“There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists by virtue of a force…We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
Max Plank
Germany’s greatest physicist and the mentor of Albert Einstein
By Raymond Coffin Jr.
What is real? How do you define real?
This is the famous line from the all-time classic movie The Matrix. In the movie, Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburne, asked these very questions to Neo, played by Keanu Reeves. Morpheus goes on to explain that their reality is nothing more than a massive computer simulation, which was created by artificial intelligence that went terribly wrong. This may seem like a great story and plot for a movie, but nothing more. However, this may be a more accurate description of our own reality than we could have ever imagined.
In 2003, a Swedish philosopher by the name of Nick Bostrom proposed such an argument, called the simulation hypothesis. In this argument, Bostrom proposes one of three statements is very likely to be true:
- Civilizations will die off before reaching the technological power to run simulations the size of the universe.
- Civilizations have no interest in running such simulations
- You are most definitely living inside a simulation.
Nick Bostrom’s argument, made more fifteen years ago, marked the first time the simulation theory had been introduced into serious scientific studies. Bostrom is by no means a slouch, as he has earned a Master’s Degree in philosophy, physics, and computational neuroscience from Stockholm University. He is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the prestigious Oxford University.
Bostrom theorized that an advanced civilization would be very likely to program and run these sophisticated simulations. Using the logic of Moore’s Law, which says that the speed and capability of computers can be expected to double every two years, this idea would seem very plausible as we are not far away from achieving this ourselves. With the explosion of computer entertainment, and virtual gaming worlds being a multibillion dollar industry, one can see how likely this scenario becomes.
Although this idea of a simulated universe would have been ridiculed in the recent past, scientists are now taking this idea very seriously. Experiments at the cutting edge of physics are producing some very strange results. More and more, scientists are beginning to notice alarming correlations between our world and the world of virtual reality.
The idea that our universe is virtual, or dream-like in nature, may seem like a modern philosophical argument. However, this claim can be traced back to antiquity, back to the time of the ancient Greece philosophers Plato and Democritus. All scientific arguments are rooted in one or more philosophical positions. Mainstream science in the modern world was built on the foundations of Materialism, which Democritus had built his logic upon. This idea states that everything exists only because they are made of atoms; all of your thoughts, hopes, dreams, and ideas are nothing more than a collection of atoms buzzing around in complicated ways. In other words, physical matter gives rise to the mental world. However, since the discovery of quantum mechanics, this notion of materialism is quickly falling by the wayside. Albert Einstein himself spent the last years of his life attempting to salvage materialism, but failed in doing so.
On the other hand, Plato built his reasoning of the universe upon Idealism, which says that thoughts, dreams, and ideas are even more fundamental than physical objects. This way of thinking leads one to believe that consciousness is fundamental, and everything that we see is emergent, or coming out of, the mental state, and these are the conclusions that mainstream scientists have been coming to. Science is beginning to show that our world is actually emerging from something non-physical, and completely beyond our senses, something that great religions have been telling us for thousands of years, and science is proving time and time again. Our world, and everything we know and love, makes more sense when viewed as a virtual reality.
To demonstrate this, the big bang theory is widely accepted in the scientific community, if not unanimously accepted. However, it is extremely difficult to explain how everything we see came from nothing at all. But the big bang is easily explainable when we view our universe as being digital in nature. Take for instance your favorite video game. The game world is in a zero state, complete nothingness, but when you boot up the system, you set loose a massive information influx, and a digital big bang occurs from the perspective of the game.
Another example supporting the idea of a digital universe is pixelization. When we take a digital picture and upload it to our computers, what will we find? We will find that as we zoom in deeper and deeper, we get all the way down to the world of pixels. Tiny pieces of digital information that cannot be broken down any further. Sure enough, this is very similar to what we find in our own reality. Everything we see, touch and taste, are made of atoms. However, atoms are not the smallest unit in nature, and the hunt is on to build even bigger, more elaborate equipment to allow scientists to delve deeper into the subatomic realm.
If the universe is really digital, and we do live in a matrix-like computer program, wouldn’t we find any hard evidence of computer-programming? Well, yes, in fact we do find such evidence. This was revealed in 2014 at a science conference in New York City by Professor James Sylvester Gates PhD, the former Director of String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland, former Science Advisor to President Barack Obama, and currently a professor of physics at Brown University.
While studying and solving equations in the fields of super-symmetry and string theory, Gates unraveled what could possibly turn out to be one of the most intriguing and stunning discoveries in all of science. What he found buried deeply in the mathematics that describe our universe was computer code, written into the fabric of the cosmos.
“Not just something that resembles or looks like computer code, but a special kind of computer code invented in the 1940s by a scientist named Claude Shannon,” said Gates.
This cosmic computer code is a self-correcting program and is used today to run search engines and web browsers. So this raises a question that is begging to be asked: What on earth is computer code doing buried deeply in the fabric of the universe?
“I’m left with the puzzle of trying to figure out whether I live in The Matrix or not,” said Gates just moments after his revelation.
This announcement stunned the crowd in attendance, as well as Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson who was hosting the conference. Dr. Tyson, famous for his show “Cosmos,” host of “Star Talk,” and also the Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, has been a public supporter of this theory supporting the digital nature of our universe.
“I find it hard to argue that we aren’t living in a simulation,” said Tyson on an episode of Larry King Live. This argument has garnered incredible support from physicists, astronomers, philosophers, entrepreneurs, billionaires, and scientists around the world.
One such supporter of this idea is a Swedish-American Physicist named Max Tegmark. After earning his bachelor’s degree at the Royal Institute of Technology, Tegmark then completed his masters and doctorate studies in physics, at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He argues that nature doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematics written into nature, and that we are rediscovering the “source code” written by the programmer of the universe. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview:
“The most striking thing I’ve learned so far in my career as a scientist, is that the universe is a whole lot stranger than we could have imagined… We’ve come to the conclusion that all of this [the universe] is governed by mathematical rules that are very much like what you would find if we were in a video game.”
Yet even more evidence of a virtual reality comes from a scientific theory called the holographic principle. This was proposed by an award-winning Professor of theoretical physics, named Leonard Susskind. This idea states that the universe could be viewed as emerging from a flat 2D surface, like a TV or computer monitor, and everything we see, including us, are holographic projections. The holographic principle only worked mathematically in theory, but all that changed in 2017, when cutting edge experiments produced observable evidence supporting this theory.
To further drive home the idea that our universe is virtual or digital in nature, we should look no further than the life’s work of Brian Whitworth PhD. Dr. Whitworth earned bachelor’s degrees in both Mathematics and Psychology, a master’s degree in neuropsychology, and topping it off with a doctorate in Information Systems. He made it his life’s work and mission to compare the two opposing, philosophical views: Materialism and Idealism. When studying over 20 key features of our universe, Whitworth concluded that what we see better fits Idealism, that the world is virtual in nature, and much more stranger than anyone could have ever dreamed of.
We are inevitably moving towards a new chapter in human understanding. We are finding indisputable evidence that our universe is not what we thought it was. Whether we are in a computer program like The Matrix, a purely mathematical reality, a dreamlike existence, or a holographic cosmos, the mounting evidence becomes much harder to ignore. For thousands of years, religions have been speaking of different realms and levels of reality. Now, science is beginning to prove their existence as indisputable proof continue to be discovered. We are coming to a crossroads; where science, religion, and philosophy are beginning to merge, and true human progress can be obtained from the union of these powers. One day, not far from now, we will all come together to discover the secrets of the Mind Behind the Matrix.
For more information about the virtual nature of our universe, please visit www.brainwhitworth.com
Categories: Commentary, Health, Science & Technology, Technology
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