attention to) with respect to the library clock. In the novel on the shelf, the characters are at once born, living, and dead. Once it is taken off the shelf and actually read by someone, the act of reading augments the arrow of time with a flow of time centered on the present moment, and the characters actually live out their lives.

The conventional view of spacetime offers no explanation for the sense of “now” or the flow of time. Both of these properties fall out naturally from the simulation hypothesis, which implies that time is multidimensional, with 4-dimensional spacetime defining the extent of the simulation, and 5-dimensional “library time” giving us the simulation in play.

2) The Body as a Wetware User Interface App

Neuroscientists enamored by the physicalist paradigm have long tried with mixed success to explain (explain away) thorny issues like consciousness, volition, and qualia. If the simulation hypothesis is correct, the brain/body becomes an avatar, and they get an instant reprieve from such mental gymnastics. In the life-as-a-simulation view, the job of the wetware UI we call the brain is simply to relay sensory information to a user in an entirely different realm and to respond as an actuator to incoming motor signals. Whatever consciousness is, we are not going to find it by dissecting the brain, because it ain’t there.

In a nutshell, adopting this paradigm involves dropping the notion of body as free agent, and replacing it with body as a transceiver for energy patterns. This may sound esoteric, but such systems are ubiquitous in the modern world. Think cell phones, radio and television stations, satellites, mice, and game controllers. All of these devices share a similar architecture: the combination of a sensor, modulator, and transmitter; or the inverse, a receiver, demodulator, and actuator. In the case of the body, both types operate simultaneously.

Patterns Outbound (Sensor/modulator/transmitter): A sensor responds to time-varying energies in the environment by generating a corresponding signal. A microphone for example converts pressure waves in the air into a stream of electrical fluctuations. The modulator takes this signal and packages it for transmission by applying it to a carrier wave. At an old-fashioned radio station, for example, the current from the microphone is reproduced as changes in the amplitude of an electromagnetic wave, a process known as amplitude modulation (AM). Or the signal can be represented by variations in frequency, i.e. frequency modulation (FM). Finally, the transmitter broadcasts the modulated carrier wave, thus sending the original energy pattern on its way.

Patterns Inbound (Receiver/demodulator/actuator): Assuming the broadcast reaches its target, it is picked up by a receiver such as a TV antenna or a Bluetooth dongle. The demodulator retrieves the data of interest from the carrier wave in order to reconstitute the original time series. This stream is passed to an actuator such as headphones or a mouse driver, which then generates a correlate of the initial energy pattern, effectively recreating that aspect of the distant environment.

Look ma, I’m a transceiver: The simulation hypothesis implies that the body operates in much the same way, as an energy pattern relay device. Environmental signals are intercepted by specialized cells in the sensory organs, which respond by modulating the characteristics of electrochemical pulses traveling down their axons. The ensemble of such data streams is collated and sent for further processing at dedicated centers in the neocortex (occipital lobes for vision, temporal lobes for hearing, etc.) before transmission to…wherever.

Once this information is received, the signals are demodulated and parsed to actuators designed to recreate the energy patterns in our environment, with the goal of conveying to whomever a sense of our experience of the world.

In parallel with this process, at Simulation Central, sensory equipment is responding to changes in the local energy pattern by generating a time-varying signal, the data from which is imprinted on a carrier wave for transmission to the body. In the centers of the brain responsible for signal reception, this information is received, demodulated, and routed to controllers (in the motor cortex) for application to actuators (muscle groups), thereby reproducing a correlate of the time-varying energy patterns occurring at the source.

Any neuroscientists interested in at least entertaining this view of the world would need to change their list of things to do from explaining consciousness, volition, and qualia, to identifying potential neural mechanisms and loci for the transmission and reception of hyperdimensional signals…