Simulated reality

“What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind driving you mad” _____ Morpheus, The Matrix

What if the built environment around you is not real? What if your house isn’t real? Your office is not real? The city you walk through is not real? What if the reality you are experiencing around you is not real? What if it is all a simulated reality? Morpheus explains it better when he says – “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church and when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” What is real? Define reality? Arch World brings to you the Possibility of a Simulated Reality.

The Matrix depicts a dystopia where the real world or the built environment is actually in ruins. The Matrix is a computer generated dream built to keep humans under control.

IT Specialist Anuk Ahangamgoda pointed out that Elon Musk is infamously known for also believing in the ‘Matrix’, American astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author, and science communicator Neil de Grasse Tyson says it’s possible and Plato the philosopher penned the idea that the world is an illusion. So yes, we may actually be living in the matrix and there would be no way to effectively prove otherwise!

Absolute zero

He also pointed out that saying a scenario like The Matrix is impossible is as if saying there will never be a time where vehicles float instead of using wheels- it is extremely unlikely but the possibility is never an absolute zero. The technology of our current day and age would of course limit this probability, but as time progresses and technology evolves, the means to which this is possible will only expand. Virtual Reality technology could be considered the precursor to true simulated reality, and as Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality continue to evolve at explosive rates, a future with a Matrix-like simulation of the real world may not be too farfetched.

“A commonly accepted distinct difference between Artificial Intelligence and human intelligence is the ability to act or make decisions humanely. The current state of what defines an AI is far from a reality where artificial and real intelligence is indiscernible. In recent years, the commonly accepted definition of AI is where it is capable of completing a given task as efficiently as possible using its environment and context with minimal human help. While AI could be capable of self- learning and self- awareness, it may not have that element of humanity or that ability to relate to each other the way humans relate to each other. Artificial Intelligence does not truly think for itself, instead it would only ‘think’ based around the objective it is given. Once we are able to create a man- made system that can relate to another entity in the way humans relate to each other, then it will be able to truly think for itself,” explained Ahangamgoda.

As artificial intelligence systems grow and become more and more autonomous and complex, the risk of something going wrong somewhere will only increase he adds.

“Machines would not have to be truly intelligent to go to war with us. A common theme in Man Vs Machine science fiction is AI trying to accomplish the goal of protecting or advancing humanity or the planet through ending humanity itself, rather than going to war on their own free will. It is instead a result of a task humanity has given them. That said, a war between machines and humans is highly unlikely in the near future since AI is currently being handled in a way that does not give it access to resources it may use to possibly start a war. AI created by companies would not have access to military resources and AI used by governments would have multiple levels of restrictions and fail-safes to prevent incidents,” pointed out Ahangamgoda

He adds that based on recent trends in technology and computer science there might come a day when AI are advanced enough to act as our personal assistants in hardware bodies, taking over complex tasks and jobs, video games played in a simulated reality and the power of a computer held in smart glasses to augment our perception of the world. On the flip side of the coin, we may also wake up to dystopian society where one’s digital privacy is no longer in one’s own hands and the livelihood of people is dictated by AI.

Solution Architect NCINGA Pvt. Ltd Sanjaya Pussegoda added that when watching the movie, The Matrix, there are certain elements of the plot that seem realistic to us. The movie explores the concept of a creator. Is there a creator? A creator that has carefully designed our built environment and who is in control of this world we live in? When watching this movie, we are made to question our reality.

Superior entity

“If you are in a dream, sometimes you cannot understand whether it is real or not. That is pretty difficult to understand. The Matrix of course maintains that the world we live in (or the world we think we are living in), is created by a superior entity. I think that is what the creators of The Matrix want to tell us – that living in a simulated reality is a possibility. In other words’ this could be some sort of a game and we are inside that game. A simulated reality could be possible and you cannot rule out that possibility. If you take religion, some religions speak of a creator god and others do not. Most religions speak of a sentient being born into this world, who liberates others in the world. In The Matrix, the protagonist does just that,” pointed out Pussegoda.

“That you are a slave. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind” _______ The Matrix

The film also explores the possibility of intelligent machines that can think like humans. That is possible. Today Robotics is a field with amazing potential. The Robotics industry is reaching new heights as we speak. Today we have Artificial Intelligence. AI is a field that is developing rapidly.

“Ten years back we could not imagine the world as it is today. What will it be like in another ten years’ time? What The Matrix movies seems to be saying is that there must be a creator responsible for the creation of the world. So there are always possibilities. If you take Virtual Reality, when you are interacting with Virtual Reality, you cannot really tell the difference. When you are interacting with the game it seems real to you. There are no boundaries. The game is created in such a way that we are part of that game. Just think what it will be like in a few decades? However, I don’t believe that robots can surpass the human brain. They cannot surpass the human mind. Technology is evolving but I doubt it can surpass the human brain,” explained Pussegoda.

When addressing the question – is it possible that we are we living in a Simulated Reality or The Matrix? Archt. Nirodha Gunadasa says that there are several ways to answer this questions.

Energy of information

The first approach he says is through the Information Theory. The abstract concept of information is now well understood and proven to be not so. Information is physical. Like energy and momentum, information is also conserved. You can neither create or destroy it. Information is directly related to energy. In the famously known thought experiment named “Maxwells Demon”, which was recently physically carried out, it is proven that information is energy.

“When the matter (physical substance) is a form of energy, according to famous Einstein equation E=mc2, everything should be information. If matter is energy and energy is information, then everything has to be information. So the reality we see at the fundamental level is all information. The reality is an information structure. Pretty much like the matrix,” said Gunadasa.

According to Gunadasa, the second way to approach it is through the theory of holographic universe. Holographic universe is a mathematical model of universe that explains the reality from the level of sub atomic particles to the realm of relativity.

“Holographic universe is a metaphor to describe the model to the general public. As per the metaphor, the reality we experience does not exist here. The three dimensional reality exists at the boundary of the observable universe. It is a two dimensional sphere, sphere of information. The three dimensional reality we experience including ourselves is a holographic projection of that two dimensional information structure. In that sense, the reality we experience does not exist. It is an illusion.”

Parameters and equations

He goes onto explain that the third approach is through the special theory of relativity. When we study the geometry of space-time, we see amazing symmetry. When we do not assign any uniqueness to time and consider time as another dimension only, the universe becomes a four dimensional structure. In this four dimensional structure there are no two things called energy and momentum. Energy is the momentum along time axis. So we talk about four momentums. It is mathematically plausible to interchange time axis with any length axis and study the universe.

“The time you see - a past different from future, a present moment moving towards future – it is an illusion of your consciousness. As Einstein once explained, the difference you see between past present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion. Think about it. Things exist in time. Things exist in present moment. You exist in present moment. When the present moment is an illusion, all that exists is an illusion. The reality you see to be existing out there, including yourself, is an illusion,” explained Gunadasa.

He points out that it is not fiction. There is rather concrete scientific evidence that the reality is an information structure. It is kind of a computer simulation.

“As contemporary architects, the way some of us design is parametric. We model and simulate reality in computers in terms of parameters and equations. The equations we use are pretty much the same in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but we simplify and do away with functions of gravity and time. Yet we model the reality as a functional and play with it changing the parameters until reaching that desired wonderful solution. Once we indulge in this computer generated reality, it is hard to philosophically (rather mathematically) distinguish between the world we create in computer and the reality.”