They asked me if I wanted a drink before I came on

and I asked for a pint but they gave me water.

(Laughter)

So, following the other speakers I have a change of pace,

a little bit of a fun talk.

And what I am going try and do is convince you you're a stimulation,

and that physics can prove it, okay?

(Laughter)

So, instead of a usual uplifting talk, this is a different kind of talk.

Okay, so, there's one thing you know for certain,

that is that you exist as a flesh and blood human being;

my goal is to convince you otherwise. Okay?

So, logic is not going to be enough,

you guys are going to be simulation deniers,

there's just no way round it.

So, my actual goal will be to actually create a sliver of doubt in your minds,

so that you actually think about this, and what it might mean. Okay?

So, here's is the first check about simulations.

How many of you have ever played a computer game?

Just raise your hands.

Ah, alright.

So, did you do it against simulated player or simulated players?

Or, in fact, was it you, several people plus simulated people?

Right. And what role did you take? Was it a pawn or a hero?

What role do you have in life? Is it pawn or hero?

Right. Are you the king, for example?

(Laughter)

I don't see him here... but...

Now, the other thing you might ask, if you were a social scientist,

or other kind of scientist like a cosmologist:

Would you like to run realistic simulations

to test and develop your theories? Likewise for political candidates.

Right? So, I'm just trying to see there's motivation for it.

And then the question is: Are computation and simulation capabilities

increasing over time?

So, think of the HetNOS, think about Moore's law,

think about what computer you had when you were young

and what you have on you now, not that you're not all young still.

Okay, that's just setting you up for having the doubt.

Okay, so we'll take a little journey into philosophy.

Solipsism is the idea that one's own mind is the only thing that's sure to exist.

It turns out, people have been studying this for decades,

and realizes both irrefutable and indefensible at the same time,

so have this point of view,

and that it's not a falsifiable hypothesis,

there are people who work on this issue.

So, there doesn't seem to be any imaginable disproof that you can have,

so even if you have a Solipsan, he dies,

you can't falsify his belief, because he's not there to do it.

This is a pragmatic dead end, it's kind of like what we have on TV now,

which is, you know, zombie philosophy.

But there is an opposite, that is philosophical zombies.

There's a slight use to philosophical zombies.

So what is the idea here?

The philosophical zombie is a hypothetical being

that in this thing what you all thought a normal human being,

that is everybody you think you are, you know what you think you are,

except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia or sentience.

So, if you take a philosophical zombie and poke it with a sharp object,

it doesn't feel any pain, however, it behaves exactly as if it does.

It would say "ouch" and do all the usual kind of things.

So, what the zombie is there for, is to support the idea

that the world includes two kinds of things: the mental and the physical,

or the concepts and the physical world around you.

And so that's the idea.

So, we have in cosmology, lots of things. We have the anthropic principal,

that is, a philosophical concept that the universe must be compatible

with conscious life that observes it.

And there's a strong version and a weak version.

One of them that says the universe is compelled to have conscious life emerge,

and the other says that the universe is fine-tuned for life to be necessary.

And this is pretty much in line with a lot of even more specific kind of ideas,

from conservative Christianity and Islam, that there's intelligent design,

or that there could be like a simulation. I'm working on you... so....

And we also have the idea of multiverses,

that there are many different kinds... there's a metauniverse

and there's many possible universes inside of it.

And there are different reasons for that, quantum mechanics,

but also a way to explain whether physical constants happen to be the ones

that make this auditorium possible.

And so, you know, one way is to have that many real universes,

the other way is just to make a lot of simulations.

So, your choice. Okay, so now we move on.

Here's the crux of the arguments,

and these arguments have been around for more than 30 years,

they were first published 30 years ago,

and what people went to a lot of trouble to show,

that one of these three things is extremely likely to be true.

So, you get your choice between No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3,

just like the doors, look what's behind each door.

The first one is: Human civilization is unlikely

to reach a level of technological maturity

capable of producing simulated realities, or it's physically impossible.

Okay, so we made some progress in 30 years and I'll mention that.

The second is: Comparable civilizations throughout the universe

which do reach that capability

will choose not to make simulations

in such a large scale that, in fact, the probability of being a simulated being

is much higher than probability of being a real being.

So, those are your choices, right --

there's some other choices, but they're extraordinarily unlikely,

and we can pretty much rule them out.

And the 3rd choice is: Any entities with our general set of experiences

are almost certainly to be living in a simulation.

That would be us. Right? Okay? In case you guys aren't paying attention.

(Chuckles)

Okay. So, let's talk about making simulator realities by humans.

So, will humans produce realistic simulations?

And the answer is yes.

I have to keep coming back because I just wrote this talk

and so I don't remember what I have to say.

And, so, the answer to that is clearly yes, you guys already proved it,

because there's a lot of money to be made in making computer games,

simulated realities.

And the better the simulator reality, the more people you get involved in it.

There's a lot of entertainment, we have a lot of animated movies.

Now, we're going to have animated interactive movies

and videos and pornography.

So, you know, you can't rule out pornography,

in the early days of the Internet, pornography was the No. 1 commerce,

it was roughly half the commerce in the Internet in the early days.

And even today, 50% of the bits that are transmitted on the Internet

are transmitted for porn.

So, you can wonder: Why is it? Well, originally stories

and then there got to be pictures, and then there got to be videos,

pretty soon there'll be interactive videos.

So, it's clear there is a tremendous financial motivation,

and especially here in Media City,

where people make their living out of these kind of things.

So, how... I'm not sure which of the three, But OK.

How detailed and how accurate will the simulations be?

And the answer turns out, as we know from experience,

computation power is the first issue,

you have to have tremendously good computation power

to make a really good quality simulation,

and good programming, that is good software,

to explain what's going on, that's the second.

But, clearly we're making progress, just look at the games, look at PONG,

and look at that the kind of video games we have now. So, we'll see.

What about simulations by other civilizations?

So, now we know a lot more about this than we did 30 years ago.

We've made tremendous progress.

We've discovered more than 2,000 other stars

that have planetary systems around them.

And we know there is at least on the order of a billion or more habitable planets

in our galaxy, and there's about a 100 billion galaxies

for around 10^20 to 10^22 depending what your range

possible sites for life and then advanced civilizations in the universe.

So, what are the chances that the earth is the most advanced,

the most computationally powerful.

Well, the odds, you got to be really, pretty much thinking you're special,

to think that the odds are that we're the top.

So, the question is: Will advanced beings run simulations?

And, in fact, will simulated beings run simulations?

If we're simulated, are we running simulations in our simulations,

simulations all the way down? If you know the things.

So, even the people running our simulation don't know if they're a simulation or not.

It's interesting, because it creates ethics and a bunch of things

because there might be somebody watching you.

So, are ethical considerations likely to stop every single civilization

from running simulations and running large numbers of simulations?

Well, the answer I think is "no".

What if doing simulations is likely to say what we think are real lives?

Right? We're willing to do the simulations

even though they're being strapped in that simulation, right?

Conscious beings.

And the other thing you might consider is how do human beings

treat what they think are real human beings.

How's the ethical treatment on our Earth?

And how much more is society likely to advance

before we're doing

very advanced simulations of civilizations and beings?

So, we'll probably all be in a simulation. The lights are not on enough in here,

but look to the left and look to the right,

if there's anybody here you think is a real person, this is a random sample,

then you're probably not. (Laughter)

But, you know, If you think you're a social scientist

or an anthropologist or something, and you want to run

and see how the civilizations rise and fall,

you'll run simulations with up to billions of people.

And you will run many of those simulations,

so it's not so hard to imagine you'll get up to the level

of 10^12:1 simulated beings to unsimulated beings,

that's why the probability becomes fairly likely

that any being that has a behavior or activities and experiences like us

is simulated.

Sorry, I got some sunscreen in my eye.

Put on sunscreen this morning in case it was an unusual day in England.

(Laughter)

And I got a little in my eye here.

So let's talk about how we're going to do the simulations on the Earth.

This is part of going back to convince you

that we're going to have realistic simulations

and we're going to have artificial reality to go with it.

So, can we take a real brain and make it into a virtual mind?

And the answer is: So, here is the purple real brain,

and the neurons behind it, it's this neural net,

it's the regional neural net, as far as we're concerned.

And then on the left, yeah your left,

there is the beginnings of a mapping of a brain,

so that I can take and map that brain, and just place it into a computer.

So, how's that going to work?

The answer is, it's going to work just fine,

because we're there to the point where we can do it now.

So, here is a high-resolution, 45-minute brain scan

that was done in February.

And 45 minutes, that's how long you have to hold the person's head still,

in order to make a map to this level.

And what you can see here are the main --

Let's see if the laser pointer works -- -- No --

So, you can see here the main highways in your brain.

They're mapped out by this, and this is basically an MRI

I got a scan of my brain done and I was really impressed,

to prove that I had a brain, but one of my friends got an fMRI

to prove that his brain worked. (Laughter)

The thing that's impressive about this

is that the MRI's are getting so good now,

you can map to the individual neuron level.

The problem is there's a lot of neurons,