Speaker 1: I want you to think back to the last truly
massive argument you had with someone. Oh boy, yeah, you
know the exact kind I'm talking about, the kind where
your blood pressure is just spiking, your hands are maybe
shaking a little bit, and you are absolutely one hundred
percent convinced that you are right, and.
Speaker 2: The other person is, you know, completely out of.
Speaker 1: Their minds exactly. You have the facts, you have the
memory of exactly what was said. You can see the
entire sequence of events perfectly in.
Speaker 2: Your head, right and you're just looking at them like,
are we even on the same planet right now?
Speaker 1: Yes, you feel like they are clearly delusional, twisting reality,
remembering things that just straight up didn't happen.
Speaker 2: It's such a universal human experience. I mean, we've all
been there, that feeling of uh, I am the same
one here and you are broken totally.
Speaker 1: But and here's the hook to start us off today,
and it is a genuinely terrifying What if science And
I'm not talking about like psychology or couple's therapy here,
I'm talking about hard physics and neuroscience.
Speaker 2: That foundational stuff.
Speaker 1: Right. What if hard science proved that you were both right?
Speaker 2: Which sounds impossible it does.
Speaker 1: Not in a metaphorical hey, let's agree to disagree kind
of way, but in a literal, physical sense. What if
you and that other person were simply not inhabiting the
same reality.
Speaker 2: I mean, when you phrase it like that, it sounds
like science fiction or maybe a philosophy seminar that went
way off the rails, right, But as we are going
to unpack today, this is rapidly becoming scientific fact, and that.
Speaker 1: Is exactly what we are grappling with on today's show.
Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Everyone. I'm your host, and I'm
joined by our resident expert to guide us through this
absolute madness.
Speaker 2: It is great to be here, and I have to
say I've been buried in these research papers all week
and I had a few moments where I just steered
at my coffee cup and wasn't totally sure if it
was actually there.
Speaker 1: I do not blame you at all. So the mission
for today today's thread that we are pulling on is
basically going to unravel the entire fabric of your existence.
Speaker 2: It really is a two front war on reality.
Speaker 1: We are looking at this frankly terrifying compilation of research
from the entity of Chronium. They've done the heavy lifting
of pulling together studies ranging from you know, neurobiology labs
at Harvard all the way to high level quantum physics
experiments in Vienna, and.
Speaker 2: The picture they paink is well unsettling is probably the
most polite word for it.
Speaker 1: Unsettling is putting it mildly, because we assume the ground
beneath our feet is solid, right, but A Chronium's research
suggests this solid world we trust is actually what researchers
are calling a mathematical void.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not just the universe out there that's glitching,
it's the processing. And here inside your skull, we're finding
out that the biological machinery we use to preceide the
world is less like a high definition camera and more like.
Speaker 1: Really creative fiction writer.
Speaker 2: Exactly a storyteller, making things up on the fly.
Speaker 1: So by the end of this, we're going to question
how your brain fakes data, how quantum mechanics proves the
past literally doesn't exist until you look at it. And
we might even question if we exist as individuals at.
Speaker 2: All, or if we're just dissociated fragments of a single
universal mind, which is a wild concept.
Speaker 1: We will definitely get to Okay, So let's unpact this
because usually when we talk about reality being fake, people
immediately jump to, you know, the matrix simulation.
Speaker 2: Theory, right, some guy in a higher dimension typing code
in a basement exactly.
Speaker 1: But we need to start closer to home. We need
to start with the wetwear, the biological machinery, the.
Speaker 2: Brain, because before you can even ask if the universe
itself is real, you have to ask if your perception
of it is actually accurate.
Speaker 1: Right? We trust our eyes Implicitly people say I saw
it with my own eyes, as if that is the
ultimate mic drop that settles any argument.
Speaker 2: But neuroscience is known for a long time that the
brain is not a camera. It is absolutely not a camera.
Speaker 1: What is it doing?
Speaker 2: Then? A camera records pixel for pixel exactly what is
in front of it. The brain is a sensor. It's
this highly efficient editor that actively erases data that just
doesn't fit its internal narrative.
Speaker 1: And the source material highlights this specific study from twenty
thirteen by Trafton Drew at Harvard, which I have to
be honest, this one really freaked me out because of
who the subjects were. Can you walk us through the
gorilla experiment.
Speaker 2: Oh, this is the gold standard for what we call
inattentional blindness. Now, normally these psychology studies use like nineteen
year old college.
Speaker 1: Students, right, people who are probably distracted anyway, exactly.
Speaker 2: But Trafton Drew wanted to really raise the stakes here.
So he took a group of twenty four highly trained radiologists.
Speaker 1: And we need to pause on that for a second,
because these are experts. Their entire career, their paycheck, their
professional reputation, it all depends on their ability to spot tiny, anomalous,
weird little nodules in lung CT scans.
Speaker 2: They are professional noticers. They're paid hundreds of thousands of
dollars to see the things regular people miss. Okay, So
Drew took a stand stack of long CT scans, the
exact kind these doctors look at all day long, but
he edited them. He inserted a literal image of a
gorilla into the scam.
Speaker 1: A gorilla, a gorilla just hang it out in lunk.
Speaker 2: Just right there in the lung tissue. And this wasn't
some microscopic where's waldo situation either. This gorilla was forty
eight times the size of a typical cancer nodule. It
was huge relative to the data they were scanning. That
is just absurd, completely out of context.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he asked the radiologists to scroll through the
scans and look for cancer nodules. That was their instruction.
But here's the kicker. They didn't just ask them afterwards
if they saw anything weird. They used eye tracking technology
to see exactly where these doctors were looking millisecond by millisecond.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, so we know for an absolute fact if
their eyes physically crossed the image of the gorilla. There's
no ambiguity.
Speaker 2: We have the receipts the eye tracking show that every
single one of them looked directly at the gorilla. They
foviated on it, the photons from the monitor their retinas.
Eighty three percent of them did not see it.
Speaker 1: Eighty three percent. That is a staggering failure rate for
trained professionals.
Speaker 2: When asked afterwards, they swore nothing was there. They looked
right at it, and their conscious mind registered absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying because the implication here is that if
the brain doesn't expect to see a gorilla in the
lung scan, it just it just deletes it. Treats it as.
Speaker 2: Spare Precisely, it's what we call the model theory or
predictive coding. This was famously discussed by Carl Fristen at
University College London around two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: Okay, what does that mean? Exactly?
Speaker 2: The theory, which is basically the dominant view in neuroscience
right now, is that the brain doesn't actually see the
world in real time. That would just be way too
much data, like trying.
Speaker 1: To download a four K movie every second over dial
up exactly.
Speaker 2: It would require far too much biological energy to process
every photon every millisecond, so it takes massive shortcuts. The
brain runs a prediction model. It predicts what should be
there based on your past experience.
Speaker 1: It's an efficiency engine.
Speaker 2: Yes. It projects its expectation onto the world. It constantly
compares the incoming signal from your eyes against the model
it already built.
Speaker 1: So if the input matches the model, like let's say
the kitchen table is exactly where it was yesterday, what happens.
Speaker 2: It effectively ignores the actual visual data coming in from
your eyes and just serves you the memory the table
you see your expectator.
Speaker 1: He wait, let me get this straight. When I walk
into my kitchen tonight, I'm not seeing the kitchen as
it actually is right now. I'm seeing my brain's idea.
Speaker 2: Of my kitchen in a very real biological sense. Yes,
you are hallucinating your kitchen based on your memory of it.
Speaker 1: That is wild.
Speaker 2: The brain only really pays attention to prediction errors, things
that violate the model. But if the violation is too weird,
like a gorilla in a lung scan, the brain often
decides the incoming data must be noise. It decides the
input is faulty, so it filters it out to preserve
the model.
Speaker 1: So it actually prioritizes its own internal story over external reality.
Speaker 2: We see what we expect to see, period.
Speaker 1: You know, this explains so much about traffic accidents. You
always hear drivers say I looked, I swear I looked,
and that car just came out of nowhere.
Speaker 2: The car was there, the driver's eyes absolutely saw it.
We know this from dash cams and crash reconstructions. But
their brain's model of that specific intersection at that specific
time of day didn't include a.
Speaker 1: Car, So the brain literally erased the car until the
collision was imminent, and the prediction error became way too
loud to ignore. That makes me feel incredibly unsafe in
the world. It means we were all navigating reality wearing
a blindfold made of our own expectations.
Speaker 2: It does get worse, though, Oh great. It's not just
missing things, it's about the brain swapping things out entirely.
A Chronium highlighted that famous door study from nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 1: Oh right, Daniel Simon's and Daniel Levin. This study is
honestly hilarious, but when you think about the implications, it
is deeply disturbing. It feels like a hidden camera prank.
Speaker 2: Show exposes a massive flaw in our perception called change blindness.
Speaker 1: Set the scene for us. This wasn't in a sterile lab, right, No,
this was.
Speaker 2: Out in the real world on a college campus. Imagine
you are a pedestrian walking across the quad. A stranger
walks up to you holding a map and asks for directions.
Speaker 1: Okay, standard human interaction. You start pointing out where the library.
Speaker 2: Is, right, and suddenly two construction workers carrying this massive,
solid wooden door walk right between you and the stranger.
They rudely cut right through your conversation, completely blocking your
view of the person you're talking to for just a
second or two.
Speaker 1: Rude. Sure, But things like that happen in a city
or on a campus.
Speaker 2: Except while that door is passing between you, the stranger
you were talking to is swapped out, swapped out. One
experimenter ducks behind the door and walks away with the
construction workers, and a completely different person steps into their
place and continues the conversation with you once the door passes.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about a physically different person, not an identical.
Speaker 2: Twin, a totally different human being through different height, different voice,
different clothing. Sometimes you were wearing a different hat or
had a different haircut.
Speaker 1: And people notice this surely, I mean you would notice
if I suddenly turned into a completely different person mid sentence.
Speaker 2: You would, really hope so. But the results of the study, yeah,
seventy five percent of people did not notice at all.
Speaker 1: Seventy five percent.
Speaker 2: They just continued giving directions to this brand new person
as if absolutely nothing had happened.
Speaker 1: That is mind blowing. You are looking directly at a
human being, making eye contact, engaging with them, and your
brain doesn't register that they have been body snatched.
Speaker 2: It proves that we aren't looking at the fine details
of the world. We are looking at concepts. Your brain
tags the person in front of you with a conceptual
label stranger asking for directions.
Speaker 1: Wow, So as long as the new input vaguely fits
that category.
Speaker 2: Exactly, as long as it's a human and they are
still asking for directions, the brain just pastes over the reality.
It assumes continuity because checking the details takes too much energy.
Speaker 1: It really makes you panic about what else we miss
every single day, Like do I actually see the subtle
expression on my partner's face when we're talking, or am
I just seeing the expression I expect them to have
Because we've had this exact same conversation one hundred times before.
Speaker 2: It's a very valid fear. We are filling in the
blanks constantly. We are skimming the book of reality. We
aren't reading every word. And there's actually one more biological
layer to this illusion before we even get to the
physics of the universe.
Speaker 1: Oh, you mean the tape delay.
Speaker 2: Yes, the actual signal processing speed of your nervous system, right.
Speaker 1: Because light hits your retina, but that signal doesn't just
instantly appear in your mind. It has to physically travel
down the optic nerve. Get routed through the thalamus and
eventually reach the visual cortex at the back of your brain.
Speaker 2: And all of that transit and processing takes time.
Speaker 1: The Achronium source says it takes about eighty milliseconds.
Speaker 2: Give or take. Yeah, now, eighty milliseconds doesn't sound like
a lot to us. It's literally less than the blank
of an eye.
Speaker 1: But in the modern fast paced world, that is a
huge amount of time.
Speaker 2: It's an eternity. Think about it. If you were driving
on the highway at sixty miles per hour, your car
travels a full meter about three feet in those eighty milliseconds.
Speaker 1: So physically speaking, when I react to a car slamming
on its brakes in front of me, I am reacting
to where that car was a full meter ago.
Speaker 2: Correct. You have never, not once in your entire life,
actually experienced the present moment. You live permanently on a
tape delay. That is just your brain is constantly presenting
you with a live feed that is actually on a lag,
and it's incredibly clever about it. It edits the timestamp
to make it feel immediate. It synchronizes the sound and
the video perfectly so you don't feel like you're watching
a badly dubbed foreign movie. But it's all a post
production trick.
Speaker 1: That is profound. We are literally living in the past,
physically biologically trapped in the past.
Speaker 2: We are always always catching up to reality. We never
touch it.
Speaker 1: Right now, Okay, let's just take a breath and look
at where we are. This is just the biological side
of the argument we've been unpacking. My brain deletes things
it doesn't expect, like giant gorillas. It swaps out entire
people without me noticing because it relies on broad categories
instead of fine details. And the whole hallucination is happening
on an eighty millisecond tape delay.
Speaker 2: That's what we call the glitch in the machine. Your
hardware is fundamentally faulty.
Speaker 1: Okay, fine, I can accept that. I can accept that
I'm a flawed, fleshy biological organism. But here's the pivot.
Surely I can trust the world itself, right, I mean,
the table in front of me is solid wood. The
math of the universe adds up. Physics is reliable. If
I take a tape measure and measure this table, the
table is there.
Speaker 2: Well, this is where we have to transition from the
glitch in your machine to the glitch of the universe itself,
because it turns out the universe is even more broken
than your brain is. Oh, come on, that's solid table.
It might not actually be there in any way that
you currently understand being there.
Speaker 1: This is where we step into the quantum void. And
I want to start this section with a concept that
sounds like a dry legal term but is actually a
total reality breaker contextuality.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Cochinspecker theorem from nineteen sixty seven. This is
quite possibly one of the most important theorems in quantum mechanics,
and yet nobody talks about.
Speaker 1: It, probably because it's terrifying.
Speaker 2: It mathematically dismantled the entire concept of a context independent reality.
Speaker 1: The Eucronium outline used a really great analogy for this,
the glitchy smartphone. I think everyone listening can relate to
this immediately.
Speaker 2: It's the perfect way to visualize it without getting bogged
down in the math. Imagine you have a smartphone that
is totally hopelessly bugged out. If you turn on the
Wi Fi, the camera app instantly crashes. If you try
to open the camera, the screen goes completely black.
Speaker 1: Right, I can check my email or I can take
a photo, but the phone physically will not let me
do both at the same time. The features clash.
Speaker 2: The Cochinsbecker theorem essentially proves that our universe is exactly
like that broken phone. Historically, we used to think that
a particle like an electron, just has a set of
innate properties spin, position, velocity.
Speaker 1: Charge, like character stats in a video game, exactly, and.
Speaker 2: We assume those properties just sit there, fixed and real,
waiting for a scientist to come along and measure them.
Speaker 1: Like reading a book, the words are printed on the page,
whether I open the book or not, The quote to
be or not to be is physically sitting on page fifty,
regardless of whether I'm currently looking at it.
Speaker 2: That perspective is called realism. It's common sense. But Cocaine
and Specker proved mathematically that a particle does not have
a value for a property until you actually measure it,
so it's hidden. No, that's the crucial part. It's not
that the value is hidden inside the particle. It's not
that we just don't have good enough microscopes to see it.
Yet the value is functionally undefined.
Speaker 1: So going back to the book Analogy, the book is
entirely blank until I open it.
Speaker 2: It's even weirder than that. The physical act of opening
the book is what writes the words onto the page,
and the specific way you choose to open the book,
the angle, the speed determines what words actually appear. Measurement
doesn't read a pre existing reality, it creates the reality.
Speaker 1: I mean that sounds like pure magic. How can physicists
possibly prove that? Isn't that just a philosophical debate, Like
if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears.
Speaker 2: It, it is rigorously mathematically proven. They showed that if
you try to assign fixed definite values to all the
possible properties of a quantum system at the same time,
you literally end up with a logical contradiction. The math
breaks you get zero equals one.
Speaker 1: So the rules of the universe just cancel each other out.
Speaker 2: If you try to define everything simultaneously. Yes, reality is
entirely contextual. It strictly depends on how you choose to
look at it.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the properties of matter are fluid. They are
generated on the fly by observation. But surely, I mean
I'm grasping at straws here. Surely arithmetic holds up basic
counting one plus one equals two. If I put two
apples into a basket, I have two apples, you would
really hope.
Speaker 2: So logic and math should be the bedrock, right, But
let me introduce you to something called the quantum pigeonhole principle.
This was tested recently by Yakir Aharanov at Chapman University
around twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: This one hurts my head so much, but I absolutely
love it because the setup sounds so incredibly simple. It's
just a basic logic puzzle, it is.
Speaker 2: It's based on the classical pigeonhole principle in mathematics. Very simply,
if you have three pigeons and you only have two
pigeon holes to put them in, then.
Speaker 1: At least one hole has to contain two pigeons.
Speaker 2: Right, it's undeniable. You physically cannot put three separate things
into two separate boxes without doubling up somewhere.
Speaker 1: It's logic one oh one. A toddler understands this.
Speaker 2: So ro Andov and his team decided to do this
exact puzzle, but with subatomic particles. They put three photons.
Those are our pigeons, and they sent them into an
innerferometer with only two possible paths. Those are our holes.
And then they measured the paths to see which photons
were sharing a path.
Speaker 1: They were looking for the double up exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they checked every they have. Did photon one photon
two share a path? The answer was no. Did photon
two and boton three share a path?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: Did photon one and photon three share path?
Speaker 1: No? Wait, stop, Three separate particles went in. Only two
paths exist, but no two particles were ever found in
the same path together direct That is literally impossible. Where
did the third one go?
Speaker 2: It didn't go anywhere. They were all accounted for in
the system. But the fundamental logic of counting simply broke down.
At the quantum level. The concept of a number just
does not work the way it does up here in
our macro world. The particles were able to traverse the
system without ever acknowledging each other's presence in a shared space.
Speaker 1: It implies that counting is just a human construct. That
one plus one equals two is a convenient rule for
grocery shopping, but it is not a rule for the
basement level of reality.
Speaker 2: Precisely, we built our entire system of logic based on
interacting with apples and rocks. But the universe isn't made
of apples and rocks. It's made of these bizarre probabilities,
waves that frankly, do not care about our rules.
Speaker 1: And if that isn't enough to make you question the
solidity of things, let's talk about the Cheshire Cat experiment.
This was done at the Vienna University of Technology in
twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2: I love the naming convention here. It's a direct nod
to Alice in Wonderland. Obviously, the cheshire cat slowly fades away,
but its creepy smile remains just hanging there in the
empty air.
Speaker 1: Which is a beautiful, surreal image in a children's book.
But you're telling me they did this in a physics lab.
Speaker 2: In the lab, they did this with a neutron. A
neutron is a real subatomic particle. It has mass, you
could bounce it off things, and it also has a
property called spin, which is a type of magnetic momentum.
Think of the physical mass of the neutron as the
cat and its magnetic spin as the smile.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm with you, cat and smile, mass and spin.
Speaker 2: They shot this neutron through a specialized beam splitter which
separates particles based on their properties, and they managed to
send the neutron, the physical mass the actual particle down
the left path of the device.
Speaker 1: A cat goes left, but.
Speaker 2: They successfully sent its spin its magnetic rotation down the
right path.
Speaker 1: Hold on, That's like saying I physically walked into the kitchen,
but my height walked into the living room, or my
sense of humor went out to the garage while my
body stayed inside.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. They successfully physically separated a
property from the object that belongs to The magnetic property
was just hanging there in a location where the particle
itself was not.
Speaker 1: So let's review properties can be ripped off objects. Basic
arithmetic breaks down completely, and nothing actually has defined values
until you measure it. We are really starting to see
that this solid world we live in is just a
collection of loose attributes that don't even stick together unless
we are actively watching them.
Speaker 2: We are peeling the onion layer by layer and realizing
there is absolutely nothing in the center.
Speaker 1: But surely, and I am begging you here, surely the
past is safe, even if the present moment is a
glitchy contextual mess. What happened yesterday is locked in history?
Is history a toast for breakfast this morning?
Speaker 2: That happened? You are such an optimist. I really like
that about you.
Speaker 1: I try to be, but I can hear in your
tone of voice that you're about to tell me the
past is fake.
Speaker 2: Two, I'm going to tell you about the legged garg
inequality from nineteen eighty five. This was a framework designed
specifically to test if the past exists when we aren't
looking at it. It tests a concept called macrorealism.
Speaker 1: How do you even test if the past exists? You
can't physically time travel to check.
Speaker 2: You test it by measuring a system at different intervals
of time. Well, it's called them T one, T two,
and T three. The physicists developed a mathematical metric called K. Basically,
K measures how well the measurements at these different times
correlate or agree with each other over time. If the
system had a defined state between your checks, meaning if
it actually had a solid history while you weren't looking,
The absolute maximum logical limit for K is exactly one.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if K equals one, that means the past
is real. The object was physically doing its thing while
my back.
Speaker 2: Was turned exactly. But when they actually run these experiments
on quantum systems, the value of k reliably comes back
at one point five.
Speaker 1: One point five. But you just said the mathematical maximum
is one.
Speaker 2: The maximum logical limit is one. Getting a result of
one point five is a brutal, undeniable violation of logic.
It implies that the statistical correlations between the timeframes are
stronger than a real continuous history could ever allow. It
mathematically proves the particle did not exist in any defined
state between the times you.
Speaker 1: Checked it, So between the exact moments I looked at it.
It wasn't just hiding somewhere else. It was literally nowhere.
Speaker 2: It was nowhere. It had no trajectory, there was no past.
The past has created only when it is observed in
the present moment. You are generating the history of the
object backward in time by the act of measuring it.
Speaker 1: Right now, That sounds like a massive paradox, but it
ties directly into the quantum switch experiment too, doesn't it,
The one by Philip Walter at the University of Vienna
in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, the quantum switch directly attacks our concept of
cause and effect. We all think of time as a
straight arrow. Event causes event B.
Speaker 1: Right, I put on my socks and then I put
on my shoes. I strike the match, and then the
fire starts. There is a strict chronological order. Well.
Speaker 2: In the quantum switch experiment, they applied two distinct operations
that's called them A and B to a photon. In
our macro world, either operation A happens before B, or
operation B happens before A. That has to be one
or the other logic again, But in the experiment, the
photon experienced operation A before B and operation B before
A simultaneously. The causal order itself was placed in a
quantum superposition.
Speaker 1: How is that even comprehensible? How can the shoes beyond
before the socks A and D the socks beyond before
the shoes.
Speaker 2: It heavily suggests that linear time, that arrow pointing from
the past into the future, is just a biological filter
of our nervous system. It's a tool our brains used
to organize data, but it's not a fundamental law of
the universe itself. At the base level of reality, causal
order simply does not exist. Events are just this soup
of possibilities until the consciousness threads them together.
Speaker 1: And the Acronium source mentioned a University of Queensland study
from twenty nineteen that called this phenomenon the cheat codes
of the universe.
Speaker 2: Yes, because they showed that you can actually use this
lack of causal order to transmit information much more efficiently
than linear time would ever allow. If you don't actually
have to wait for process A to finish before process
B starts and vice versa, you can completely bypass the
clock speed of the universe. They are essentially hacking the timeline.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's recap this nightmare. No solid objects, no
innate property is without observation, no past history, no fixed timeline.
It really feels like we're just drifting alone and avoid here.
Speaker 2: And it gets even lonelier because now we have to
ask the really dark question. If reality is this fluid
and observer dependent, do we at least share the same
fluid reality? If I'm hallucinating my world and you're hallucinating
your world, are we even in the same room.
Speaker 1: This is what the outline refers to as the subjective universe,
and this brings us to a mind bending modern update
on a very old thought experiment.
Speaker 2: Wigner's friend Eugene Wigner came up with the original idea
decades ago, but in twenty eighteen, Daniella Fraukier and RENARDA.
Renner at eat Zurich upgraded the math to basically break
physics entirely.
Speaker 1: Walk us through this scenario because this is the one
that proves we can literally have different facts.
Speaker 2: Right, yes, Okay. Imagine you have a friend who is
inside a completely sealed, isolated laboratory. Inside that lab, she
measures a quantum particle. Let's say it's a quantum coin. Flip.
She measures it, and she gets heads for her inside
the room. That is an objective fact. The universe has
decided it is heads. She writes it down on her clipboard.
Speaker 1: Okay, simple enough, she has established a fact.
Speaker 2: But you are standing outside the lab. You cannot see inside.
To you, that lab is just a giant sealed box,
and according to the strict rules of quantum mechanics, until
you open the door and look, the entire lab, including
your friend, is in a superposition, a mix of all possibilities.
Speaker 1: So to me out in the hallway, the coin is
both heads and tails.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Now Here is the twist. You perform a highly
complex mathematical measurement on the whole lab from the outside,
treating the building itself as a quantum system. The math
rigorously proves that you can get a result that definitively
implies the coinless tails.
Speaker 1: Wait. Wait, she looks at it and sees heads. She
knows its heads. I stand outside, do some math and
prove its tails.
Speaker 2: And you are both one hundred percent correct. The laws
of physics say her result is perfectly valid and your
result is perfectly valid.
Speaker 1: But they're mutually exclusive. A coin cannot be heads and
tails at the same time once measured in.
Speaker 2: A shared, objective, global world. No, it can't. But this
experiment mathematically implies that two people can possess mutually exclusive facts.
Speaker 1: That completely breaks the definition of the word fact. A
fact is supposed to be something that is true for everyone,
regardless of perspective.
Speaker 2: It forces us to redefine it. Facts are entirely local,
not global. You live in a private universe. My facts
are not necessarily your facts.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just a thought experiment on a chalkboard anymore,
nor a tishlar at Griffith University actually tested this physically
in twenty twenty. They called the framework local friendliness.
Speaker 2: And this was a devastating result for classical science. They
put three fundamental assumptions of physics to the test. Rule one,
events are absolute, meaning if something happened, it happened for
everyone in the universe. Rule two, observers have free choice.
Rule three nothing travels faster than the speed of light.
Speaker 1: Those seem like the absolute bedrock of reality.
Speaker 2: The experiment broke the system. You mathematically cannot keep all
three rules, and to make the physics work, science is
basically being forced to abandon rule number one. Absolute events
do not exist, so.
Speaker 1: An event happens for you, but not necessarily for everyone.
Speaker 2: Correct. There is no God's eye view of the universe
where all truths are stored in a master ledger. There
is only your specific view and my specific view, and
physics says they do not have to match. We are
structurally trapped in our own reality bubbles.
Speaker 1: This directly leads to that controversial framework.
Speaker 2: Right Yes, quantum basianism. It's an interpretation of quantum mechanics
that is rapidly gaining ground. It basically argues that the
wave function the master mathematical equation of quantum physics is
not actually a map of the physical world. It's just
a user manual for your personal expectations.
Speaker 1: A user manual.
Speaker 2: Think about it like betting odds. When you measure a
particle and the wave function collapses. External reality doesn't change.
The only thing that changes is your personal information about reality.
Speaker 1: So the universe is quite literally just me updating my
internal betting odds on what I'm going to see next.
Speaker 2: That is the core cubist view. Life is a single
player game. You were just a consciousness making bets against
the void.
Speaker 1: Okay, I really need a breath here, because we have
dismantled solid matter, we've killed linear time, and we've erased
shared objective truth. But surely, and I mean at this time,
surely logic itself, mathematics the pure language of the universe.
If I can't trust atoms, I can absolutely trust numbers.
Speaker 2: I really hate to be the bearer of bad news today.
Speaker 1: I do. Oh no, do not take math away from me.
That is all I have left.
Speaker 2: We have to talk about the mathematical ceiling. And this
goes all the way back to Kurt Godel in nineteen
thirty one with his incompleteness theorem.
Speaker 1: I have vaguely heard of this. It says you can't
prove everything right.
Speaker 2: It's far more specific in damaging than that. It mathematically
proves that in any complex logical system, including the mathematics
we use to describe physics, there are profound truths that
are true but cannot possibly be proven using the rules
of that system. Math essentially has massive holes built into
it by design. It can never be a complete description
of truth.
Speaker 1: And Alan Turing added to this, didn't he the computer scientist.
Speaker 2: With the halting problem. In nineteen thirty six, Turing proved
that you cannot systematically predict whether a computer program will
ever finish its task or if it will just get
stuck in an infinite loop forever. It is logically impossible
to know in advance. There was a hard horizon of
knowledge that we literally cannot.
Speaker 1: Cross, and then Gregory Cheaton took it even further in
the seventies with the Omega number. This concept fascinates me.
Speaker 2: Chayden's omega is like the ultimate mystic number of mathematics.
It represents the exact probability that a randomly generated computer
program will eventually halt it is a specific, sharply defined number.
It sits somewhere perfectly between zero and one.
Speaker 1: It exists, okay, a specific number.
Speaker 2: But its digits are completely random and completely uncomputable. You
can figure out the first few bits of it, but
you can never ever calculate the rest. It implies that
the knowable world, the stuff we can safely explain with
human science and logic, is just a tiny, fragile island
floating in an infinite ocean of unknowable chaos.
Speaker 1: So there is a number that is definitively real, but
it is physically impossible for us to ever know it exactly.
Speaker 2: The universe hides its source.
Speaker 1: Code, And that phrase right there connects to the idea
that the universe might literally just be pan commutationalism.
Speaker 2: Right thinkers like Conrad Zoos Stephen Wolf from Edward Fredkin.
They argue that physics is just underlying code and physical
matter is just the data being processed.
Speaker 1: Okay, but if the universe is fundamentally a computer processing information,
does it ever crash?
Speaker 2: It does, and we actually have a name for those crashes.
We call them black holes.
Speaker 1: WHOA wait, I have never thought of a black hole
as a cosmic blue screen of death.
Speaker 2: Think about the physics of it. What exactly is a
singularity at the center of a black hole? It's infinite density,
infinite gravity in an infinitely small point. In a computer program,
what happens if you tell the system to divide a
number by zero?
Speaker 1: You get a critical error system failure.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the computation fails. The laws of physics literally return
an undefined result at a singularity. A black hole is
where the universe's processing system creates a massive divide by
zero error and crashes.
Speaker 1: And in our galaxy has what millions of these errors
just floating around?
Speaker 2: They are about one hundred million of these crashes in
the Milky Way alone.
Speaker 1: And this leads directly into the information paradox which Stephen
Hawking made so famous.
Speaker 2: Yes, Landauer's principle from IBM in nineteen sixty one tells
us that information is not abstract. Information is physical. Erasing
information physically creates heat. You know this intereritatively. Your laptop
gets physically hot when it's working hard, deleting or processing
heavy files. But black holes seem to permanently delete information
when they slowly evaporate via Hawking radiation. If I throw
a thick encyclopedia into a black hole, and then a
trillion years later, the black hole totally evaporates and disappears.
Where did the information in the book go.
Speaker 1: It's gone, It's erased.
Speaker 2: But the core rules of quantum mechanics state that information
is unitary, it can never be permanently lost. So we
have a huge crisis in physics. Either quantum mechanics is
fundamentally wrong or black holes are doing something totally incomprehensible
with our data.
Speaker 1: So either the physical machine is broken or we just
completely misunderstand the operating system.
Speaker 2: And that is exactly where constructor theory comes in, developed
by David Deutsch and Kierra Marletto, suggest we need a
paradigm shift. We have to stop looking at what happens
in the universe and start looking strictly at what transformations
of information are physically possible.
Speaker 1: How does that reframe things?
Speaker 2: It completely reframes the concept of life itself. In this view,
biological life isn't just some happy, random accident of primordial chemistry.
Life is a mathematically permitted transformation of information. The universe
is built with a back end code that explicitly allows
information to replicate.
Speaker 1: Itself, which brings us to the absolute biggest mystery of
all the thing that is actually doing the replicating, the
thing that is currently experiencing all of this weirdness, consciousness.
Speaker 2: The missing link, the ghost in the quantum machine.
Speaker 1: Neuroscience has been trying to find the physical seat of
consciousness in the brain for decades, right, but they can't
find it.
Speaker 2: We can't and they won't because it's something called the
binding problem.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 2: Think about your conscious experience right at this exact moment.
You see the ambi in color of the room, You
hear the tone of my voice, you feel the texture
of your chair, you perceive the chronological passage of time. Now, biologically,
these sensations are all processed in completely different physical sectors
of your brain. Color is in V four, visual motion
is in V five, sound is processed in the.
Speaker 1: Temporal lobe, and they all process at slightly different speeds
too exactly.
Speaker 2: Yet you do not experience reality as a disjointed out
of sinc mess. You see a perfectly unified picture. You
feel like one singular person experiencing it all simultaneously. The
binding problem is the stark realization that there is absolutely
no central processor to be found in the human brain
that stitches all this together. There is no central physical
spot where it all converges.
Speaker 1: So how on earth do we feel like one unified person.
Speaker 2: Well, there are a few cutting edge theories. Julio Tononi's
integrated information theory or It is a major one. He
argues that consciousness isn't some magical ethereal spark, It's a
measurable physical quantity culled fi.
Speaker 1: FI like a metric of awareness.
Speaker 2: Yes, five measures the degree of functional connectivity in a system.
If a system is highly interconnected, if all the internal
parts talk to each other incredibly complex ways, it has
a high five score, and therefore it has high consciousness,
like a human brain.
Speaker 1: And if the system has low connectivity.
Speaker 2: Well, this implies panpsychism, the idea that literally everything has
some base level of experience. Even a simple thermostat on
your wall has a tiny, microscopic, non zero amount of FI.
Speaker 1: So my living room thermostat has feelings, not complex.
Speaker 2: Human feelings, not I hope the host turns my dial
up today, But the microscopic flicker of existence, a tiny
spark of there is something it is like to be
a thermostat.
Speaker 1: That is wild to think about. But then there is
the other side, the quantum theory of consciousness. Ork your
Roger Penrose and Stuart hammerf.
Speaker 2: This theory was highly controversial for a very long time.
Mainstream scientists practically laughed them out of the room.
Speaker 1: Why what were they claiming? So?
Speaker 2: Roger Penrose proposed that human consciousiness actually arises from microscopic
quantum wave collapses happening inside things called microtubules, which are
tiny structural tubes inside our brains neurons. The critics screened
the brain is too warm and too wet because quantum
states are notoriously fragile, they usually require absolute zero temperatures
in the lab to survive. They argue the messy environment
of a brain would destroy any quantum state instantly.
Speaker 1: But the research from a quoranium says the evidence is
actually turning in their favor. Recently, it absolutely is.
Speaker 2: In twenty fourteen, researchers found that surgical anesthetics, the drugs
that literally turn off human consciousness, bind specifically to these microtubules.
If you chemically mess with the microtubule, the conscious lights
go out, and even more massively. In twenty twenty two,
a team at Trinity College Dublin detected actual quantum entanglement
signals inside brain microtubules at room temperature.
Speaker 1: That is a massive vindication for them.
Speaker 2: It's huge if our brains are actually functioning as warm
quantum computers. That perfectly splains why we can interact with
the quantum void we talked about earlier. It explains how
we mentally bridge the gap between wave and particle.
Speaker 1: It suggests consciousness isn't just an accidental byproduct of biology.
It's actually woven into the fundamental fabric of the universe exactly.
And this brings us to the crux of the entire episode.
We've stripped away solid matter, we've stripped away linear time
and shared facts and basic logic. What is actually left
standing the observer.
Speaker 2: The observer is everything. It is the only reality.
Speaker 1: Tell me about quantum Darwinism.
Speaker 2: This is a brilliant theory by w. Chig Zurich. At
Los Alamos, he looked at all this and asked, Okay,
if the universe is just quantum soup, why does the
world look so stable and solid to us? His answer,
reality becomes solid because certain quantum states are just really
good at copying themselves into the environment.
Speaker 1: Like a viral internet meme.
Speaker 2: Exactly like a meme, the sonnid table in front of
you is just a highly successful quantum state that has
aggressively spammed the surrounding environment with copies of its information.
Photons are constantly bouncing off it. Air molecules are hitting it.
It's literal survival of the fittest, but for quantum information.
Speaker 1: But here is the catch with that.
Speaker 2: Theory, right the massive catches. This natural selection of information
strictly requires a receiver. If there is no conscious observer
present to receive and process the copy, there is no selection.
No solid world ever forms.
Speaker 1: So we literally physically look the world into existence.
Speaker 2: We do without the act of observer, the memes of
reality have nowhere to land, so they remain a wave
of probability.
Speaker 1: And Bernardo Castrop takes this idea to its ultimate logical
conclusion with the one mind theory or cosmopsychism.
Speaker 2: This is arguably my favorite theory in modern philosophy because
it completely solves the isolation problem we talked about. Castra
powerfully argues that the entire universe is just one single
fundamental consciousness, one unified mind.
Speaker 1: But I feel very distinctly like me and you feel
like you. I don't hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2: Castrop compares the universe to a patient with dissociative identity
disorder or multiple personality disorder in clinical did one single
human mind can psychologically split into separate identities that do
not share memories. They can even have totally different biological
allergies or eyeglass prescriptions, all within the same brain.
Speaker 1: So you're saying you and I are just the dissociated
altars of the universe.
Speaker 2: Yes, the universal mind has dissociated into billions of localized fragments, us,
the animals. We were all the exact same mind, just
viewing itself from billions of different localized angles.
Speaker 1: And there is actual medical precedent for this kind of split,
right the split brain patients.
Speaker 2: Yes. The fascinating work of Speryan Gazanniga in the nineteen sixties,
when doctors surgically severed the corpus sklosum, the bridge between
the two hemispheres of the brain, to treat severe epilepsy,
they literally created two separate conscious minds operating inside one
single human body. One hand would try to button a
shirt and the other hand would actively fight it and
unbutton it.
Speaker 1: That is incredible. So if a human surgeon can physically
split a single mind with a scalpel, then the Big
Bang could have easily been the event that split the
universal mind into us.
Speaker 2: Exactly. We are the universe waking up and looking at
itself through billions of different pairs.
Speaker 1: Of eyes, and this conscious observer it has immense power.
We touched on it earlier, but let's hit retro causality
again to really hammer this home.
Speaker 2: The delayed Choice quantum eraser experiment from nineteen ninety nine.
This experimentally proves that measuring a quantum particle right now
it can actually determine which physical path its twin took
in the past, and that ties.
Speaker 1: Into John Wheeler's concept of it from bit.
Speaker 2: Wheeler believes strongly that we live in a participatory universe.
He used the mind blowing example of an astronomer looking
at a distant quasar through a telescope. The photon from
that quasar has been traveling through empty space for billions
of years, but by the astronomer actively choosing how to
measure it today on Earth, we actually determine the physical
path it took billions of years ago.
Speaker 1: We are actively building the deep past right now in
the present.
Speaker 2: We are We are the real time architects of all history.
Speaker 1: So if space and time are this incredibly malleable, what
is the actual physical structure of the universe. We are
approaching the end of our thread here and we need
to look at the holographic projection.
Speaker 2: This comes from legendary physicists Gerard Hooft and Leonard Suskin,
the holographic principle. They were studying black holes and realize
something strange. All the information of everything that falls into
a black hole is actually stored on its two D surface,
the event horizon, not inside its three D.
Speaker 1: Volume, like the nutritional label on a soup can.
Speaker 2: Or exactly like a hologram, a flat two D surface
projecting a fully three D image. They eventually extrapolated this
map to the entire universe. They proposed that the three
D world we walk around in the depth, the volume,
the space might just be a complex projection emanating from
a two D boundary of pure information at the absolute
edge of the cosmos.
Speaker 1: So we are literally living inside a holographic.
Speaker 2: Projection, a mathematical hologram.
Speaker 1: And space itself. Is it smooth, No.
Speaker 2: It's pixelated, just like a computer screen. We call it
the plank length. Tend to the power of negative thirty
five meters, you physically cannot get any smaller than that.
Space is granular. If you zoom in close enough on
the fabric of reality, you just see.
Speaker 1: The pixels and what actually holds those microscopic pixels together,
So we don't fall through quantum entanglement.
Speaker 2: This is the er equals EPR theory proposed in twenty
thirteen by Juan Meldsena and Leonard Suskind. They proved mathematically
that quantum entanglement, that spooky connection between particles, is the
exact same underlying geometry as a wormhole.
Speaker 1: So the empty space between me and you is literally
stitched together by quantum information.
Speaker 2: Yes, and a massive study at Caltech in twenty sixteen
mathematically showed that if you were to somehow break the
entanglement between all the particles in a room, the physical
space itself would literally rip apart. The geometry would fail.
Connection is what actually creates space.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, let's try to summarize this insane journey we've
been on today, and it really has been insane.
Speaker 2: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: Point one, My biological brain actively deletes reality and hallucinates
a predictive model just to save energy. Check Point two.
Physical particles have absolutely no defined properties until I actively
look at them. Check Point three. The past does not
exist until I measure it in the present moment. Check
Point four. My objective facts are not your objective facts.
We all live in private, isolated mathematical bubbles. Check Point five.
Time and space are just user interfaces and most likely
just a pixelated holographic projection. Check and finally, the only
thing in the entire universe that actually provably exists is
the observer, me, you, the consciousness.
Speaker 2: The one singular thing we couldn't strip away Descartes was
right centuries ago. I think, therefore I am it is
the only survivor of modern physics.
Speaker 1: You know. Hearing it all laid out like that, it
sounds horrifying, like we are just ghosts flowvading alone in
a dark void. But the acronium source material actually ends
on a surprisingly beautiful optimistic note.
Speaker 2: It really does. They call it existential.
Speaker 1: Optimism, and the idea is, if the foundation of reality
is completely empty, then the massive weight of all your
daily problems is resting on absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2: Exactly Your credit card, debt, your past, regrets, your anxieties
about the future. They feel so incredibly heavy, but physics
proves they are built on a structure that doesn't even
physically exist until you observe it. You are the one
sustaining them.
Speaker 1: The universe literally requires you to exist in order to
open its eyes. You aren't just some meaningless, tiny cog
inside a giant col machine.
Speaker 2: You are the machine, as the source brilliantly puts it,
go live, not because everything is perfectly fine, but because
everything is mathematically impossible and you are miraculously here anyway.
Speaker 1: That is just such a powerful thought. Everything is impossible,
but we are here. We are the impossible actively observing itself.
Speaker 2: We are the universe's unique way of experiencing itself, and
that carries both a deep responsibility and an incredible freedom.
It means you have vastly more agency than you think
you do. You are part of the source code.
Speaker 1: So here's our final question to you, the listener. If
reality is constantly being created by the observer, what kind
of reality are you actively choosing to build right now?
Are you building a reality of fear and separation or
are you projecting one of connection?
Speaker 2: And are we one single mind that is dissociated, just
trying to find our way back to each other. Or
are we just billions of incredibly happy accidents drifting in
the dark.
Speaker 1: We want to know your stance. Please leave a comment
wherever you are listening. Do you feel the one mind
connecting us or do you feel like a solitary player
in the void. This has been thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Keep pulling the thread everybody.
Speaker 1: We will see you next time.