I had a thought today when trying to comprehend the idea of the Matrix and the holographic Universe. I thought that if there is a Matrix that contains the Universe, then it could be a Matrix that contains itself and there is nothing outside it at all. Why create such a device? Just for amusement? Machines would have no concept of emotion and they would feel nothing for the subjects inside the computer simulation. I surmise that this is just a massive experiment to study humans and how they live with each other. The existence of necessary evil in the world and the sense of an uncaring god that is seemingly apathetic to the wars and starvation in the world is explained in this very interesting web page: http://www.simulation-argument.com/matrix2.html. This lays out an explanation for the world of the matrix and the possible existence of a holographic Universe that sees us living in a virtual Universe. It is mind-blowing that an entire Universe could be simulated in a computer. The problems with the simulation of the microscopic world and quantum effects is easily explained by the fact that we have nothing outside our Universe to compare it to. Therefore we can not be sure if what we see through our microscopes and on the screen of a scanning tunneling microscope is real at all.
This is outlaid in this very simple argument: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html. The entire Universe does not need to be simulated to the atomic level; only the sections close to our planet and the places our probes have reached. The rest could be just images and radiation sent out from the simulated stars and Neutron stars. The interior of the Earth that we cannot reach need not be totally simulated either. But the actual world be interact with on a daily basis is the main focus of 90 percent of the attention of the massive computer consciousness. The Matrix movies featured the ability to upload new skills into the brain whilst in the Matrix and also in the real world with the cables that connects to the back of the neck they used to re-train Neo. The explanation for the use of humans when the machines had built nuclear fusion power, which provides almost unlimited energy is that the networked human brains had spare computing power that was used in a super-computing cluster to create a powerful computer for the machines to use to control the finicky fusion power. Read this article for a good explanation of this very deep and complex film: http://www.kurzweilai.net/glitches-in-the-matrix-and-how-to-fix-them. This makes sense; considering the amount of energy that the machine city had, the massive cables with unimaginable amounts of electricity running through them would be fed by fusion and not six billion slave humans fed by magical foodstuffs.
That does not make much sense. And why do they not recycle the effluent instead of just throwing it en-masse into the ocean? There are actually many useful waste products in human waste that can be re-used from human waste. But the idea of a simulated Universe is a strange one; but possible. There is a strange quantum fuzziness in matter observed at a very small scale and the observation that there could be a massive amount of energy at the edge of the Universe that could contain information about everything inside the Universe. This is the event horizon argument. This puts forward the argument that the entire Universe is inside an event horizon and that the edge of this could contain all the information about everything that is inside. A black hole has an event horizon that you pass as you are spaghettified by the immense gravitational forces exerted by the black hole. But the information about something that falls into a black hole is stored in the event horizon and this means that anyone who falls in is not destroyed. That is truly amazing to think about. Could we therefore be inside an event horizon and be living a simulated reality? That is mentis inclinans to think about. We cannot escape the Universe; as far as we know; it is about 500 billion light-years across and the edges are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. So travelling to stars near the edge of the Universe is out of the question.
Our own Universe has some amazing sights to see; we should not be in a hurry to leave when we have practically infinite space to travel around in and many planets to see. So the future is bright if we can move out into space.
–et ultra spatium infinitum.
This posting brought to you by Neo.