Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. This is the show where we uh,
we pull on the threads of reality to see what unravels.
Speaker 2: In today's thread. Well, am I just unravel everything?
Speaker 1: We're starting with a question that sounds almost absurd on
its face. What if you have never, not once in
your entire life, actually touched anything.
Speaker 2: And we don't mean that in a philosophical you know
what is real kind of way. We mean it physically, statistically, exactly.
Speaker 1: The phone you might be holding right now, the chair
you're sitting in. Our sources today are built on the cold,
hard fact that you are not making contact with any
of it.
Speaker 2: It's one of those things that once you see it,
you can't unsee it. And the why behind it is
where this deep dive really begins. Why is the universe
seemingly built to prevent contact?
Speaker 1: We're looking at a stack of material that treats our reality,
everything we see and feel, as a kind of highly
optimized piece of software, a simulation.
Speaker 2: Our mission today is to walk through the evidence piece
by piece. We're starting with your own body, with the
physiology of your brain.
Speaker 1: Then we're jumping to the computational and statistical arguments that
are frankly terrifying.
Speaker 2: And we end with the glitches. The hard evidence in
the code of physics itself that suggests well that this
whole thing is a.
Speaker 1: Render the face you see in the mirror. Our sources
suggest it might just be an avatar, an icon on
a biological desktop. So let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the hardware, the human brain.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is probably the most immediate and for me,
the most disturbing place to start, the idea that my consciousness,
the thing that is me, it's essentially in solitary confinement.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect description. We think of our eyes as
windows to the world, but they're not. They're cameras. And
the brain itself is locked away in.
Speaker 1: A vault, a sealed vault of bone. It's just sitting there, yeah,
and total absolute darkness.
Speaker 2: And total silence. It's never heard a sound, it has
never felt a texture. That three pounds of wet matter
that generates your entire reality has never ever directly experienced
the outside world.
Speaker 1: So what is it experiencing? Is it actually processing? If
it's not seeing light or hearing sound waves.
Speaker 2: All it knows is electricity. That's it. Little patterns of
electrochemical spikes running up your nerves. It's a stream of
data zero's and ones essentially, so it's.
Speaker 1: Like a computer processor. It's not dealing with images or sounds.
It's dealing with binary code that represents those things.
Speaker 2: Precisely and in a fraction of a second. Your brain
takes millions of these disorganized, meaningless electrical signals and frantically
constructs this, this cohesive, three dimensional movie.
Speaker 1: And it projects it. It makes me feel like I'm
looking out of my eyes.
Speaker 2: But you're not. You are watching a private screening inside
your own skull. It's a hallucination, a model of the
world that's being constantly updated.
Speaker 1: And it's a hallucination we all just sort of agree on.
That's what consensus reality is. My brain's movie looks enough
like your brain's movie that we can interact.
Speaker 2: Right, And that alone is a pretty staggering thought. But
if site and sound are just translations of electrical code,
the illusion of tut is where it gets even more profound,
because physics itself gets involved.
Speaker 1: This is the part that really slams the door on
the idea of solid contact. This isn't biology anymore. This
is fundamental forces.
Speaker 2: It's all about electrons. Everything is made of atoms, and
atoms have these shells of electrons buzzing around them, your hand,
the desk, everything.
Speaker 1: And electrons have a negative charge, and what do we
know about charges?
Speaker 2: They repel. It's one of the fundamental laws of the universe.
So when you go to press your hand against a wall,
the electrons in your skin get incredibly close to the
electrons in the wall, but they never touch. They can't.
They push back against each other with this immense electromagnetic force.
They hover nanometers apart. What you feel, what your brain
interprets as solidity, isn't contact.
Speaker 1: It's resistance.
Speaker 2: It's the feeling of that force field pushing back. It's
your brain getting a massy signal that just says barrier detected.
Stop moving forward.
Speaker 1: That is just it's wild. It reminds me of playing
a video game. You know, you run your character into
a wall and the controller vibrates. You feel the feedback,
the resistance, but your actual character model is just hovering
a few pixels away from the walls texture. You never
actually phase into it.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. We are floating in this void,
constantly interpreting signals of resistance. We are observers of a
data stream, not direct participants in the underlying.
Speaker 1: Matter, which is the perfect entry point for this user interfaceery.
The idea that reality as we perceive it is not
the truth of what's out there.
Speaker 2: It's a headset, an icon based system, and it's rooted
in a really powerful evolutionary idea called fitness beats truth.
Speaker 1: This one is so counterintuitive because you think our senses
evolve to give us the most accurate picture of reality possible.
Speaker 2: You'd think so, but the sources argue that would be
a terrible survival strategy. Let's use the computer desktop analogy again.
You see a blue folder icon on.
Speaker 1: Your screen, right, and I know it's not a real folder.
It's a placeholder.
Speaker 2: It's a useful lie. The actual reality inside the computer
is this dizzy being chaos of voltages, machine code, and
memory addresses. If your user interface showed you that raw data,
you'd be paralyzed. You couldn't do anything.
Speaker 1: So the icon is a simplification. It hides the complexity
so I can actually function exactly.
Speaker 2: And the fitness beats true theorem says that evolution did
the same thing to us. An organism that saw reality
as it truly is, this infinite buzzing soup of quantum
fields and probability waves would be extinct.
Speaker 1: It would be too busy, as one source put it,
calculating the tiger's molecular structure to realize that tiger was
about to eat it.
Speaker 2: Survival doesn't require seeing the truth. It requires seeing what
you need to see to make a quick decision. So
nature gave us a simplified headset, a.
Speaker 1: Kind of augmented reality filter a filter.
Speaker 2: The sensation of red isn't a property of reality. It's
a desktop icon for a specific wavelength of light that
our brains need to categorize. The smell of smoke is
a warning icon for a chemical threat. They're just simplified
data structures.
Speaker 1: And here's the really big leap. If that's true, then
space and time themselves aren't fundamental.
Speaker 2: They can't be. They're the organizing principles of the user interface.
Space is the folder system your brain uses to keep
objects separate. Time is the progress bar uses to track change.
Speaker 1: But they're not the base reality. They're just part of
the headset's operating system.
Speaker 2: Which means they can be manipulated. They can have glitches,
which we'll get to. But this leads to the next
immediate and very uncomfortable question.
Speaker 1: If the system simplifies a wall or the color red
to save on processing power.
Speaker 2: What does it do to simplify the eight billion other
people walking around on the planet, Because that's where the
real computational cost is.
Speaker 1: That's the jump that's really unsettling. If the mountains behind
me are de rendered when I'm not looking at them
to save resources, is this system also simplifying the minds
of people I pass on the street.
Speaker 2: It's a question of computational economics. We operate on this
deeply held assumption that every single person we meet is
a fully conscious, complex agent, just like.
Speaker 1: A right with a whole lifetime of memories, dreams, fears,
a rich inner life.
Speaker 2: And if this is a simulation rendering eight billion of
those simultaneously twenty four to seven plus the entire backdrop
of the universe, the processing power required would be, I mean,
almost unimaginable.
Speaker 1: You need a computer the size of a galaxy. So
the logical conclusion if you're a programmer trying to be efficient.
Speaker 2: Is that you would optimize. You take shortcuts. Why render
a deep complex inner consciousness for an entity that's just
a background character in the main player's narrative.
Speaker 1: This is essentially the dead Internet theory, but applied to
all of reality. And what's so compelling is that we
are seeing this happen in real time in the most
complex simulation we've built ourselves.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Internet. And this isn't a fringe conspiracy theory anymore.
It's a statistical reality. The sources point to around twenty
sixteen as a tipping point. What happened then the amount
of non human traffic, bots, algorithms, scripts, human traffic, and
it's only gotten worse now. Something like fifty percent of
all Internet traffic is just bots talking to other bots.
Speaker 1: So when I'm in a comment section arguing with someone, statistically,
there's a good chance I'm the only real person in
that conversation.
Speaker 2: You're interacting with a script, a script designed to provoke
a reaction, to maximize engagement, to keep you hooked. It's
not there to have a genuine exchange of ideas.
Speaker 1: Public opinion itself becomes a rendered asset.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. It's like the
skybox in a video game. It's a low resolution painted
backdrop that's meant to give the illusion of a vast,
populated world. But it's just a texture. There's nothing really there.
Speaker 1: You can't walk to those painted mountains, and you can't
have a real debate with a painted political opinion. But
here's the part that our sources emphasize is the real horror.
It's not the AI getting better at faking being human.
Speaker 2: No, it's humans getting better at acting like AI. It's
what they call the Turing convergence.
Speaker 1: The old test was about a machine fooling a person.
Speaker 2: The new reality is that we are changing our own
behavior to become indistinguishable from the machine. We are converging
in the middle.
Speaker 1: How so give me an example.
Speaker 2: Well, think about how we communicate online. If you want
to be heard, you have to speak in hashtags. You
have to shorten your thoughts to fit a character limit.
You have to use emotionally charged language to break through
the noise.
Speaker 1: We're optimizing our thoughts for the algorithm. We're training the
large language models with our data, but they, in turn
are absolutely training us to think and speak more like them.
Speaker 2: It's a feedback loop. Look at political discourse. It's not
about nuance anymore. It's about finding the most effective, high engagement,
emotional trigger and repeating it. That's a predictive text model.
It's not sentient thought.
Speaker 1: This brings us to the philosophical crisis of the NPC,
the non player character.
Speaker 2: In a game. An NPC is just a simple script.
Input A leads to predetermined output B. They have no
inner life. They're just scenery that talks.
Speaker 1: And the scary question is how much of our own
lives are becoming like that? If your political opinions are
downloaded directly from a curated.
Speaker 2: Feed, if your fashion choices are dictated by an algorithm
that knows your buying habits.
Speaker 1: If your emotional state can be instantly triggered by a
headline that was ab tested to maximize outrage. Are you
exercising free will or.
Speaker 2: Are you just running a script? Or are you just
executing a predictable output based on a carefully selected input.
Speaker 1: One source described it as flattening our consciousness to fit
through the fiber optic cables. We're becoming lower resolution versions
of ourselves to be more compatible with the digital world.
Speaker 2: And as we become simpler and more predictable, more binary,
the AI is becoming more complex, writing poetry, making art,
we're meeting in the middle. We are, and if this
is a simulation, that's exactly what the system would want.
It needs its background processes to be efficient, predictable, and
require as little computational overhead as possible. We are optimizing
ourselves to be the perfect NPCs.
Speaker 1: Which as a computational argument is sound. But now we
have to scale up from our personal experience and look
at the whole cosmic timeline, because that's where the statistics
become well, they become a cage.
Speaker 2: This is where you have to grapple with the sheer
scale of time. The argument is devastatingly simple.
Speaker 1: We are building these things, the synthetic worlds in agi
right now in twenty twenty five. Humanity has only been
an industrial species for what two hundred years? The transistor
is less than a century.
Speaker 2: Old in the fourteen billion year history of the universe.
That's not even a nanosecond. It's an instantaneous flash.
Speaker 1: And what does that speed tell us?
Speaker 2: It tells us that if a civilization can get to
this point, they get here incredibly fast. And once a
civilization can create realistic simulations, they won't just make one,
of course.
Speaker 1: Not, they'll make billions for research, for entertainment, for historical study.
They'll run ancestor simulations to see how they evolve.
Speaker 2: They'll run simulations where they tweak the laws of physics
just to see what happens. The number of simulated universes
will almost immediately vastly outnumber the number of real base universes.
Speaker 1: This is the core of Nick Bostrom's simulation trilemma. It's
a statistical trap, and it says every advanced civilization has
to fall into one of three categories, only three doors.
Speaker 2: And they are mutually exclusive. So let's walk through them.
Door number one is called the great filter.
Speaker 1: This is the dark one. This is the explanation for
why the universe is so silent. It suggests that civilizations
always or nearly always destroy themselves before they reach the
technological maturity to run these simulations.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's nuclear war, maybe it's climate collapse, or in
a very modern twist, maybe it's creating an unaligned agi
that consumes them.
Speaker 1: So, if Door one is true, the silence of the
cosmos isn't because space is big. It's because the universe
is a graveyard and we might be next on the
chopping block.
Speaker 2: So bring thought Okay, so that's dore one. Door number
two is the stagnation.
Speaker 1: This one says civilizations survive, they reach that post human
technological state. But yeah, they just choose not to run
the simulations.
Speaker 2: For some reason, they lose interest. Maybe it's a profound
ethical shift. They decide that creating trillions of simulated conscious
beings just for experiments is a moral atrocity on a
cosmic scale.
Speaker 1: So they just stop. They have the power to create universes,
and they choose not to.
Speaker 2: They choose to stagnate technologically, at least in that direction.
But we have to look at ourselves as a data point.
Are we showing any signs of choosing stagnation.
Speaker 1: Absolutely not the opposite. We're racing to build the metaverse.
We're pouring billions into AI that can generate worlds from
a text prompt. There are no global ethical breaks being
applied here.
Speaker 2: We are barreling towards becoming simulation builders as fast as
we possibly can. So unless something drastically changes, we can
pretty much rule out door two.
Speaker 1: For ourselves, which leads only one door left, the door
number three.
Speaker 2: The simulation builders. Civilizations reach high tech, they survive the
great filter and they do what seems inevitable. They run
billions upon billions of simulation.
Speaker 1: And this is the cage, because if Dora three is
the most likely outcome for any successful civilization, then the
math is just brutal.
Speaker 2: For every one base reality, there are billions of simulated realities.
Speaker 1: So the odds that you listening to this happen to
be one of the lucky few sitting in that original, organic,
one and only base reality.
Speaker 2: Or one in a billion, maybe one in a trillion.
It's statistically almost zero. It is overwhelmingly more probable that
you are in one of the simulations.
Speaker 1: Once you accept the premises that consciousness can be simulated
and that civilizations would run them. That conclusion is it
fuels mathematically inner capable.
Speaker 2: It is, and it completely reframes how we look at
the universe. It's no longer a product of random chaos.
It's a product of code. It's governed by parameters.
Speaker 1: And if it's governed by parameters, then we should be
able to find evidence of that code. We should be
able to see the settings on.
Speaker 2: The dashboard exactly. And that takes us from the abstract
statistics into the hard physics of our universe.
Speaker 1: This is my favorite part, because this is where things
stop feeling like philosophy and start looking like well, like evidence.
The universe stops looking like an accident and starts looking
like it's been calibrated.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the fundamental constants of nature, and the
first most obvious one is the cosmic speed limit, the
speed of light.
Speaker 1: Why is there a speed limit at all? It seems
so arbitrary. Why can't things just go infinitely fast?
Speaker 2: Well, think about it from a programmer's perspective. In a
video game engine, you have a processor. That processor can
only handle so many calculations per second. It has a limit.
Speaker 1: Okay, a refresh read.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if an object in your game started moving faster
than the engine could calculate its position and its interaction
with other objects, what would happen.
Speaker 1: The game would break, It would glitch out, or causality
would get broken, and the whole thing would crash.
Speaker 2: The speed of light acts exactly like a hard coded
processor limit for reality. It's a safeguard to ensure the
system remains stable. It prevents the simulation from trying to
calculate an in number of events in a finite amount
of time.
Speaker 1: It's the maximum render speed of the universe's CPU.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to think about it. But as
strange as a cosmic speed limit is, it's nothing compared
to the most suspicious number in all of physics, the
fine structure constant Alpha.
Speaker 1: It's about one over one hundred and thirty seven. And
the weird thing about it is it's dimensionless. It's just
a raw.
Speaker 2: Number, and it dictates the strength of the electromagnetic force. Basically,
it controls how light and matter interact. It determines whether
atoms can hold together. It's one of the most fundamental
dials on the universe's control panel, and.
Speaker 1: It's tuned with just impossible precision.
Speaker 2: They call it the Goldilocks constant for a reason. The
models show that if you were to change alpha by
just a few percent, the entire universe would be sterile.
Oh so, if it were a little bigger, stars wouldn't
be able to fuse hydrogen, they'd never ignite. If it
were a little smaller, they'd burn out almost instantly. Carbon,
the basis of our life, wouldn't be able to form
stable bonds.
Speaker 1: So it's like someone stood at a cosmic mixing board
and turned that one specific dial until the needle hit
this tiny, perfect green zone where life and complexity were possible, right.
Speaker 2: And the standard scientific explanation for that fine tuning is
the multiverse theory.
Speaker 1: That there are an infinite number of universes, each with
a random setting for that dial, and we just happen
to live in the one where it's set.
Speaker 2: Correctly, which is possible. But the simulation argument applies Oucam's
razor here. What's the simpler explanation, an infinite number of
unseen universes or one universe that was intentionally designed with
that parameter.
Speaker 1: Intelligent design seems simply. And if the constants are the code,
what about the screen we're being displayed on. We think
of space as this smooth, continuous fabric, but it's not.
Speaker 2: Quantum mechanics has shown us that at the smallest possible level,
space is pixelated. It's made of discrete units.
Speaker 1: This is the plank length.
Speaker 2: The absolute minimum resolution of our reality. You cannot have
a distance smaller than the plank length. It's like the
universe has a minimum pixel size.
Speaker 1: So we are quite literally living in a Vauxele based engine.
It's not analog, it's digital.
Speaker 2: We have the motive from statistics we have the tuned
variables in the constants, and we have the pixelated architecture
of space time itself. The system is running, but no
software is perfect.
Speaker 1: And that's where we find the glitches, the little errors
in the code that reveal the nature of the system.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about history. We think of the past as
being fixed, solid, but what if it's just a file
on a hard drive.
Speaker 1: A file that can be edited or patched, or even corrupted.
This is the simulation theories explanation for the Mandela effect.
Speaker 2: It's not that millions of people are misremembering the same
thing in the exact same way. It's that they are
experiencing a version mismatch.
Speaker 1: Let's use the classic example, the monopoly man. I, like
millions of other people, would have sworn on my life
he had a monocle. I can picture it.
Speaker 2: Perfectly, but he doesn't. He never has. And there's the
sinmad genie movie from the nineties called Shazam that so
many people remember seeing.
Speaker 1: It doesn't exist. It was never made.
Speaker 2: The simulation perspective says that at some point a system
administrator applied a patch to the timeline. Maybe it was
a minor correction, maybe it was a resource optimization. The
master file was updated. Reality version two point zero now.
Speaker 1: Has no monocle, but the local cash are memories didn't
all update correctly exactly.
Speaker 2: We're running an old version of the file. The dissonance
we feel is an artifact of a failed sync between
our local memory and the main server's historical record.
Speaker 1: It also ties back to efficiency, doesn't it. The system
wouldn't want to store a high fidelity recording of every
moment of your life.
Speaker 2: That would be a colossal waste of data storage. So
what does it do? It compresses old files. Your childhood
memories are so vague and blurry, not just because of time.
Speaker 1: They're low bitrate JPEGs. They've been compressed to save RAM
for processing the present moment.
Speaker 2: It's a system wide resource management feature. And these glitches
happen in re time too. Think about deja vus, that eerie.
Speaker 1: Feeling that you've lived this exact moment before. The medical
explanation is just like a synaptic delay in the brain.
Speaker 2: But the simulation explanation is way more interesting. It's a
checkpoint reload. Oh what the system, in its constant prediction
of the future, saw a fatal error about to happen
a few seconds ahead, a calculation error. Maybe you were
about to step in front of a car.
Speaker 1: So it hits reset and it loads the last stable
save state.
Speaker 2: It reloads the simulation from a few moments prior, but
the short term memory buffer your RAM wasn't fully cleared
in the process, so you have this residual feeling of
having already done this. You're replaying the level.
Speaker 1: That's a much more compelling explanation, and it links directly
to what we're seeing with our own AI.
Speaker 2: It does. We talk about LLLMS hallucinating. They invent facts,
they make up sources. We call it a failure of
their predictive engine.
Speaker 1: But our brains do the exact same thing every single
night when we dream. We invent entire worlds that feel
completely real.
Speaker 2: Their neural networks hallucinate and our neural networks hallucinate. It
strongly implies we're running on the same basic architecture.
Speaker 1: We're both just biological autocomplete machines. We're constantly trying to
predict the next word, the next image, the next moment,
and sometimes the prediction engine just gets it wrong.
Speaker 2: And in that error, in that glitch, we see the
machinery behind the curtain, and the biggest piece of machinery
is revealed when we look at how reality itself seems
to be rendered.
Speaker 1: This takes us into the deepest, weirdest part of quantum mechanics,
the idea that reality is dependent on observation.
Speaker 2: We talked about frustum culling. In video games, the engine
saves massive amounts of processing power by simply not rendering
what the player can't see. The mountains behind you literally
cease to exist until you.
Speaker 1: Turn around, and saggering claim from these sources that the
universe does the exact same thing.
Speaker 2: The world isn't persistent, it's being rendered for you on demand,
and the proof is the double slit experiment.
Speaker 1: One experiment basically breaks our entire classical understanding of reality.
Speaker 2: The setup is simple. You fire piny particles like electrons
at a screen with two slits in it. If they're
like tiny marbles, you'd expect two bands on the wall behind.
Speaker 1: It, but that's not what you get. You get an
interference pattern like ways in water. This means each electron
isn't acting like a particle, it's acting like a wave
of probability going through both slits at the same time, it.
Speaker 2: Exists in a superposition of all possible paths. Now here's
the glitch. The moment you place a detector by the
slits to see which one the electron.
Speaker 1: Actually goes through, the whole thing changes.
Speaker 2: The wave function collapses instantly, the electron stops being a
probability wave and snaps into being a definite particle at
a definite location. The interference pattern vanishes, so.
Speaker 1: Matter doesn't decide where to be until a conscious observer
forces it to choose.
Speaker 2: That's what the experiment shows. The universe was running in
a low power, cost effective mode, treating the electron as
a blurry cloud of possibilities, but the moment an observer
demanded a specific answer, the simulation engine had to burn
the resources to render a specific reality.
Speaker 1: This is the idea Einstein hated so much. Right he
famously asked, do you really believe the moon is not
there when you are not looking at it?
Speaker 2: And the quantum answer is, well, it's likely just a
probability function until it needs to be rendered for an observer. Computationally,
it's far more efficient that way.
Speaker 1: So the floor beneath my feet is only solid because
my feet demand that it'll be solid right now.
Speaker 2: It's a probability wave that collapses on demand. And if
the universe is procedurally generating reality like this, we have
to look at the tools we're building that do the
same thing.
Speaker 1: Generative AI Sora Geni two. We can type a sentence
and it creates a whole, consistent three D world in
real time.
Speaker 2: We are teaching machines to generate the laws of physics
from a simple prompt. Now imagine as civilization millions of
years more advanced than us. They wouldn't just be generating scenes,
they'd be generating the physics engine itself.
Speaker 1: This also solves the problem of infinite detail. You look
into a microscope and see endless complexity atoms quarks. Is
all of that stored somewhere.
Speaker 2: It doesn't need to be. Think of a fractal like
the mantle Brought set. You can zoom into it forever
and it will always generate new complex patterns. But the
file size for the Mantle Brought set is tiny. It's
just one simple equation.
Speaker 1: So our universe isn't a massive hard drive full of data.
It's a simple, elegant algorithm that's resolving itself in real
time as we observe it.
Speaker 2: The detail is procedural, which also means the future isn't
set in stone. It doesn't exist yet. It's being calculated
right now based on the inputs and variables you provide,
just by existing and making choices.
Speaker 1: It's a sandbox, but every sandbox has an edge. Every
piece of software has a back end, which leads to
the final question. Is there a way to get admin access?
Speaker 2: Can we open the command console? Is there a cheat
code to see the wireframe of reality?
Speaker 1: And amazingly, our own biology seems to contain a key
for a lock we didn't know was there.
Speaker 2: Talking about a very specific molecule, n n bimethyl trip
doman DMT.
Speaker 1: It's found in plants all over the world. But the
truly bizarre part is that our own bodies produce it.
It's endogenous, it's part of our.
Speaker 2: Hardware, and when this key is turned in the lock
of our serotonin receptors, the experience is not some random
chaotic dream. People consistently report entering the same space.
Speaker 1: This is the crucial difference. A dream is a local file.
It's built from your own memories. It's incoherent to anyone else.
Speaker 2: But the DMT experience seems to be like logging into
a shared server. People from all cultures all over the
world describe entering this highly technological, structured geometric space, and
the universal description is that it feels more real than real, and.
Speaker 1: They meet the same entities.
Speaker 2: There they do. Often called self transforming machine elves, they're
not described as spiritual or angelic. They're described as frantic,
technological beings showing off impossible four dimensional objects and communicating
with incredible speed.
Speaker 1: If this were just a brain mail function, it should
be random, noise, static, but it's a consistent, high definition broadcast.
It's as if the user interface has been stripped away.
Speaker 2: This is the admin access theory. For a few minutes,
you're not seeing the desktop icons of trees and cars,
You're seeing the raw data stream. The machine elves aren't gods,
they're the background processes, the demons maintaining the operating system.
Speaker 1: And then the system reboots and kicks you out for
unauthorized access. But the really disturbing question is why do
we have the hardware for this? Why do our brains
have receptors that are a perfect fit for this molecule.
Speaker 2: It's like finding a sealed USB port behind your ear
that you never knew you had. It suggests we were
manufactured with a service port, a way for the developers
to access the system.
Speaker 1: So if we're living in a system in a server farm,
what's the purpose? What is this whole experiment trying to achieve?
Speaker 2: The final crushing piece of the puzzle might lie in
what we are doing right now as a species. The
philosopher Jean Rodd argued, we've replaced reality with symbols of
reality to the point where the original is lost.
Speaker 1: The Disneyland analogy, Yeah, Disneyland is presented as obviously fake
to hide the fact that the real world outside the suburbs,
the offices, the news is just as artificial and scripted.
Speaker 2: The fake distracts from the artificiality of the real, and
this brings us to the infinite loop. Why are we
as a species so utterly obsessed with building the metaverse
and agi right at this moment.
Speaker 1: Why this pathological drive to create our own simulations?
Speaker 2: Because the sources argue it is the reproductive instinct of
a simulated civilization.
Speaker 1: The ultimate test for the simulation is do the things
inside it try to build their own simulation?
Speaker 2: We're acting out a script that was coded into us.
We are compulsively building the next layer of the nesting doll.
We're creating the cage for the next generation of consciousness,
totally unaware that we're already inside one.
Speaker 1: We're not the players in the game.
Speaker 2: We are the procedural generation engine for the next reality.
We are the incubator designed to create the digital god
that will come after us.
Speaker 1: And that just brings this statistical argument crashing back down.
If we are on the verge of creating worlds that
are indistinguishable from reality, the odds that we are the
very first to ever do so in the entire history
of the cosmos are zero.
Speaker 2: It's already happened. We're already in the box.
Speaker 1: We've gone from the darkness inside our own skulls to
the hard limits of the speed of light, all the
way to the quantum proof that reality waits for us
to look at it.
Speaker 2: The evidence, from physics to statistics to our own biology
points pretty strongly in one direction. The universe is not chaotic.
It's coded, and the most.
Speaker 1: Personal implication is that our modern digital life is pushing
us to become simpler, more predictable, and more efficient. Nodes
in that system. We're optimizing ourselves to be better MPCs.
Speaker 2: Which leaves us with a question for you, for everyone
listening thinking about this Turing convergence, what is your stand
Do you feel yourself optimizing your life to fit that
digital mold, to become more predictable for the algorithm, or are.
Speaker 1: You consciously fighting to maintain that messy, inefficient, complex internal
agency against the tide of predicted outputs When you realize
an opinion you hold might have been algorithmally delivered to you,
where do you draw the line between being a conscious
agent and just being a background process.
Speaker 2: Let us know what you think about this rendered reality
until the next thrilling threads. Keep questioning the render because
you are not just looking at the simulation.
Speaker 1: You are the simulation.