🧖🏽 🌉 🤱🏿 The book “Rick and Morty. Guide to the most brilliant cartoon of all galaxies

Hello, habrozhiteli! "Rick and Morty" is one of the smartest and craziest animated series of recent times. The genius and concurrently alcoholic Rick Sanchez and his ill-fated granddaughter Morty are constantly stuck in the most piquant situations in the vast vast universe with parallel worlds. In each series they use the latest achievements of science. But if you look outside the Rick laboratory in the garage, which of the shown to us is true and will be realized in the near future?

From the book you will learn how we can use dark matter and energy, what biohacking is, is it possible to control the nervous system of a cockroach with the help of language, and much more.

Life in a 5% simulation?

I understand correctly that you are now reading this book on Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy in the cluster of galaxies of Lanyakei?

Or maybe “you” are a few lines of “code” in a simulation controlled by a more advanced civilization? Are you sure that the world as we know it is created exclusively for us and there is nothing outside our field of vision?

How to understand which of the assumptions is true? Perhaps, for this it is necessary to open the rat and find a sloppy inserted device inside? Or ask your son-in-law to take off all his clothes and fold himself in half twelve times? If you remember, Rick used just such methods.

There is a theory that in reality our reality does not exist. All that we feel and what we think about is nothing more than an imitation. Perhaps only part of the world around us is real. Or was real once in the past. How to determine this? And if we can determine this, will it be possible to get to know those who manage everything?

When a person asks such questions out loud, others suspect that he is not in himself. So it is only natural that they arise in Rick and Morty. And even three times: in the series “M. Knight Shyamal-Aliens! ”,“ Hurry Up to Mortinochi ”(remember how Morty played Roy in Blips and Cheats?) And“ Rickshaw from Rickshaw ”.

References to this theory in the first three seasons of Rick and Morty show how popular it is.

When did we think?

For the first time, the concept of simulation appeared in philosophy, and only in recent decades they began to think about it from a scientific point of view. Proponents of both theories put forward equally strong arguments.

The representation of the world in the form of a computer model appeared relatively recently, but the hypothesis that our life is only a dream was born, most likely, at the moment when a person had the opportunity not to spend all day to get food and war with neighboring tribes, respectively, he could sit down and think a little. An analysis of reality led our ancestors to interesting ideas. And for the analysis we used the best technologies available at that time.

One of the earliest statements, which can be interpreted as a theory of simulation, belongs to the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, who lived around 300 BC. He described a dream in which he was a butterfly and fully enjoyed life. After awakening, Chuang Tzu wondered who he was. A man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who dreams that she was a man?

The famous Western contemporary of Chuang Tzu, philosopher Plato, asked the same questions. According to his hypothesis, our life can only be a fragment of a large invisible world. In the dialogue “State”, Plato presents the allegory “The myth of the cave”, in which he describes a group of people chained to a wall in a cave from birth. They cannot even turn their heads. Far behind them, a fire burns. And all they see are shadows falling on the wall from people passing between the cave and the fire. Since there is no other reality for them, the prisoners begin to believe that they see real things. They are similar to us in their belief that through the senses they can know the true reality. If you take the prisoner out of the cave and show him the big world, he is unlikely to comprehend it and, most likely, wants to return to the cave, where everything is familiar and makes sense.

The ideas of Plato and Chuang Tzu are still alive, after almost 2500 years they find a response in our souls. They awaken our curiosity, our desire to understand what is reality? Does someone or something control our world? Are we being watched as an experiment? Or are we being used as entertainment?

And as science developed, it was tempting to look at this philosophical concept from a scientific point of view.

Definitions and boundaries

First of all, we will consider what rules the theory of simulation obeys. It is not a multiverse, although a simulation can also be created for a multiverse. But we are not talking about numerous worlds that differ in small variations. Because in this case an endless sequence easily arises, which is perfectly illustrated by the story from the book of 1838. A woman living alone in a forest asked a student who had wandered to her, why they were taught strange things, for example, that the Earth is round:

“Our world, ma'am,” I said, wanting to show my scholarship, “not quite round. In form, it resembles a rather flattened orange and, in twenty-four hours, makes a complete revolution around its axis.

“I don’t know anything about any axes,” she answered, “but I know that our world does not rotate, because if it rotates, we would all fall, and anyone standing on a rock sees a rectangular piece of land in front of you!”

- Standing on a rock! But what is the rock itself worth?

“Of course, on another rock!”

- And what's under it?

- My God! Boy, how stupid you are! There are rocks to the very bottom!

Later, the rocks were replaced by turtles, as the version appeared that the earth’s crust is the back of a giant tortoise, which stands on another turtle and so on ... to the very bottom.

A discussion of the theory of simulation can quickly go to turtles, or rather, to endless digressions towards endless sequences. We will try to limit ourselves to the upper turtle. We at least see her.

Moreover, the theory boils down to the assumption that the world around us is illusory. Remember the episode "Stop in a quiet town" from the series "Twilight Zone". The couple wakes up in an unfamiliar city and discovers that houses and the whole world around are props, and they themselves have become pets for an alien child. Or the film “The Truman Show”, in which a person lived in a reality artificially created for him, surrounded by hidden cameras, and his life was broadcast live around the clock.

That is, with the help of advanced technologies, a plausible reality is formed for people. Like simulation cameras on a Zigerion spacecraft in which nanobots quickly create a “world” for Rick and Jerry. Or in the form of a direct simulation of a picture for the brain, as in the Roy game or during interrogation in the Federation.

In theory, for a person in a simulation and for someone who controls a simulator, time should move at different speeds. Often inside it moves faster. People who got into the simulation can do whatever they want in the framework programmed for them. They can be given the opportunity to lead a full life, engage in research, make discoveries and even develop their own technologies to such an extent that they can create their own simulations.

Thus, a recursion can form rather quickly, forming a stack of simulations that go far from the original one. Perhaps you are reading this book in a simulation that goes into another simulation, which in turn goes into another simulation ... and so on, to infinity.

In the middle of the 20th century, attempts to scientifically interpret this concept began, as science fiction writers realized that it would soon be possible to make our dreams a reality.

Early versions of simulation theory can be found in science fiction works, such as The Thirteenth Floor by Daniel F. Galois (1964), about people who were computer programs in a virtual city created for the purpose of marketing research (in 1973, the book was filmed German television). In his works, the American science fiction writer Philip Dick repeatedly questioned the nature of reality, but he exhaustively showed the idea of a simulation in the 1966 story “We Will Remember All of You”, on the basis of which two versions of the film “Remember All” were shot. The imitated world called the Matrix was shown in the 1976 episode "The merciless killer" of the Doctor Who series, and by 1987, viewers began to regularly observe this concept in the Star Trek series thanks to the hollow deck.

In 1999, the film "The Matrix" was released, introducing everyone to the post-apocalyptic world of Morpheus, Trinity and Neo, in which computers enslaved people to produce energy, simulating for them life in an illusory world.

The success of the "Matrix" has raised the bar of stories about virtual worlds. New stories required plausible scientific explanations of the process of integrating objects into a simulated world. At the same time, a lot of terms from the theory of simulation entered the spoken language, which gave the creators of artworks the opportunity to spend time not on explaining the concept, but on developing the world and its characters.

Thoroughly crafted stories have appeared, such as San Junipero from the series Black Mirror. Or the Extremis series of the Doctor Who series in which the virtual Doctor sent an email of his real version. Or the last six episodes of the fourth season of the series “Agents“ Shch.I.T. ” In 2002, Richard Morgan used the idea of simulation in his novel, Modified Carbon. After 16 years on this novel, Netflix directed the eponymous series. In the novel, all life takes place in a simulated world where human personalities are digitized and can be loaded into different bodies.

And of course, in the same row are three episodes of "Rick and Morty."

Bostrom's amazing theory

As the theory of simulation appears more and more in science fiction scenes, in the early 2000s, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published the proof of simulation article in Philosophical Quarterly. This publication made the idea of simulation more serious. Articles by other scholars began to appear. Neil Degrass Tyson, Elon Musk, Max Tegmark, Lisa Randall and others expressed their opinions.

Bostrom's article is available for free and you can read it if you wish. Three theses are put forward in it, at least one of which is true:

1. The proportion of developed civilizations that can reach the posthuman phase (in which it is possible to run a simulation that mimics the evolutionary history of people) is close to zero.

2. The share of post-human civilizations interested in running simulations is close to zero.

3. We almost certainly live in a simulation.

If at least one of these statements is true, then the three possibilities converge to two:

1) a simulation indistinguishable from reality will never appear;

2) we already live in a simulation.

These ideas work only when the human mind is independent of the carrier. If a person’s consciousness is not connected with his brain, then it can exist and even be recreated in other environments, for example, in neural networks based on silicon microcircuits. This means that the simulation that Bostrom draws is different from what we saw in The Matrix, or from a continuously generated world, like on a hollow deck or on a Zigerion ship.

Point No. 1 cannot be excluded, since during the Cold War it became clear that mankind has many ways of self-destruction, and we too often flirt with this idea. Point number 2 can be refuted. If we survive as a species, our distant descendants may well create simulations, taking as their basis (if no other ideas appear) numerous video games and films on this topic. So, item number 3 can be considered a reality.

Interestingly, the last paragraph allows two more possibilities. Every person of the future who can run a simulation will launch at least one. This will lead to billions of simulations. As a result, an endless stack may appear, because the creatures inside the simulations are so progressive that they launch their own simulations and so on.

All this leads to an interesting question: is infinite nesting of simulations possible? And if so, how to determine the remoteness of a particular model from the authors of the very first simulation? If this is acceptable, there is a chance that the “root” simulation is at an unattainable distance for us.

This point of view is held by Elon Musk, who openly claims that, in his opinion, we not only live in simulations, but have moved away from the basic version by many billions of simulations. On a tree of simulations, our reality corresponds to leaves rather than branches, and certainly not to the trunk.

At the Code Conference 2016 technology development conference, Musk said:

We definitely strive to make games indistinguishable from reality. They can be played on any console and computer, which are likely to be billions. From this we can draw a simple conclusion: the chances that we live in primordial reality are one in many billions.

Here is what Neil Degrass Tyson answered in 2017 to Larry King's question if he agrees with Musk:

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, , , , . . , , , ? , , ?

So, purely statistically, there is a possibility that we are just the creation of some child who, for his own entertainment, writes a program on the parent computer. All the tragic events of our history can be generated intentionally when the programmer becomes bored to watch his simulation.

This is an interesting and unusual point of view. But can it be attributed to science? No, this is just a philosophy.

Science vs. Philosophy

Simulation theory is difficult to transfer from the field of philosophy to the field of science. Of course, the technologies for creating simulated worlds are related to scientific projects, but the basis for their development, according to skeptics, lies exclusively in the field of philosophy.

There are moments that even the most ardent proponents of the theory of simulation must agree with. Of course, Bostrom added formulas and numbers to his article, but all his calculations were speculative, and by and large, the article was a philosophical view. Why is the theory of simulation irrelevant to science? To answer this question you need to remember what science is.

Science is a way to gain knowledge about the world. Of course, there are also random discoveries in it, but real science is a process leading to the acquisition of knowledge. And this process occurs in accordance with the following scheme:

1. Observation, which raises questions. For example, if we see that it was not possible to harvest a good crop this season, the question arises: what caused the low yield this year?

2. As an answer to the question put forward a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation of observed phenomena that can be simple or complex, but must be verifiable. The scientific method requires consideration of two competing hypotheses. This is the null hypothesis, that is, the default assumption that there is no connection between the observed events. And an alternative hypothesis proposed by the researcher. For example, it can be suggested that crops were poorly growing due to insufficient fertilizers. The null hypothesis in this case will say that the amount of fertilizer does not affect the yield in any way.

The scientific hypothesis should be such that it can be systematically verified and refuted experimentally.

3. The researcher predicts what results experiments should test to verify his hypothesis. At the same time, he is constructing an experimental verification technique that excludes the collection of irrelevant data.

4. The results of the experiments are analyzed and conclusions are drawn. In our example, if as a result of the use of fertilizers the yield increases, as was predicted, the hypothesis is considered confirmed. If the yield on the treated area is the same as on the untreated, then the null hypothesis is true.

It is simply impossible to consider the theory of simulation according to the above scheme. Because the first question is: what observations led to the emergence of such a hypothesis?

In our world, there are no repeated observations that could be interpreted as manifestations of reality of a higher level. No one has seen a consistent, inexplicable “failure in the Matrix”. Some proponents of the theory point to various "supernatural" phenomena as evidence. But the problem is that such observations do not repeat and do not arise during a controlled experiment, that is, they simply do not meet the criteria that make their observation scientific.

Remember what Rick saw in the M. series Knight Shyamal-Aliens! ”: At the beginning of the episode, he discovered a sloppy device inside a rat, Beth’s strange behavior and unusual weather. He was already faced with simulations developed by the Zigerians, so he knew what and where to look. Many discrepancies were enough to understand what was happening. Moreover, the number of inconsistencies increased with the development of the episode.

We can’t do that. In our world, nothing happens that would indicate the artificial origin of our world. Nothing suitable for a scientific experiment.

What hypothesis can we test?

For example, Rick knew that if you reboot a Zigerion computer that implements a simulation, that computer will freeze. Which he did at a rap concert, forcing virtual viewers to follow a chain of complicated instructions.

We cannot verify the theory of simulation in this way. Even if you give the crowd an incredibly complex series of instructions, the world around you will not freeze due to lack of computing power. It is useless to ask the interlocutor to take off his clothes and take shape twelve times, and it is impossible to turn a mug of coffee into a farting ass. If you say loudly: “Computer, stop execution”, people around you will think that you have problems with your head. So far, no one has managed to stop the world around him.

In addition, in order to attribute the theory of simulation to science, it must be falsifiable. But she leaves only two possibilities. Either everything around, including the results of any experiments we are conducting, is a simulation, or the real universe is around us, and all attempts to prove the opposite will yield results on the basis of which it is impossible to give an unambiguous conclusion.

In other words, this is a theory that cannot be confirmed or disproved. She is beyond our reach or understanding. Moreover, any other notions of reality have the same right to life. It can be assumed that we live in a dream. Or in a bead attached to a cat collar.

All hypotheses about the nature of our reality are in the category of unverifiable. Their supporters love to claim that science is silent about information and is not intended to establish a true picture of what is happening at all. And in general, people need to completely change the ways of cognition and their consciousness, only after that they can understand the true nature of the world. As a result, the boundaries between science and religion are erased.

However, scientists usually listen to all this, say: “Yes, it is really very interesting,” and return to their work.

Science Strikes Back

Let's try to consider what is happening from a scientific point of view.

Simulation theory cannot be categorized as scientific, but this did not prevent scientists from building hypotheses and conducting experiments. For example, to look for the answer to the question: is it possible, even in theory, to build a computer that can simulate everything that surrounds every person, including his feelings and feelings?

Quite possibly.

Modern computers are more powerful than those with which we worked five years ago. The process of growth in computing power over time in 1965 was described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

Moore's Law has become a kind of bible for manufacturers of computer chips and futurists. According to Moore's observations, the number of transistors installed on a computer chip doubles every year, while the cost of the chip drops by half. Over the past years, such things really happened every two to three years.

But all good things come to an end ...

We can reduce the size of the computer, while it allows the physicist (more precisely, nanophysics). Now the smallest single transistors are 7 nm in size, and the next target is 5 nm. But reducing transistors to seven (and then to five) nanometers costs billions. They are spent on new industries and technologies. To make it easier for you to imagine the scale, I’ll mention that the diameter of the DNA is approximately 2.5 nm, and the diameter of the gold atom is about 0.33 nm.

Sooner or later, the laws of physics and chemistry - however, on such a scale it is difficult to distinguish them from each other - simply will not allow further reduction while maintaining the desired functionality.

So around the mid-2020s, Moore’s law will no longer be respected. In 2015, Moore himself said that the trend would continue for about 10 more years. Without a technological breakthrough, the size of 7 nm can be extreme.

Does this mean that after 2025 we will no longer be able to increase the power of computers?

Not at all. Do not underestimate human resourcefulness, the ability to find new applications of materials and even radically change the approach to computer technology, for example, using quantum computing or transferring computing to the clouds.

Even without taking into account promising developments, we can estimate the maximum available computing power, which will become the lower limit of post-human civilization.

In 1992, nanotechnology expert Eric Drexler described how to create a computer system the size of a piece of sugar, capable of performing 10 (* 21) operations per second. If you enlarge a system of this type to a megastructure the size of a planet (which was called the “brain-Jupiter”), it will be able to perform 10 (* 42) in operations per second. New technologies will further increase these indicators. But the question arises: how much energy will such a computer need?

Obviously, he needs more energy than the Brainalizer 9000 consumed, to which Rick was connected in prison, and the Zigerion processor, since in both cases Rick was able to recognize what was in the simulation.

The number of operations performed by the human brain per second is in the range from 10 (* 14) to 10 (* 17). However, in our nervous system, redundancy is most likely laid in, which can be eliminated to increase the effectiveness of modeling.

Let's calculate whether a computer the size of a planet that performs 10 (* 42) operations per second can simulate people living on earth.

Counting all the people who have ever lived on earth does not make sense, because you can not be sure of the existence of the past. It can be implanted in our brain or created for us programmatically. I am only sure of what I am experiencing at the moment, and you, as I believe, too. So let's try to simulate the reality of 2100. If the computer has enough power to cope with a similar task, it can cope with the simulation of our time easily.

How many people need to be modeled? Let it be 11 billion. This is the projected population of the Earth in 2100.

We will make the average life expectancy equal to 75 years. In developed regions, it is slightly higher, in the underdeveloped it is slightly lower, and will only increase over the years (thanks to the achievements of science!). In addition, we will need the number of seconds per year. It is 3.2 × 10 (* 7) (365 days × 24 hours × 60 minutes × 60 seconds).

And to convince each of these 11 billion of his stay in physical reality, we will take into account that his brain must perform from 10 (* 14) to 10 (* 17) operations per second.

Total we get:

1.1 × 10 (* 10) × 75 years per person × 3.2 × 10 (* 7) seconds per year × 10 (* 14) to 10 (* 17) operations per second = from 2.64 × 10 (* 33) to 2.64 × 10 (* 36) operations per second is needed to simulate reality for 11 billion people.

I can advise skeptics to increase the number of people living on Earth, or the expected life expectancy, or the number of operations per second, to make sure that the range of indicators does not change.

A computer the size of a planet can perform 10 (* 42) operations per second, what proportion of its computing power is needed for simulation?

A simulation of reality for 11 billion people uses from one millionth to one billionth of the total computing power of this computer. As you can see, we don’t even need a computer the size of a large planet. A moon-sized computer is enough.

However, we are now not considering the creation of a model of the universe. This computing power will be used to make the human mind believe in a simulated Universe.

So in theory, everything can work

About scientific evidence

So, we found out that it is theoretically possible to create a computer that allows us to simulate reality for 11 billion people. But this does not mean that science recognizes the theory of simulation. Skeptics indicate a lack of confirmatory observations. Of course, there are supporters of the theory even among scientists, but most of all those who prefer not to accept either side.

The cited “evidence” is not an observation that science can accept. There are many videos on YouTube called “Simulation Theory: Now We Have Evidence!” Most of them talk about interesting phenomena that are convincingly explained in the context of life in a simulation. But they cannot be regarded as evidence.

For example, Rick points Morty to the Pop Tarts cookie, which lives in the toaster, and goes to work on a smaller version of the toaster. But such an observation does not prove that they are in a simulation. This is just a strange fact. More precisely, very strange. Rick confirmed his hypothesis only by presenting other evidence and, finally, physically running out of the simulation.

The situation is similar with the "evidence", which is now and then thrown by the proponents of the theory. Yes, there are many inexplicable physical phenomena, but scientists should perceive them skeptically, and not speculatively. Science is built on the facts that we learned and saw, and not on inventing explanations for unverified ideas.

As evidence of the “code” that underlies our reality, proponents of the theory can cite universal constants, for example, a fine structure constant, pi number or golden ratio. Yes, we really don’t know why these meanings are exactly as they are. Of course, they can be explained by belonging to the source code of the simulated reality, but most likely, they have a simpler explanation, which we have not yet found.

On top of that, the cited “evidence” is often distorted by both proponents of the theory and journalists who do not understand how everything works in science. For example, many articles with high-profile headlines appeared after physicist James Gates said that while working on superstring equations, he discovered code that automatically found errors in data transfer and resembled Shannon's algorithm (designed to compress data). Numerous news publications wrote at the time that “computer code” was found in the equations, written by someone or something that controlled our reality.

Gates quickly became the hero of groups promoting the theory of simulation, but tried to distance himself from what was happening, saying that in the universe there were other examples of error correction mechanisms. When Neil Degrass Tyson, in the framework of the 2016 scientific debate in memory of Isaac Asimov, asked Gates to assess the likelihood that our Universe is a simulation, Gates replied that the probability is only 1%.

All this does not mean the lack of scientific research aimed at testing the simulation hypothesis. I just want to emphasize the difference between the “evidence” of the proponents of the theory and the really convincing scientific evidence. Sometimes a cosmological constant is simply a cosmological constant.

Physicists seriously considering this theory are looking for repetitions in the fundamental laws of the universe. Repetitions, as if created by a programmer who repeatedly copied and pasted the same fragment of the algorithm. They are also looking for what can be considered the “signature” of the code that starts the simulation.

Experiments from this category are based on our expectations related to the infinite Universe, and not on the results of observations. After all, if we lived in a simulation, observations would show the finiteness of the Universe, because the resources of a computer supporting the simulation are limited. Remember how during a rap concert, Rick overloaded the processor. Zigerionans in the series all the time saved resources, so Rick did not even have to come up with a difficult test. What about possible simulators of our reality?

The theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Zore Davudi is working on models of strong nuclear interaction - the force that holds particles in the nuclei of atoms. Models run on supercomputers, which, according to the laws of behavior of subatomic particles, build a three-dimensional model. But due to existing power limitations, only very small spaces are modeled. Davudi suggests that with the gradual improvement of technology, sooner or later we will have the opportunity to simulate on a macro scale and we will begin to create simulations of cells, people and much more.

Davudi hypothesizes that it’s almost like in the movie “Terminator 2”, where Skynet started with the first Terminator, sending the Terminators to the past to kill Connor, modern simulations may turn out to be a technology that over time will give rise to the technology of full modeling of the Universe. If we really live in computer simulations, she argues, modern simulations on classical computers must have experimentally detectable signatures that will be repeated in our own universe.

From Davudi's point of view, if we live in a simulation, the laws of physics must exist as a set of end points in a finite volume. In this case, cosmic rays of superhigh energies that move with relativistic speeds will not behave as physics predicts, because their motion began at a certain point in time and at a certain point in the final simulation space.

However, this is just another hypothesis that cannot be verified experimentally. At least with the current level of technology.

Is the rabbit hole deep?

So, in the foreseeable future, the concept of simulation will remain philosophical. Because we do not have tools for its scientific verification.

But does this mean the reality of our world? Or is the whole story of our species just a pastime (or a game called "Swarm") of some posthuman teenager?

Yes.

No.

Choose what you like best.

The correct answer does not exist. It may turn out that we live in a simulation, and the moment we find it will be the end of the game. The simulator will turn it off or restart it. Perhaps we are programmed in such a way that we can never realize staying in a simulation. Or maybe the point is to make our lives so creative, amazing, exciting and full of creativity so that the owners of the simulation do not want to turn it off.

In the end, remember what Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough that the garden is beautiful - you still need to believe that fairies are dancing in it?”

Or not fairies, but small pieces of code that our simulated brain perceives as fairies.

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