Friday, February 19, 2021
Thursday, December 31, 2020
The Universe as Simulation
The zen koan has no answer, of course. It’s intended to get your mind out of its usual ruts, to make you think differently. You do this by seeking an answer and never, necessarily, finding one. And by observing your own mind in action.
One answer to the question is: there is no sound. You have to start somewhere. So there is no sound. But then neither is there a clap.
Is there a hand? Isn’t that where we started? No, not really. We started with an event: one hand clapping. If there’s no event, if that event is impossible, then none of it is real. If nothing happens, then nothing is real. This is a physical statement, as true as any of Newton’s or Einstein’s laws.
Could something just exist, without anything happening to it? Imagine an isolated particle in space. Big black space. There’s nothing else. Is the particle moving? How fast? Things only move in reference to other things. An isolated particle is not moving, it has no speed. (And you can’t escape this by suggesting a frame of reference, which is an abstraction, a derivation of the mind that must reference real things to have meaning.) What is the particle’s energy? Its kinetic energy exists only in relation to its speed. If there’s no other particle, it has no kinetic energy. Other forms of energy also (electrical, chemical, nuclear, etc) are only in relation to forces that occur through interactions with other things. And mass only has meaning with respect to interactions with other mass and energy. No thing has any meaning on its own. It doesn’t exist.
Going one step further: when, in time, does it exist? Quantum mechanics tells us that fundamental events don’t happen until they happen. Before an event, there are only probabilities. The superpositions and uncertainties of the quantum world describe particles that are not yet real, and won’t be until they interact in an event. The Schrödinger equation, a fundamental equation of quantum mechanics that defines how a physical state evolves with time, tells us how those probabilities change over time. It tells us that the probabilities change in an oscillating pattern, the mathematics of a circular or spherical motion, which is the smallest possible path for something not yet settled. Physicists call the output of the Schrödinger equation a “wave function” because it resembles the mathematics of waves of water and electromagnetic energy, which are governed by similar equations. But it predicts probabilities, not certainties at any specific space and time. The probabilities evolve deterministically, but the events they predict do not.
What’s real? The wave function? It’s been proven in experiments. But it is an equation, a description, not a thing. What was there before the event is uncertain. After the event, everything is uncertain again except what is past, which is no more. Only the event is real.
In the real world, we can only use probabilities, and never certainties, in extrapolating future events from past ones. There is an inherent randomness about what will happen at every moment. Before the clap, there is no hand, only a probability of a hand being there.
Particles, mass, charge and other properties are useful abstractions, but only have meaning in relation to events. They come out of a fog of probabilities and disappear into a fog of future possibilities. They tell us how events are related to each other. They are connections between events. We have it backward when we think of events as connections, or collisions, between things with mass and charge. Events are fleeting but the connections set up patterns that repeat, making them seem permanent, but nothing is. The sound of one hand clapping is meaningless. So is the clap. So is the hand, without a clap.
Now let’s get back to simulations. Computer simulations are deterministic, they don’t evolve as interacting probabilities. But we know that real events, before they happen, are only probabilities that can go either way, happen or not happen. Many events, including those that give us life, are connected in ways that result in very high probabilities for events that are important to us. It makes life feel deterministic. But in the universe, which is much larger than us, many events are connected with greater uncertainties than we experience. Science allows us to see some of these things, but our day by day experience is built on things that happen and happen again and again with high probability. As organisms, most things we need to deal with to survive seem determined precisely by past events. We can be fooled.
The idea of simulating the universe occurs because simulations of real things we see in VR headsets seem so real. Those convincing simulations seem like “real life.” But that’s because our experience of “real life” is very, very limited, much as we dislike admitting it. We are alive because we only have to deal with probabilities that are near certainty for most of what we do. At least as far as those things we have to react to and reason about (i.e. make crude simulations in our minds) in a certain timescale, in order to continue living. For many other things, we accept uncertainty and just deal with things when they happen, and those of our ancestors for whom this has been good enough have survived, adapting through evolution. It doesn’t mean our simplified, deterministic understanding of how the world works is right. It just works for us, enough of the time.
We do manage to live with some things that are highly uncertain, like the weather. We’ve learned to accept this uncertainty, and prepare for the range of possibilities that usually occur. This keeps us, unless we are meteorologists, from thinking about how much uncertainty there really is in the chains of causal events that result in the weather we experience. Which doesn’t mean simulations of systems with lots of uncertainties are useless. Weather simulations keep getting more and more accurate. They’ll just never get all the way to deterministic, and the farther they go the slower their progress will get, and ultimately slow to a hard limit on their precision in predicting future events.
Some everyday things we experience are far beyond our ability to simulate. Like ping pong. One of the early simulation games was Pong, a simulation of ping pong. The simulation of trajectory reflection rules for elastic objects’ momentum gave an impressive simulation of reality, a warm feeling that simple equations could capture reality. But a real ping pong game involves two or four humans. A real ping pong game would require simulating the human perceptions and reactions that control the actual movements of the paddles. It would include things like subconscious signals arising from childhood disappointments in the distant past. No computer yet made could predict a real game of ping pong. The name given the early simulation game is Pong, just half of ping pong. Like one hand clapping.
Could a deterministic simulation of the universe include artificial probability simulations, using pseudo-random variables, just to fool us? That would be hard, for a whole universe. But it might not be impossible, given a big enough computer. It might have to be a computer with a different timescale, to simulate all the randomness and have events occur on the timescale of our experience. It might have to be a computer literally larger than our universe. But why would this occur? One could imagine an infinite regress of computers simulating universes that contain computers that simulate more universes ad infinitum. But why? Occam’s razor should be unsheathed here.
A simulated universe? Maybe. But, probably, not.
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Post-Apocalypse
But only seemingly. I fear nukes more than climate change or pandemics. A rapid nuclear exchange could occur, that in one day would kill many millions and efface our current global civilization.
So I persisted working on my story. I imagined the usual scenes of panic, flight, looting, hoarding. Then I happened to read an article by Lauren Groff on “preppers” in the March 2020 Harper’s. The preppers are groups preparing themselves to survive after the apocalypse, whatever causes it. They focus acquiring guns and ammo much more than, say, being healthy and fit in preparation for apocalypse. They seem mainly worried about defending themselves from mass humanity going berserk. Groff says humanity wouldn’t do that.
If there’s never been an apocalypse, how would she know? Well, big disasters, if big enough, are a lot like the apocalypse, and they have been studied. The social aftermaths of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans, and the obliteration of Hiroshima have been studied, among others. The results have been well-documented but aren’t well known. The studies were done just after the disasters were no longer news.
The results are surprising. People directly affected by disaster don’t panic. At first many are stunned, startled. But after that, they don’t panic, they don’t riot, and they usually don’t “loot.” What they do is emerge from their damaged buildings and quickly start gathering together and helping each other. Ad hoc organizations, like soup kitchens and rescue teams, spring up. Mutual aid rules the day, with altruism not far behind. Rather than fleeing disaster zones, the usual phenomenon is a convergence of people coming to help out.
Where panic often occurs is among the powers that be, who are usually some distance from the actual disaster zone. Governments lose touch with what’s happening. They fear losing control. They learn of people in the affected areas distributing food from warehouses and damaged stores, often with the owners’ permission, but this is seen as “looting.” The government says they are “out of control.” They send in the troops, who only make things worse.
This is not speculation. Groff’s Harper’s article on preppers references Rebecca Solnit’s masterful 2009 book A Paradise Built from Hell – The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit did in-depth research on five major disasters, including the major twentieth century earthquakes in San Francisco (1906) and Mexico City (1985), the destruction of Halifax (1917) when three megatons of high explosives on an ammunition ship went off (the largest man-made explosion to that date), the 9/11 New York attacks (2001), and Hurricane Katrina and its ensuing floods (2005). Her book presents vivid eyewitness accounts and scholarly research she gathered on these and other large-scale disasters, which testify that people naturally come together, overlook differences and self-organize to help themselves and others in disasters, displaying both mutual aid and altruism (two different things), and this is the overwhelming social response in such circumstances. Her research included visits to each of the five places to interview survivors and their descendants, and she spent weeks on the ground in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, over multiple visits. She also unearthed a seldom-referenced body of work in a sub-specialty called disaster sociology, including notably work by Charles Fritz, a sociologist who surveyed the civilian response on the ground after World War II bombings in Europe and Hiroshima.1 Fritz established the Disaster Research Project at the University of Chicago, and later moved to the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, which continues the work.
Each of the disasters Solnit researched had the emergence of mutual aid and other empathetic responses in common. Each aftermath had its unique aspects. For example, the San Francisco 1906 earthquake had a particularly lively set of neighborhood kitchens as spontaneous food distribution, but also a particularly vicious and illegal reaction by federal troops and local police. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake was notable for the emergence of civil society, which was a concept consciously discussed and promoted as an alternative to government power. Equally notable was the continuation and strengthening of non-governmental civil society after the earthquake, which continues to play an important role in Mexican society today. Hurricane Katrina is described as “not a disaster, but a catastrophe.” The physical disaster was far worse than the others because it lasted so long: after the hurricane came the floods which continued for weeks. Not only was the government’s reaction misguided and oppressive to the hardest hit, there was a strong surge of vigilantism which killed many. New Orleans post-Katrina also highlighted the divergence that occurs between reality and the media’s presentation and popular understanding of the course of events. The rabid, racist, and lethal vigilantism was never widely reported, while the reported crime and looting of the poor black population was largely fiction. Solnit was on the ground for this. “If the facts don’t fit the beliefs, murders in plain view can go largely unnoticed,” she reports.
Solnit says, “In the absence of government, people govern themselves. Everyone from Hobbes to Hollywood filmmakers has assumed this means ‘law of the jungle’ chaos. What in fact takes place is another kind of anarchy, where the citizenry by and large organize and care for themselves. In the immediate aftermath of disaster, government fails as if it had been overthrown and civil society succeeds as though it has revolted: the task of government, usually described as ‘reestablishing order,’ is to take back the city and the power to govern it, as well as to perform practical functions- restoring power, cleaning up rubble.”
Ryan Christopher’s Civilized to Death – The Price of Progress (2019) gives us an understanding of how humans lived and cooperated to meet the challenges of their environment before there was a state or civilization. This gives us a baseline for what we might revert to when the state and civilization suddenly disappear in a big disaster, or after the apocalypse. Ryan explodes the idea, expressed by Hobbes in 1651 that primitive human life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s widely assumed today to be the condition of homo sapiens’ lives since the origin of the species, “at least three hundred thousand years ago,” until the introduction of agriculture and the political state. He cites scientists who’ve shown that the hunter-gatherer (aka forager) life, which homo sapiens lived for about 95% of its existence, was not solitary, nasty, brutish, or short, and its poorness was only in reference to our present civilization’s pathological and unequally distributed excesses.
With regard to brutish and solitary, evidence shows foragers organized into highly cooperative groups of 150 or less who generally did not compete either within or between groups. These conclusions come partly from archaeology but mostly from studies of over 100 small surviving hunter-gatherer societies observed over the past century. The dog-eat-dog “law of the jungle” never really was.
The rise of agriculture was an adaptive response to environmental conditions at the end of the last ice age, not upward progress from a nasty brutish primal condition. It did not result in better lives. Studies of modern day foragers show plentiful calories and protein, and the variety in their diet, made possible by their mobility, provided robustness to weather vagaries. Skeletal remains of ancient foragers show that they “faced occasional hunger but not extended starvation.”
In his conclusion, Ryan's Civilized to Death references Rebecca Solnit’s book and Charles Fritz’s studies of disaster victims, which show how “When civilization falls away, we catch a glimpse of human nature in the raw.” And that nature is socially egalitarian, physically mobile, and psychologically grateful for what is received from nature.
These works give us some idea of how any surviving humanity might behave in the immediate aftermath of a global apocalypse, and in their following struggles to adapt and survive. Their stories might not make for rip-roaring Mad Max movie scripts, but reality might provide more satisfying stories in the long run.
[3] Graeber and Wengrow, How to Change the Course of Human History, Eurozine, March 2, 2018. https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/