Tom Happ's Hypothesis

Though I will go into details below, the basic idea is this: there are an infinite number of realities, each defined by its own system of rules (in our case, physics) and data (things like individual particle/wave position, energy, etc.). Thus any hypothetical set of rules - and the "stuff" (data) they apply to - comprises a reality. This includes our universe, all digital computer programs, and, more broadly, programs run on the mathematical constructs known as Turing machines. Complete understanding of this concept requires one to divest oneself of the notion that the physicality of a person or object is separate from the mathematical description of their constituent particles; the mere fact that our system of rules (called physics) works is enough to give rise to our particular reality, and the same will apply to an infinite number of other realities.

Some implications, which I will go in depth with later:

• Any set of rules and data, however they are defined, that results in a sentience, will be perceived by the sentient being as real.
• Realities can be a lot more simple than the one we live in. Entire functional realities can (and have already been) described with pen and paper. These could include sentient inhabitants - though this would likely take a lot of paper.
• The study of physics in our universe is actually a "case study" of only one system of rules and data.
• Realities can start at any point and can end at any point. They do not need to emerge or evolve as our own universe appears to have.
• Sentient beings can spring into "life" from any point if the reality they exist in defines it - they do not need to have evolved from other life forms or even be "alive" by the classical definition. A thinking individual's existence does not need to be anything more than a "theoretical" network of neurons (called threshold gates in their mathematical form) defined in a void.
• Duplicates of each sentient mind exist across an infinite number of realities with widely varying configurations.
• Realities can contain "child realities" run on Turing machines or digital computers.
• Realities can contain "bugs" - seemingly extraneous rules introduced as a result of their essentially random nature. Detection of bugs in our own reality would serve as evidence for the veracity of my hypothesis.
• There are also a myriad of possible implications for the nature of consciousness, memory, perception of time, and death.

Note these ideas are not entirely unique - in fact back in 1967 Konrad Zuse had the idea of the universe being run by a computer, and in 1997 Jürgen Schmidhuber proposed that the universe is a simple Turing machine running all possible programs with all possible physical laws. Max Tegmark at MIT has a paper on the subject that approaches it from more of a physicists standpoint and is perhaps a bit less broad. However, none of these have spun things in a way I personally consider "right" - mainly because they are too specific. A Turing machine (a concept I'll explain later), for example, works according to its own set of rules and thus technically just a subset of all possible realities - even if it effectively computes them all as child realities.

I do not have a mathematical proof of my hypothesis, though I expect there to be certain signs of its truth - for example, there should be observable bugs in our own reality, since the reality for any given sentient lifeform is, from the perspective of the life form, randomly selected from an infinite possible number of realities. Thus the likelihood that our system of physics is entirely consistent and inviolate becomes vanishingly small.

What follows is the train of thought that led me to the thought experiments, the experiments themselves, and the conclusions I've been able to derive.

The Thought Process

Like a lot of people I've always wondered at the origins of our universe - namely, how did it all "get" there? One explanation would be religious - that it was created by some higher power which science cannot explain. Although I think this view is rather arbitrary depending on the religion, it nevertheless has a certain humanity to it that is very appealing, and some would say it is the simplest explanation. While for the sake of this discussion I will not deal with the religious view, I would still like to keep it in mind as relevant and potentially not contradictory to to my hypothesis.

Another explanation for the origins of our universe, and the current favored one, is the Big Bang theory. Cosmologists (scientists studying the universe and its origins) arrived at this theory by examining empirical data such as the relative velocities of distant galaxies and extrapolating back into the distant past. The basic idea behind the Big Bang is that our universe originated from an infinitely dense state and then all the matter/energy within exploded outwards. Of course this leads one to wonder why it was ever in such a state in the first place, why it would be comprised of matter and energy, why we have forces like gravity and electromagnetism, and why any number of seemingly arbitrary physical laws would be what they are and not something else.

It is the "arbitrary" part that leaves me ill at ease. Why should things be one way and not another?

A lot of people believe that on further study of our universe more will come to light. We've already made great headway in discovering relativity and quantum mechanics. We feel relatively sure that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago and is largely comprised of empty space and energy, which is the same thing as matter, which is largely comprised of entities known as electronics, protons, and neutrons, which are themselves comprised of quarks and leptons. We've tied together electricity and magnetism, as well as something called the "weak" force. Scientists are working on a way to tie these together with gravity and something called the "strong" force.

So it's not unreasonable to think that if we work hard enough, we'll come up with a Theory of Everything (TOE) that fully explains all physical phenomena. And it's not unreasonable to think that in seeing such a theory, all questions of why things should be otherwise will become moot, that the solution is so elegant that we will be content that things are how they are and realize that they could never be any other way.

On the flip side, it could turn out that while the Theory of Everything we arrive at explains our universe - perhaps with a large and ungainly equation or set of equations - it nevertheless still has us (and famous scientists like Steven Hawking) asking, "why this particular set of ungainly equations?" To put it simply, we might wind up with a really detailed description of a particular tree without making any mention of the forest or how that tree wound up there.

A New Frame of Reference

To me the situation seems similar to ones from ancient times, when people believed that the sun and stars revolved around the Earth, and derived some very complex equations to predict their behavior from this point of view. To think that the universe revolves around the Earth is not untrue - relativity teaches us that. But it's a lot easier to understand the movement of the planets when the sun is the frame of reference. When think about the big bang, relativity, quantum mechanics, and other convoluted inter-workings of our universe, I begin to wonder - is there another frame of reference we should be looking for? Maybe not a spacial one, but a theoretical one?

As everyone reading this is probably aware (and maybe a little tired of hearing about by now), reality as observed by human beings is subjective. The digital era has been rife with books and movies about virtual reality and the question of whether a digital reality presented in a convincing manner is any different from one comprised matter and energy. We've seen numerous fictional characters discover that their world is actually contained within another "macro" world, and probably wondered if there could be a conspiracy large enough to do the same to ourselves.

Although they are now something of a science fiction cliche, and it will be a long while before such a convincing technology could come to fruition, I do think the idea that the idea of digital realities could provide a good basis for "thought experiments" - hypothetical situations which could help us to solve problems by analogy. In a digital universe you have the freedom to define practically anything you want. And for most people today the concept of a digital reality is not difficult to grasp - we have plenty of movies and video games to demonstrate for us just how thorough a digital world can be, and it is not hard to see that our virtual realities are only getting more detailed as technology progresses.

Maybe you can see where I am going with this. At present we live in a universe where, from our frame of reference, everything spawns from a big bang way back in the past, light has a fixed speed, electrons have a negative charge, and any number of arbitrary specifics. Might a sentient creature living in a virtual world draw up a similarly arbitrary-seeming conclusion as to the nature of that world? But looking through a computer monitor at the virtual creature trying to explain its world, might we have a different (perhaps more enlightening) explanation given that our frame of reference is outside that world?

Some Background

It is my intent to be able to explain what I'm talking about without requiring a lot of background knowledge, mainly since I think that if I'm right in my hypothesis that it's better that more people be able to understand what I'm talking about. So first, a brief explanation of how a computer works - so that you can understand what goes in a virtual world (as well as a video game or a word processor or any other software).

Basically you've got a central processing unit (CPU) and memory. A computer program is a big list of instructions that sits in memory. You could think of it as step-by-step directions like you might give to someone trying to find your home, only instead of listing how far to drive and where to turn, it has instructions like "add this number to that" and "copy this piece of memory to that". These instructions are actually very simple taken one at at time - most people could do them in their heads or with a pen and paper. The CPU reads the list of instructions like someone following the directions to your home. But it does them one at a time, very, very fast - billions of them per second, as of the present writing. When you have so many of these simple instructions going on at once, they can create really complicated behavior - like making Mario appear to jump on screen or make an advertisement animate in your web browser. That is essentially the entire mystery behind your computer - just a list of simple directions that, taken together, create something much more complex.

Now for neural nets, which I'm also going to talk about in my "thought experiment". Neural nets are artificial constructs that can be run on a computer (the same way you might run Internet Explorer or Mario Brothers or anything else) that behave similarly to the actual neurons in your brain. Although scientists have yet to understand how all the little parts of your brain integrate into a consciousness, they have a pretty good understanding of how the smallest pieces - the neurons - work, and have been able to incorporate similar behavior into computer software. At present we typically use neural nets for simple things such as pattern recognition - being able to scan a written letter of the alphabet and identify it as "t", for example. However, given enough time and study it's not unreasonable to believe that we will eventually be able to create intelligent, thinking neural nets. This supposition will form the backdrop of my "thought experiment".