The book picks up. On the topic of the metaverse, I briefly talked about my views and my conjectures about the ultimate form of the metacosm. I guess the metaverse may be the so-called "singularity", I don't want the article to be published within two days, Luo Yonghao and Lao Gao also said that it may be a singularity. It was such a coincidence that the hero saw the same thing.
Today continue to talk about the metaverse -
"What if we're already in the metaverse?"
"The likelihood that we're living in reality is one in a billion." —Musk
"Our world doesn't exist, I just leave first." — Albert Einstein
♠️
During the Spring Festival in 2021, I spent a few days watching all of Lao Gao's videos on YouTube (and watching some other bloggers of the same type). That is, during this period, a feeling is stronger than ever, and the world is more and more illusory. Is it influenced by the film of the old high? There must be part of it. In fact, this feeling has been vaguely there before, and watching old high films undoubtedly makes this feeling more and more concrete.
"Isn't the world illusory?"
Later, I learned that both Einstein and Musk had doubted whether the world was real.
Back to the metaverse. I think the title and the world are the same question. If we are already in the metacosm, it is possible to show that our world is illusory; conversely, if our universe is illusory, then we are likely to be in a metacosm.
So, are we already in the metaverse? To answer this question, it is necessary to prove that the world is illusory, and to prove that the world is illusory, it is necessary to find the unnatural place of this world, and it is not impossible to say that it is a BUG.
Fortunately, there are some such BUGS.
♣️
Brain in the Vat
"Brain in a Vat" is a hypothesis expounded by Hillary Putnam in his book Reason, Truth and History in 1981.
"A man was operated on by an evil scientist, and his brain was cut off from his body and placed in a tank containing nutrients to keep his brain alive. The nerve endings of the brain are connected to a computer that programs messages to the brain so that he can keep everything completely normal. For him, it seems that people, objects, and the sky still exist, and their own movements and physical sensations can be input. The brain can also be input or intercepted by memory (memory of brain surgery is taken out, and then entered into various environments and daily life that it may have experienced). He could even be typed into code and 'felt' that he himself was reading an interesting and ridiculous passage of text here. ”
This hypothesis leaves the reader (and the author himself) with the following thought: "How can you guarantee that you yourself are not in this predicament?" ”
(Screenshot from the Matrix movie.) Invasion and deletion. ）
All the sensations that humans perceive are nothing more than neural signals that the brain receives (and processes). These signals come from the five senses, namely sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
What you think of as "real" is nothing more than what the "five senses" think is true.
Last time I talked to Sally, a veteran curator, she talked about art as nothing more than five senses. When you think about it, it is. Without the five senses, art does not exist.
Speaking of which, I think I've seen a video [of a science fiction and fantasy blogger], and it's interesting to say that some kind of alien likes to come to Earth to experience life, why do they like it, and say that because there is art on Earth, there is no art on their planet. So in this way, this alien probably has no five senses.
♥️
The Mandela Effect
The Mandela effect refers to the phenomenon that reality does not correspond to collective memory. That is, group memory bias. South African President Nelson Mandela died in 2013, and many say that in their own memory, Mandela "should have died in prison in the 1980s," but the reality is that Mandela did not die in the 1980s, was later released, and became president of South Africa, still alive until 2010.
The point of the Mandela effect is that the person involved (with memory bias) is so convinced of his memory that he can even clearly state the details. Moreover, there are many people with the same detailed memory. For example, in the 86th edition of "Journey to the West", there is no plot of Yang Li Daxian frying in oil, but many people think that there is. I am the column. I even remember what the pot looked like.
Let's take another real case of what happened to me. Fast forward to a few years ago, one day I suddenly had a whim and wanted to do morning exercises. Because my only experience with morning exercises was in elementary school, I went online to see if there was any matching audio. I still remember that the set of exercises was the "seventh set of broadcast gymnastics", and I clearly remember a few melodies (I am very sensitive to sound and music), but I can't find it on the Internet. The seventh set of broadcast gymnastics that can be found is also very different from what is remembered.
There are different interpretations of the Mandela effect. There is an explanation that has pulled it together with parallel universes. I think it's more like a game world where the server goes down due to a problem, and the content after the fix is skewed from the current data, resulting in different people having inconsistent memories of the same events.
♦️
The Monkey Effect
An experiment was conducted in the 1950s. On an island in Japan, a monkey learned to wash sweet potatoes with seawater until one day, when the hundredth monkey learned to wash food with seawater, the monkeys on the entire island learned. The most amazing thing is that the monkeys on the other island are all gone, and there is no connection between the two islands. (The hundred monkeys here refer to a certain number, not specifically the 100th.) ）
Some scientists explain that the same species, although in different regions, tend to forget one direction. We humans are like this, groups in different environments, the trajectory of development is very similar in retrospect.
I think it can also be explained by the "collective subconscious", which feels like these monkeys have learned it all after they have slept. Whether there is communication in the dream, whether there is some kind of "subconscious" network mechanism, I do not know. But it feels a lot like what's going on in the virtual world.
Let's also classify it as a bug.
Double-slit experiments & quantum entanglement
Double-slit interference experiment. In simple terms, a beam of light passes through a baffle with two slits, followed by a receiving screen. When the light passes through the two thin slits, multiple light and dark stripes are produced on the receiving screen, which shows the characteristics of the wave. Later, scientists placed a detector or camera at the two slits where the light entered, and when the detector was turned on, the receiving screen had only two clear lines, which showed the characteristics of the particles at this time; turning off the detector, it returned to the characteristics of the wave. It is as if the light knows that someone is observing it immediately becomes a particle, and if it is not observed, it becomes a wave.
This phenomenon is also known as the "observer effect". It is still a mystery to humanity.
(Image from the Internet)
Quantum entanglement. Phenomena in quantum physics. Simply put, in a pair of entangled particles, scientists place the pair separately. As long as you measure the spin direction of one of them, the other must spin in the opposite direction. No matter how far apart, there is an instant induction between them. This induction speed is even far faster than the speed of light.
The mechanism behind the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is still unclear to scientists.
1% of consciousness
"In Which Shoe Will I Wake Up Tomorrow" is a poem by Haizi.
The world we live in has a certain "stability," which is one of the most important reasons why you feel real.
You don't worry that you won't wake up tomorrow in the same bed; you certainly won't worry that you'll wake up tomorrow in some corner; I'm sure you won't worry about which shoe you'll wake up in tomorrow.
Stability means a certain degree of continuity and certainty. If our world were to face drastic changes every day, full of variables. It's like the movie "Soul Shifter City". The aliens would restart the city every early in the morning, making all sorts of new arrangements in new ways (except that the city's inhabitants were completely unaware). Then we will be tired of dealing with such variables every day, let alone development. Moreover, our human brains work in a way that can not move, in order to save unnecessary energy. In an extremely unstable environment, it is bound to threaten the survival of mankind.
I once sent a circle of friends, a small reflection on the material world and the quantum world. I said that if the real world is material, then the dream world is quantum. For the physical world is continuous and deterministic; the quantum world is discontinuous and uncertain.
What the so-called "real world" in the metaverse will look like, I don't know. But from the previous exposition, we will conclude that a universe that can experience "development" must be a relatively stable world.
As mentioned earlier, man is a "cognitively lazy" animal, who can not move as much as possible, and can try not to think without thinking. And to do so, the structure of our bodies is indispensable, they are the "parasympathetic system" and the "subconscious mind". Many scientists say that most of us spend nearly 99% of our time on "autonomous driving" and living according to inertia. Only 1% of the time is conscious. But incredibly, it was this 1% conscious that created the technology and civilization that is now brilliant. Here we can't help but ask, why not be 100% conscious? Imagine if humans could be 100% conscious, then the achievements that can be achieved are unimaginable. This 1% limit is as if someone had deliberately done it. Is the aim so that each of us can have room to grow? I think so. Because the weight of the human brain only accounts for 2% of the body weight, the energy consumed accounts for 20% of the overall consumption! This clearly shows that we have the potential to improve. Each of us has the potential and space to raise our consciousness, provided we have the will to do so.
There is an upper limit to the speed of the universe
How do we describe the universe? The vast expanse and boundlessness are not enough to describe the vastness of the universe. It is in such a seemingly infinite universe that the speed of the universe has an upper limit, that is, the "speed of light". It's a little unnatural. This is indeed a lot like the "world behind the scenes" (assuming we are in the metaverse) to set limits to save hash rates, to ease the pressure on the server.
In the production of large games, a technology called LoD is used. It's an algorithm. 3D computing consumes huge computing power, but LoD can analyze the scene and render the most important and immediate scenes better in detail; on the contrary, it is not important, and the distant scenes are given a small amount of rendering, which can greatly reduce the computing power and improve the smoothness of the game. In fact, in the early years of real-time strategy games, such as age of empires, Warcraft, Red Alert, etc., similar treatment methods have emerged. At the beginning of the game, you can only see a small square of land, and as the game progresses, the scene slowly expands and expands. This was also a solution, in order to alleviate the shortage of computing power on computers at that time.
No aliens can be found
Scientists have calculated that there should be a lot of extraterrestrial civilizations, and so should the ability to find us. But in fact there is none (at least the Earth officially does not recognize it).
This seems very unnatural. Is it really afraid of the "dark jungle law" mentioned in "The Three-Body Problem"? And then the heads of state secretly banded together to say don't make it public? It's unlikely to think about it.
Imagine if the Law of the Dark Jungle really happened and the Earth was destroyed. Then all the players involved in this metaverse will not be able to proceed.
Well, this topic is simply talked about here.
At last
The story of Zhuang Zhou Mengdi, I believe everyone has heard of it. There are many explanations for this story. One explanation is that Zhuangzi was already thinking about whether the world was real or illusory at that time. But I prefer another layer of explanation, that is, Zhuangzi actually means that whether it is a butterfly or a Zhuangzi, it is me! As long as this "I" has not changed, then why not butterfly or Zhuangzi?
Returning to the topic of this article, can we confirm that we live in the metacosm? To be honest, I don't know.
But I don't think that's the most important thing. What matters is whether we affirm that there is a Zhuangzi so-called "I."
If you confirm that "I" does exist, it is indeed real. Well, what you have to do is very simple -
If it comes, it will be safe. Now that you're here, let's experience the world.
Whether the world is real or illusory. Let it go!
If life is a game, enjoy it!