Author Archives: Robert Bast

About Robert Bast

Robert Bast has written about other "out there" topics, and they can be found via Google

Timeliness

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This is a very unusual and perhaps unique thought – the simulation might conspire to make things happen in a timely manner.

Context: I regularly make a 90 minute drive. Typically I listen to the radio and when a song bores me, I start a CD. Not a CD I know well, but a CD randomly pulled from a box of CDs I have not listened tp in decades.

I haven’t looked at track listing, and have no idea of how long the album plays for. Although, obviously, it will be within a range of like 30 mins to 80 mins.

So I listen the the album and – I think 5 times now from 30 journeys – when I arrive home and park, the moment I pull the parking brake the last track finishes precisely then.

Uncanny and no way I can cause it to happen.

Last weekend I attended an expo which had lots of talks. The first we wanted to attend was at noon. Google Maps said it was a 3 hour drive so I allowed 4 hours. I went to pick up my girlfriend at 8 but she was 12 minutes late. Our journey included a detour to see a town (but couldn’t find it), and 20 minutes of a wrong turn and backtracking, and a fuel and coffee stop. By the time we dealt with the queue to get in, and the parking, and finding the tent, we sat down to watch the talk. And the moment we sat down my watch ticked over from 11:59 to 12:00.

I’m not intending to convince anyone, just showing where I am coming from.

If we live in a Truman Show existence, then maybe the system contrives to make us turn up at the right time, by putting obstacles in our path, or whatever.

Something to try and notice.

Diamonds & Salmon

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The nicest things from nature cost the most!

No, of course not, flowers are wonderful and grow for free. 

Some of the nicest things from nature cost the most!

Diamonds are rare. Muck is common. Do we like diamonds because they are rare, and that is the only reason? Would we like muck if it was rare, and pay $50K per kilo?

It is complicated!

My guess is that truffles and caviar are seen as delicious because they are expensive. And we know things like salt used to be very expensive.

But you don’t need many tweaks to gamify a world. Often just one thing that we are told to desire will suffice. In games like Fortnite it is outfits. My kids have had hundreds of outfits but desire the expensive ones they don’t have, that to my eye are no different. And makes the developers hundreds of millions.

Maybe diamonds are intended to be the goal in our simulation. Regardless of how things actually turn out, our world is different to other simulations by only three factors:

  • diamonds exist naturally
  • they are rare and hard to attain
  • we think they look amazing

Someone from another simulation will think they look like a pebble.

So maybe there is a single thing that this world has unique, to randomise the outcome. It doesn’t have to be what we end up desiring for all time, but most likely will be at least for part of our evolution and history.

It could be anything we have ever fought over, like salt and gold. Or it could be something that is really similar to cheaper versions, but we prefer the expensive one, like salmon.

 

Conspiracy Theorists are Not Real People?

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If we lived in a simulation, and most of us humans are non-player characters (NPCs, how can we spot who are real and who are not?

I have often considered certain groups, because they are oddly similar and I’ve never known one in real life, or even spoken to one socially:

  • pack cyclists
  • bus drivers
  • osteopaths

Here’s a new idea – conspiracy theorists. Maybe something in their programming is glitching, combined with some need to belong to a group. Maybe such things spread only amongst NPCs?

So if someone thinks everything is a conspiracy – the war in Ukraine, floods in Australia, elections in the US – maybe it is a programming glitch and they are not real people?

Easter Egg at the Bottom of the Ocean?

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So imagine if our creators decided that a certain level of technological advancement was required before we could discover that we are not actually real.

That could look like a symbol, sign or something clearly un-natural:

  • on something very small (requiring advanced magnification)
  • on something out in space
  • at the bottom of the ocean (which we still find very hard to get to, and dark!)

And it could be in multitudes, or just one instance, the latter meaning we would need to be full scanning and mapping and analysing everything.

Scanning sea-floors could be great for archaeology as well, given that a lot of land has been submerged since we became a modern species. Telling the difference between what was made by us, or our creators would be hard, so I only expect such an Easter Egg to be at the bottom of the deepest parts of our oceans.

They could make it doubly tricky, like only somewhere remote, and you need to use a scanning electron microscope to see it…

Tardigrades and Quantum Entanglement

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I’ve had two opinions around quantum entanglement:

Simulation: An algorithm decides how small something should be to show it, depending on whether someone is watching or not. Just like how a video game doesn’t render anything off-screen, because there is no point and it wastes processing power.

Non-simulation: I always though it was a factor of size and being an object made from a single element.

Turns out a creature can be observed in a quantum entangled state:

In the experiment, researchers placed a tardigrade tun on a superconducting qubit and observed coupling between the qubit and the tardigrade tun via a shift in the resonance frequency of the new qubit-tardigrade system. They then entangled this joint qubit-tardigrade
system with a second superconducting qubit.
https://www.dailygrail.com/2021/12/quantum-tardigrade-scientists-observe-quantum-entanglement-in-a-multicellular-living-creature-for-the-first-time/

So, I consider this to be a strong indicator of us in a simulation, unless some scientists can explain it.

The Matrix: A Reason for Our Simulation?

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The Matrix, the movie, had a profound affect on our society. It changed action movies, it gave us catchphrases and icons, it showed that high concept, hard-to-get-your-head-around movies can be blockbusters. And it inspired us to question our reality.

Fast forward 20 years and we have a world that is questioning science and reality, disturbingly so. Just like the moon/eclipses may have been planted to inspire religion, The Matrix may have been planted to inspire doubt.

Imagine if the world of The Matrix is a reality, and we are a simulation. Imagine if what transpired in The Matrix really happened, and our reality is a simulation that looks at how the ideas presented in that movie might affect the decades beyond, for all those who watched it.

Donald Trump is telling us that everything is a lie.

More and more we are choosing to live in video games and virtual worlds.

 

 

Columbia Professor: 50/50 odds

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In an influential 2003 paper, University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom laid out the possibility that our reality is a computer simulation dreamed up by a highly advanced civilization. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three propositions must be true:

 

  1. Civilizations usually go extinct before developing the capability of creating reality simulations.
  2. Advanced civilizations usually have no interest in creating reality simulations.
  3. We’re almost certainly living inside a computer simulation.

Now, Columbia University astronomer David Kipping took a hard look at these propositions, also known as Bostrom’s “trilemma,” and argued that there’s essentially a 50-50 chance that we are indeed living in a simulation, Scientific American reports.

 

Kipping collapsed the first two propositions into one, arguing that they both would result in the same outcome — we are not living inside a simulation.
https://futurism.com/columbia-professor-50-percent-chance-simulation

 I am OK with 50/50, unless a simulation actually becomes possible, anywhere in the future of our planet, then it becomes almost certain.
Destroy technology to stop it happening?
No, that would only stop us from making a simulation within our simulation.

Art and Prescience

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I think I have just solved the pyramids and Shakespeare, with the same theory. It might take many years to explain it properly. It involves the same simulation (us) running repeatedly, tweaked by some people knowing a little about what happened last time it ran.
 

Many artists, especially songwriters, have said that it just came to them, fully formed, all at once.

I know this as well. My best ideas are never laboured – they just pour out of me without thought – as if I am copying them from elsewhere.

If we live in a simulation that is a rerun but allows some people to tap into what it important from the future (coming from the last time the same simulation was run) – then we can get a feedback effect.

Example:

Shakespeare in Run One writes a play. It is well received, so well received that all of England knows his name.

In Run Two, Shakespeare, with the gift of prescience, gets the notion that he is writing a great play. That emboldens him to make it more of what it would be otherwise. It becomes even more successful in Run Two.

In Run Three, the feedback effect continues. All Shakespeare gets is an inkling of its potential, a spark felt from the future. It emboldens him to make the play more x. The play is still a hit, but not as much as Run Two.

Run Four, and Shakespeare only feels the future from Run Three. No matter how it manifests itself, the future feedback changes the play, somehow.

Some artists feel the future so well, and are so good at their art, that every Run causes that art to get better again.

We might be in Run Seventy Four, and we are baffled. How could Shakespeare write such amazing plays that nobody has come close to matching since?

Shakespeare had an advantage – he was there right at the beginning of his type of art – when it first became available to all. Consequently, his feedback effect is from many more years than subsequent artists can have, because they came later. First mover advantage x feedback effect.

In Run One Hundred and Nine, Shakespeare could be a religion…

This first mover advantage x feedback effect could explain curiosities like the oldest Egyptian pyramids being the best ones.

Or Michelangelo.

Crash the Simulation

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Computer programs can crash, and we might be inside a computer program.

So how do we crash it?

Over at Scientific American they argue that we can overload the system by creating our own simulations:

The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

To me this fails because we have our own real world constraints of computing power and storage to deal with first. We would need unlimited computing power and storage here to stack overflow the system that runs our simulation.

My personal theory is that quantum mechanics, where we can only tell the status of a particle if we observe it, is an indicator of resolution limits of out simulation. Maybe if we observe enough quantum particles at once, we will either crash the system, or quantum mechanics will start acting differently, proving we are in a simulation.

Then there is the impossible to answer ethical question – is it wrong to crash the simulation? If we are not “real”, then no harm done. But if we experience life or even consciousness, despite not being real, should that be protected or even sacred?

Breaking the simulation would be like death, I expect. Once you achieve it, you’ll never know what comes next.

But if there is a restore point, would we as conscious individuals experience that reboot, or would be cease to exist?

Randonauting starts now

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Because of my autism, which has a preference for routine, I deliberately invite randomness into my life, forcing me out of my comfort zone, and helping me grow as a person.

Randomness has been a bigger part of my life than you would imagine, because decades ago I read The Dice Man, and even today I carry a die in my pocket. Several times a week my lunch is decided randomly, but I have also made major life decisions with dice.

This is all good, except nothing is truly random. If our journey is already preordained, than rolling a die is part of that. Many philosophers have put a lot of thought into this.

So I have stumbled across http://randonauts.com/guide.html which tries to screw up the simulation we live in by sending people to random locations they have never been to before, and never would otherwise. And they use quantum randomness, which they think gets around the preordained aspect.

Meanwhile, I often go on patrol, like a vigilante super hero would (and, yes, I do it more when I have been watching a show like Daredevil). While I try to choose random journeys, they aren’t really random. I suspect that I am not meant to encounter crime in my life.

So by using the Randonaut bot on patrol nights… let’s see what happens!

I don’t have a selfie stick, but this seems like a fair representation of what I am hoping for: