Complex Numbers

Programmed

Pretty sure I've linked to this guy's blog in here before. Once again, I'm commenting on a blog that comments on a blog. Such is the circle of life. Hopefully the original bloggers won't feel the need to riff on this entry.

The Matrixpunk esthetic must die  

A brief word about The Matrix: I, alone in a world of nearly eight billion people (most of whom haven't even seen the movie), hated it.

My issues with that movie come down to three basic things. Well, two and a half.

1) Granted it's been a while since I had the misfortune of watching it, but as I recall, a good portion of the film was wasted with the "question" of whether the main character, Keanu Reeves' Neo, was "The One" or not. As the character's name is an anagram of "one," and because the plot would have gone nowhere otherwise, there was no way in hell that the writers would have made him Not The One (his name wasn't Neothonee), so a good chunk of the plot was utterly pointless. (Incidentally, I do like Reeves as an actor.)

2) I'd been reading up on Gnosticism, and the basic idea of the movie, its conception of "reality," is warmed-over, slurried, technologically updated Gnosticism. Techgnosticism, if you will. You probably won't.

2.5) This has nothing to do with the movie itself, but ever since it came out, you have streetcorner philosophers asking innocent passersby, "What if we're living in a smulation?" We're not living in a simulation; go do something useful, like masturbate.

Anyway, that's all me. Back to the blog post I'm quoting.

Sorry, I invented a label. It’s to describe a nonsensical fad that I keep running into.

He means "Matrixpunk." I invent labels all the time. I'll allow it.

It’s like steampunk: romanticizing the Industrial Revolution by putting gears on your top hat, imagining a world run on the power of steam with gleaming brass fittings, rather than coal miners coughing their lungs out or child labor keeping the textile mills running for 16 hours a day, limbs getting mangled in the machinery.

You mean, like, Dickens? I'd read the hell out of that.

Or cyberpunk, a dark gritty world where cyborgs rule and everyone is plugged into their machines, and the corporations own everything, including those neat eyes you bought.

At least cyberpunk was prophetic. Well, not really prophetic. Corporations use it as a guidebook and fulfill the prophecies on purpose.

Try to live on the bleeding edge, discover that the razor moves on fast leaving you lurking on a crusty blood clot.

Now, that's how you turn a phrase.

So…matrixpunk. One movie comes out in 1999, and everyone is wearing trenchcoats, ooohing at deja vu, and talking about how deep it is that we’re just a simulation (and never mind the losers who are gaga over the red pill/blue pill idea — boy, that one sure drew in a lot of pathetic people).

Oh yeah, I forgot about those shitheads. Call that, oh, reason #2.55 why I hate the movie. I do like my trenchcoat, though (it's not Neo-style).

However, one of the core ideas that seems to have suckered in some physicists and philosophers is the simulation crap.

Okay, so I'm not alone in that bit.

As a thought experiment, sure, speculate away…it’s when people get carried away and think it might really, really be true that my hackles rise.

Look, the problems with the simulation idea are legion, but to highlight:

a) This is an untestable hypothesis.

b) I want to know why someone is stuck on the idea that the world is some sort of holodeck simulation. What's your angle, here?

c) I play video games. In video games, sometimes I play as a despicable character. In Skyrim, for example, sometimes I depopulate entire towns (to the extent game mechanics will let me) just to see how tough my character is, or sometimes just because I feel like it. I know I can always reload a previous save and go about like a perfect paragon of virtue if I want, with the NPCs having no memory of being mercilessly slaughtered. I'd never do such a thing in real life -- because it's real life. Basically, believing we're in a simulation can be license to act like a psychopath.

d) The idea is basically techno-solipsism.

Back to the article, which now quotes another person's blog:

The controversial bit about the simulation hypothesis is that it assumes there is another level of reality where someone or some thing controls what we believe are the laws of nature, or even interferes with those laws.

Ah, I begin to see. The simulation-believers are largely tech people, and they want to believe that God is an IT wizard.

If there are a) many civilizations, and these civilizations b) build computers that run simulations of conscious beings, then c) there are many more simulated conscious beings than real ones, so you are likely to live in a simulation.

As I do not accept (a), the whole thing falls apart. Also, argument from probability is lame. If you win the lottery, do you argue that you didn't actually win the lottery because the probability of doing so is extremely low?

Myers chimes in again:

I’ve got a dazzlingly good hammer, or steam engine, or computer, and therefore the world must be made of nails, driven the piston of a very big steam engine, all under the control of a master computer. Or, more familiarly among the crackpots I have to deal with, watches are designed and manufactured, therefore the rabbits on that heath must also have been designed and manufactured.

I hear that last argument mostly from Muslims. Obviously most Muslims aren't crackpots, because most people aren't crackpots. But it's an argument that sane, rational Muslims have in their playbook to attempt to win over potential converts. My usual response is that we have a very good idea how rabbits came to exist, and they don't require a designer. Watches, on the other hand, are known to have been designed and built by human hands.

Myers: I would add that just because you can calculate the trajectory of an object with a computer doesn’t mean its movement is controlled by a computer. Calculable does not equal calculated. The laws of thermodynamics seem to specify the behavior of atoms, for instance, but that does not imply that there is a computer somewhere chugging away to figure out what that carbon atom ought to do next, and creating virtual instantiations of every particle in the universe.

To be fair to the simulation-pluggers, the simulation doesn't have to create every particle in the universe. It just has to create whatever it is you're looking at, at any given moment. For instance, the Eiffel Tower won't exist except in pictures until I go to Paris, which also doesn't exist until I go there. Because as long as we're saying that what I see is a simulation, as far as I know, I'm the only part of it with any "reality."

In the end, though, even if we were living in a simulation, so what? How would that change what you feel, what you do, what you think? If it does change these things, then we have a problem (see the "going around like a psychopath" thing above). If it doesn't change what you feel, do, or think, then... like I said... so what?