The Neurophilosopher has a great post on how we perceive reality, along with a very interesting one-hour documentary linked via Google video. He explains why “The Matrix” isn’t really possible right now:
In theory, computers could simulate reality if the sensory stimuli corresponding to human experience could be determined and ‘executed’ as a computer program, which could ‘run’ in some kind of advanced brain implant. In practice, however, even if the exact computations required to generate a simulated constant stream of consciousness were determined, there is no computer in the world that is powerful enough to perform the necessary calculations. The world’s most powerful supercomputer is not powerful enough to process the visual information entering the eye of a fruit fly over a period of one second, let alone generate a stream of consciousness.
Yeah, but Neuro, that’s what your brain is programmed to believe! All the explanations we can think up can’t overcome the fundamental problem, which is that the brain could be generating any sort of reality along with all manner of explanations for whatever is found in it. Because we are already “inside the matrix” how do we make reliable observations? Maybe we can’t:
The truth – believe it or not – is that we all live in a matrix, albeit one composed of several hundred billion neurons and the quadrillion (1024) or so synapses formed by them.
My first awareness of the matrix occurred at about the age of 8 or 10 years old, when an adult pulled a crappy trick on me by asking me, “How do you know you’re really here right now, or whether you’re actually somewhere pounding your head against the bars of an insane asylum?” Told you it was crappy, ha!
[Update: Remember the Battlestar Galactica episode where Caprica explains projection? Go ahead, tell me you don't find that tempting...]
Caprica: Come on, Gaius.
Baltar: Are we going ’round in circles?
Caprica: I’m sure it all looks the same to you, doesn’t it? Be hard for any human to navigate around here. Especially without projecting.
Baltar: Yes, you’ve used that word before and I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. It helps you to what, exactly?
Caprica: Have you ever daydreamed… and imagined that you were somewhere else?
Baltar: I do have an active imagination.
Caprica: Well, we don’t have to imagine. We project. We choose to see our environment in any form we wish, whenever we wish. For instance, right now you see us as standing in a hallway, but I see it as a forest.
(Perspective shifts to the forest.)
Caprica: Filled with trees, birds, sunlight…
Baltar: Like the walks that you and I used to take. on Caprica.
Caprica: The aesthetic is what gives me pleasure. Not the specific memories. Instead of staring at blank walls, I choose to surround myself with a vision of God’s creation.
Filed under: Battlestar Galactica, biological science, paranoia, technology
