The Red Pill

Everything we call real is made is of things that cannot be regarded as real - Nobel prize winning physicist Neils Bohr

Currently the most powerful super computers in the world are able to process approximately 1 million billion calculations per second.  This is thought to be roughly equivalent to the computational power of the human brain.  According to Moore's law, computational power should double every 18 to 24 months, and in fact over the last 2 decades has doubled roughly every 13 months. Over the next decade we should expect to see super computers roughly 500 times as powerful as the human brain. 

Armed with this information, Oxford Philosopher Nick Bostrom has tried to imagine what the future implications of this computational power will be. Bostrom asserts the following 3 points.

1. Consciousness at its most fundamental level is the result of information processed
2. Humans of the future are likely to run simulations of the past
3. Simulated universes will outnumber real universes

In this model, where computers may one day be able to simulate consciousness that is unable to distinguish itself from 'real' consciousness it stands to reason that these simulated realities would one day create simulated realities within themselves.  Like characters from the Sims using a computer within the game to play a game-world generated Sims game.  When viewed through this lens, the likelihood that we are living in the real world or 'first generation' shrinks to an infinitesimally small number. 

There are currently two standard models of physics which on paper work to a completely different set of laws.  The world that we interact with on a day to day basis conforms to the standard Newtonian model of physics.  However the laws of Newtonian physics break down at the quantum level.  The most basic building blocks of the universe appear to act like pixels or packets of data (quanta) which conform to a completely different set of laws.  As bizarre as the quantum world appears it is one of the most experimentally perfect theories of all time.  The accuracy of its predictions are unquestioned.

Albert Einstein died with an unfulfilled dream of understanding a unified theory of everything, that incorporates both models.  Currently the best hope for this unified theory is called string theory.  At the basis of string theory at the very heart of the mathematics they use to describe reality something strange has been found.  Computer code.  Not just a set of binary data, a very specific type of computer code, block linear self dual error correcting codes. 

This type of code was invented in the 40's by Claude Shannon.  When you send an email, the information is sent as a string of 1's and 0's, however on the way to their destination, some of these 1's and 0's will change or rearrange due to static on the line.  Shannons code ensures that these errors are reversed so that the information arrives in the way that it was sent.  So why is this code appearing at the basis of the mathematics of reality? 

Are we already living in the matrix?