June 12, 2024 • 71 mins
Reality is philosophically terrifying. What is it, exactly? Where does it come from? Why are we, humans and everyone else, stuck within this thing no one seems to understand? In this special episode, Matt and the one they call Ben wrestle with the nature of existence in the face of new, so-called "virtual environments."
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt
Our colleague Nol is still on an adventure, but will
be returning very soon.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben. We're joyed as always with our
super producer Paul Michig, controlled decad Most importantly, you are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Let's begin tonight's exploration with a fantastic, if arguably a
bit pretentious quotation from the excellent writer David Foster Wallace.
(00:53):
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they
happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way,
who nods them and says, Martin, boys, how's the water?
And the two young fish swim on for a bit,
and then eventually one of them looks over at the
other and goes, what the hell is water? That's by?
This is water? David Foster Wallace.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Beautiful, beautiful. That describes exactly what each and every one
of us does when we open our eyes in the morning.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Right, and we have to participate in this thing that
civilization has decided to call reality. Spoiler, no one knows
how it works. What is reality? It's a question that's
haunted philosophers, profits, and scientists throughout the span of known history.
Conundrum that probably, to be honest, pre dates technology like
(01:44):
fire or the written word. We're still trying to figure
it out, and in tonight's episode, we are returning to
our own exploration of these strange, heady concepts. Here are
the facts, Matt. Since we're both fans of small talk,
(02:04):
how would you explain reality?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Oh? Hey, pal, how's the air? Reality is the collective
thing that we all experience that we then get together
and say, hey, this rocks sure seems hard and solid. Yeah, yeah,
this water sure seems wet and kind of cold at times. Yeah,
it's existence. Reality is experience through a meat body.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I like that, because we're talking
already about sort of the filters through which reality is experienced.
For human beings, reality comes through a surprisingly small set
of inputs and filters. You know. Most of them are
what we call physical senses. You taste or smell things,
(02:54):
you touch things, you see them. You might hear them,
but there are deeper cuts. We've talked about pro preception.
You know, that's why you can close your eyes and
touch your nose and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
But it all goes back to a physical piece in
your ear right and some of the other things in
your body that give you those things like balance. And
in the end, it is a physical sense. But it's more,
as you're saying, than the five right.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then also one thing that philosophers
quarrel over pretty often is the other aspect of what
determines reality, which is the internal or cognitive processing of
past experiences, the attempts at predicting future changes in your environment.
And you know, we give humans a hard time on
(03:40):
this show, but they're not bad at it. They're not
bad at that one.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Oh well, I don't know. I think I think a
lot of us are a little bad at it.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
I know, a little bad show a little bad.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, because we really do color our own lenses, right,
or the stuff that's happened to us before, that we've
done before really does shape the way you see things.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yeah, I was listening. I'm glad you said that, because
I was listening to some conversations with a fascinating scientist
named Robert Sapolski, and he's talking about some of the
same stuff we're idating on here. You know. Also another
thing to add to the bag of badgers is that
(04:22):
we as a civilization know many other life forms have
a different sort of kit of sensory inputs, right, like
electromagnetic sensitivity for birds and sharks. And isn't it can't
a lot of animals, non human animals, I mean, can't
they see into like ultraviolet and infrared spectrum?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Oh yeah, Well, think about a cat's eyes. That's where
that's why they're so cool to us, because they can
sense stuff that we cannot.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
You got a ghost hunting cat, I think.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So Apparently there was a specter right outside my doorway
last night that I did not observe, but somebody else
did and the kitty cat I didn't notice, the kitty
cat notice anything.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Well, give a time, you know what I mean. New
at the job. So every ghostthutter has a first day,
I imagine, And we also know that it gets more
complicated because not all humans experience reality the same way.
Your existential mileage may differ, and when an individual or
(05:30):
group perception strays too far from the majority perspective or consensus,
we call those people insane.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
But that concept alone gets to the heart of I
think this episode. In the end, we kind of have
to choose the way we want to believe the world
exists entire right, So when you get down into the
deeper levels, like an individual person and can they actually
perceive something that we cannot, you have to decide whether
(06:02):
or not you believe that right now, at.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Least you have to observe and measure. Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
It also blows our mind. We humans can build the
most sensitive equipment that can find gravitational waves if we
want them to, which there is no other way for
humanity or any other life form to detect those things
that we're aware of. Right now. We can build this
giant array right that can find gravity waves, but it
(06:31):
doesn't mean anything. Those sensors don't mean anything if it
doesn't have an output that turns it into something we
can either see or hear or to.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Get somehow perceive. And also it doesn't solve the problem
that humanity still quarrels with, with, which is this what
is gravity? Why, at, how and where and when? Gravity?
I mean it's the same question with reality. You know
when gravity is when you know all your gravity are
(07:02):
belong to us. I don't get it. I don't understand gravity.
We also know that reality is neither as to your point,
is neither as consistent nor as constant as it appears
at first blush. You go through your day to day.
Stuff tends to fall at the same I'm throwing things.
(07:23):
Stuff tends to fall at the same measurable pace. You know,
light usually behaves the way one would expect it, as
long as you don't look too closely, because the closer
you look, the weirder stuff gets. There was a great
quote from a group OF's journalist writing and new scientists
that were talking about reality, and they said the following quote,
(07:46):
we don't know when it began, how big it is,
where it came from, and where it is going. And
we certainly have no clue why it exists, which I
think is a question a lot of us don't consider often.
Why is reality? I think.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
I looked at that article, Ben, and I was like,
I can read up my New Scientist right now, or
I can read a different article and I read a
different article. But that's a great way to open. I
think I was like one of the first lines in
that article.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
And it seems something's haunt you. You know what I mean.
These folks are definitely good to hang out with, and
they're making an excellent point. You know, the rules get
fuzzy at the very very small and the very very
large scale. And this brings us to something that I
think inspired inspired you for this episode this evening, which
(08:39):
is the double Slit Experiment and observer effect.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yes, we have to go way back to ye old
eighteen hundreds. In fact, the year after it switched over
eighteen oh one, when this fellow named Thomas Young came
up with a thing that we now know as the
double Slit experiment, which is very very important. That's why
we're doing this episode. It is the initial experiment that
(09:06):
led humanity down a bit of a rabbit hole, and
it's pretty incredible because it's influenced so many other very
good thinkers to think very hard about the nature of reality,
and it's attempted to give us a window, maybe a
two slided window, into what this whole thing is that
(09:27):
we're going through every day. But why don't you tell
us about this guy?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Sure? Yeah, Thomas Young is what we will call it.
Boffin a renaissance man. You might say he's an egghead.
He's super into all sorts of stuff. He's really good
at math. He contributed research to everything from egyptology to physics.
And then one day, Lakers said, around the turn of
the century, this guy said, I wonder if Isaac Newton
(09:55):
is wrong about light. Now, light may seem like an
academic debate. People were really hot about this at this
time in human history. There was this ongoing argument, what
is the substance of light? How does light travel? Should
we think of it like Christian Hugans propose, like a wave,
just a maybe wave of stuff emanating from things in
(10:18):
chemical reactions, or should we think of it like a
series of little pew pew pew particles.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Well, yeah, well, and when we perceive a light again,
we go back to our base experience. You turn on
a light and now there's light everywhere that that light
can basically shine on. Right, And just that concept of
how does it travel, how does it function? Right? This
is a huge deal. The I would say, well, no,
I know. The prevailing thought there is that they are
(10:47):
light particles. And then there's another school of thought that is, hey,
maybe it is waves. Maybe it does function as waves.
So we thought, well, maybe here's a cool way to
approve that by shining light through two slits.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yeah, it's it is one of the most famous experiments,
as he said, in all of human history. The tools
are maybe distressingly simple. You can play along at home.
You just need a light source, a thin card with
two holes or slits cut within it, side by side,
(11:20):
and then you need to screen. That's right, right, yeah,
And so our buddy young, I guess took a took
a long enough break from Egyptology to conduct this experiment.
And his idea was pretty simple. He said, look, just
like you were saying, Matt, if we if we can
(11:41):
measure the way the light moves, we will determine whether
it is a wave or a series of particles. If
the light is content, If the light is comprised of particles,
then it will shoot through those two slits and at
the screen you will just see two dots, right, And
if it's a wave something different, right, well yeah, or you.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Would at least see the two slits, right, the outline
of what the slits look like projected on whatever the
device it is. That you're using to see the light.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Right, Yeah, and the thing is most of well, a
great deal of human science is discovered by accident. People
are looking for one thing and they discover another. Right,
That's how alchemist ended up with chemistry. So Young also
follows this sort of tendency. He doesn't see what he
(12:36):
reasonably imagined or predicted. Instead, when he shines this light
through this double slit experiment, he sees an alternating pattern
of dark and light bands on the screen. The best
way to describe it maybe is it's kind of like
a Pointillism version of a barcode.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Right, Yeah, that's most intense at the places where you
would imagine those two slits would have light shine through them,
and then kind of dissipates, getting lesser and lesser as
you move away from the two slits.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
M yeah, it looks like someone drew a barcode by
just sort of putting little dots, yeah around.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Well, that's when Thomas Young isn't shooting particles of light yet, right,
Thomas Young is just using a light source, right, So,
like you're not getting as much of the dots as
like the lines.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Right right, right, he is at he has not yet
well The better way to say it is the double
slit experiment is still in its infancy. It still has
that new car smell. It hasn't been reproduced and refined
over and over. But the patterns that we see remain inexplicable.
(13:51):
So our buddy Young is trying to explain this. He's surprised.
He wants to understand it, and he says, okay, well,
this means light travels through space like a wave of water,
highs and lows, crest and troughs. And thinking this way,
he said, all right, here's what's happening. Light waves are
traveling through these two you know tunnels, right, very small tunnels,
(14:15):
and when they get out, they are they are like
expanding on the way when they emerge from these restrictions,
these two slits. And what I'm seeing, he says, is
that bright bands are forming where these two waves of
light overlap, they add together, so they make things brighter
(14:37):
because they're light. And when I see the dark bands,
he says, it's where the crested troths somehow cancel each
other out. That makes sense, he thinks, kind of, Well.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, it was very similar to observations that had been
done with fluid dynamics and water, and when you've got
interference patterns. Basically, if you try to imagine dropping two
things in the water about let's say, four feet away
from each other in the same body of water, when
those things hit that body of water, you get the
(15:13):
waves that move out from it right in circles. We've
all seen this before. Imagine those two sets of circles
start to interact with each other as they're moving, and
you get the exactly what Ben's describing, these interference patterns.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
And this experiment, as we said, has been replicated countless
times with very levels of refinement, with varying levels of
sophistication and measurement. But we're still not at the crazy part,
and maybe we need a little bit more background for that.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, okay, so Young is using a light source, you know,
as we were saying, and light sources have gotten more
and more complicated and intricate over the years. We've also
humanity has figured out how to shoot basically beams of light,
think lasers, think very specific photon emitters. These are things now,
(16:07):
So you can send out a single particle and or
wave of light, a single instance, let's say, of a
light and so when you can now do that, and
you've still got this double slit experiment going. You find
some weird things because sometimes when you shoot those single
light particles and or waves out, one will travel through
(16:28):
either the left slit or the right slit, And it
gets really weird when you try and detect which of
the two slits a single particle goes through.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, that's the creepy part. If either path through those slits,
and I hate that we're saying slit so much, but that's,
you know, the name of the experiment. If either path
is monitored, then stuff will seem to pass through a
discrete choice. It will go either through aperture A or
(17:03):
through aperture B. But if you shoot the light through
and you do not measure it, and you do not
monitor it, then those photons, regardless of how sophisticated or
crude your light emitting device is, those photons will appear
to have passed through both of those spaces at the
same time and then interfere with themselves, acting like a wave.
(17:28):
Poor k Nolos dose. Man, it's nuts.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
It seems to say that our basic understanding for a
long time of what light and perhaps matter, even at
the tiniest forms is still elementary, and we don't fully
understand what it is. And that is freaky because scientists
(17:52):
since that time, since the eighteen hundreds, as you said, Ben,
have been attempting to refine this experiment in ways, you know,
using very different things. We're gonna get in to. But
nobody still I hate to I feel like I'm spoiling everything.
Nobody still has an exact grasp on what the heck
these particles slash waves really are and how they actually function.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Not even a spoiler. It would be a spoiler if
someone listening tonight knew what was going on, right to us,
conspiracy iHeartRadio dot com like help science improve.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
No, there's no end to the number of people who
have a hypothesis, right.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Oh yeah, we got to get Terrence Howard.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
On the phone one at times one what happened to
the other one?
Speaker 3 (18:39):
So this is the observer effect, which will be familiar
to a lot of us. It's the idea that a
system may be influenced or affected or disturbed simply by
the act of observing that system in progress, or a
better way to say it is the idea of measuring
that system may influence the results of those measurements.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
Right, but it seems to influence the behavior exactly exactly,
And that's the troubling thing that's kind of our deep water, right,
whether particles or waves. In the observer effect, you know,
maybe a metaphor or a comparison, a simile, excuse me,
it is the best way to think about it. The
(19:23):
observer effect is kind of like that old story about
watching a pot of water and waiting for it to boil.
But in the observer effect, the fact that you are
looking at the water changes weather or not the water
boils and how it boils. And that is, by the way,
as far as we know, looking at a pot of
(19:45):
water about to boil, your perspective does not influence that.
You can unless you are unless you have like low
key pyrokinesis, you are not making water boil faster or cryokinesis.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
That's why this is so frustrating. We've created technology, a
pot in a way to make fire underneath that pot,
and some clean water to put in that pot, and
we put all those things together and we know, hey,
eventually that water's going to boil, right, I know it.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
For sure, right with based on our understanding of linear
time as well, which gets even weirder. I mean, this
takes us to the concept of wave collapse, right, the
old dilemma of Schrodinger's cat, The cat is both alive
and dead until you open the box. I don't know,
I think there was. This is already kind of weird,
(20:36):
but I was thinking, Matt about different ways to play
with the concept of observer effect. It's you know, we
often take it to mean in popular science that a
conscious mind can somehow affect reality. And perhaps that is true,
but there's no current proof that the observer or the
(20:59):
measuring device needs to be conscious. It makes me wonder, like,
if we got different non human animals together and had
them watch the double slit experiment, would that affect it?
You know what I mean? And if so, which animals
count as observers in that regard.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I think all of them, man, I think anything that
has senses is conscious in some degree or another. Like
I've fully come to believe that now. It just over
the years been we as we've been learning about what
we would call animal intelligence. Like all honestly, Man, you've
inspired me a lot with your fascination with it, because
it makes me want to learn more, especially when it
(21:40):
comes to like Corvid's and some of the things we've
kind of had a deep dive into and cetaceans. It
feels like like even plants now when we did that episode,
even plants may have a consciousness that we have previously
just kind of thrown out and said, that's not consciousness.
They're not thinking about thinking like are you sure though?
Speaker 3 (22:04):
You sure about that's why? Yeah, yeah, well I appreciate that.
I mean, I think we're we we're often on the
same page with these sorts of these sorts of questions
because one thing we can all agree on, hopefully those
of us playing along at home as well, is this
every experiment like this. It might be challenging, it might
(22:27):
be scary. Uh, reality is philosophically terrifying because it's a
thing that no one can escape and no one understands.
All of it shows us that there's a there is
a tremendous amount of stuff we do not know about
the universe or universes. I'm being that guy that we
(22:47):
in which we reside. I mean, I guess it's an
ad break. But without getting into further into some of
the murky waters of quantum thought, McCann. We also know
that humans, despite not understanding regular reality, are building new realities.
(23:09):
That's kind of weird.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
It is weird, and I love those realities, a lot
of them. Some of them might detest, but a lot
of them I'm really into, especially the ones that have
good stories and gameplay, which is really just what makes
a good game. Anyway. What can those virtual worlds teach
us about this very real world?
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Yeah? What does it mean? What could it mean for
reality today? For reality in the future. Here's where it
gets crazy. All right, how would we explain virtual reality?
The most crappy explanation is it's a version of a
(23:53):
thing that was around earlier that we still don't understand.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, okay, well, yeah, it's it's a simulated closed system reality.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It's a device, a system of devices that can trick
your meat sensors into believing that those sensors are interacting
in some other place, at some other time, in some
other way.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Yeah. Well, put, I think what personal experiences do you
recall the first time you engaged with something we'll call
virtual reality in like the technological sense.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, I think it was a friend. It was my
cousin who had one of these like an early oculus
that you had to plug in, so it was your
computer was directly plugged into it through cables. It wasn't
one of these little, you know, wireless guys that are
running around today. And I remember the feeling specifically of
doing the It's kind of like the playing thing that
(24:56):
Noel's talked about on the show here before, where you're
up at a very tall height and this device tricks
you into feeling as though you are very high up
and you have, or at least I experienced bodily reactions
to that feelings the way my body would react if
I was on the edge of a.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Building because it hacked your pro preception exactly. Yeah, yeah,
And I like the idea of emulating input such that
the body's sensory filters say this is real, or it's
real enough that we're not going to take the chance
of you falling off this plank, exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
And that goes to everything in some of the zombie
games that have come out over the years, some of
the games where there's a real fear, a fight or
flight response to something that you see as adversarial coming
at you, or you can hear it right, it sounds
like it's around the corner. It hacks you in ways
(25:56):
that I'm still uncomfortable with.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Yeah, and we need to know more. I mean, this
is the surprising thing. All right, brief history of virtual reality,
and we're going somewhere with this, folks. The term itself
is relatively new, Like when most people hear the phrase
virtual reality, you're thinking of immersive technological experiences. But the
(26:19):
concept is inarguably ancient. It's metaphysical belief, it's gnosticism, it's
Plato's cavern, it's imagination. Every time you have a dream,
you have created a virtual reality or just a day dream.
You know, it's like, like you said, a closed system
of experience. That's what a virtual reality is, which means
(26:42):
that every thought you have that you really think about,
you're kind of making another world. Nothing weird, we're fun
at parties. It's a Matroshka doll of nested realities, worlds
within each other.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, yeah, and how you think about yourself affects the
worlds you create, and then all the other characters that
inhabit those worlds. Right, And the way you think about
individuals and the way you hear a phrase from somebody, right,
or if you're walking down the street and somebody says
hey to you, What what does that mean? When somebody
says hey to you when you're walking down the street,
(27:19):
your little your bubble of reality that you're projecting ends
up changing. Oh my god, it changes that source, right
it We all do it.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
It's a You know what's interesting about that that concept
as well is that it leads us to the argument
that one is never truly interacting with another or instead
interacting with your perception of a person.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Oooh no, totally, wow.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Sanias have us over. But like I think you raise
an excellent point there, Matt. I mean, the rules get
fuzzy when we talk about virtual reality. You can witness,
like you were talking earlier about Catharsis right, you can
witness versions of reality in film, in books, in a
good song. And on some level we could say, oh,
(28:13):
I know, this isn't the real world, but experiencing those
glimpses outside of agreed upon analog reality has this crazy effect.
You said something I want to go back to. I
was not aware of this. In the early days of film, right,
no one has seen a film. What is that In
the early days of film, One of the famous stories
(28:34):
is a group of people a symbol to watch some
moving camera and it's still all silent film at this point,
and it the part of what they're seeing features a train, Paul,
can we get like a scary train noise? Perfect? They
see a train moving toward the camera, hurtling along the
(28:57):
rails from the camera's point of view. We've all seen
stuff like that before, right, but these folks had never
seen a film before. They freaked out. They're like, jump
it away, like, is.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
That an actual train that is coming at us right now? Well,
then forget about the first time a gun was pointed
at the camera. That was horrifying as well. And those
little tricks, like even the movement of trees in the background,
just sitting in a darkened theater and there's light projected
on the wall and it looks as though the trees
are moving. Love I man, I wish Paul was on
(29:31):
this episode because he could tell us all about the
history of some of this stuff with his film knowledge.
But man it it is weird how we've been tricking
ourselves mostly with light and sound for so long for fun.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah. Profit, well, there there's a profit motive. But you
could say we've been tricking ourselves with the concept of
currency in general. But also there's interesting there are these cyclical,
interesting breakthroughs in olfactory smell technology, and it just hasn't
caught on yet because you know, it's weird.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
That's the sixty experience.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Right, I mean this sounds funny. Now maybe with the
benefit of retrospect we can say, oh, those folks were silly.
But even just the idea of putting yourself in a
moment where a gun is pointed at you in any context,
that is a frightening thing, and it shows us a
very important lesson perception is kind of reality. You know,
(30:35):
at this point, perception is reality. You could also say
perspective is power. We'll get to it. But humans have
been creating new realities all the time forever, and with
each technological innovation, like you were saying, the ability to
create these worlds only expands, and these worlds become more sophisticated,
(30:57):
they have a closer fidelity to the world you're used to.
They may one day become indistinguishable. And I was surprised
to learn just the term virtual dates back to the
fourteen hundreds. Had no idea, well.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
What okay, if it goes back that far, what is
the even what could it mean?
Speaker 3 (31:19):
It comes from It ultimately comes from a Latin phrase
meaning excellence, potency or efficacy or literally manliness. That's a
weird one, oh yeah. But the idea is, if something
is virtual, it is it has for similitude, it is
(31:41):
very much like the real thing. So, okay, you know
when some we say in American English, pretty often it's
virtually impossible to blah blah blah, or it's virtually certain
that so and so, and usually I think colloquially that
means there is a ninety percent plus chance of something.
(32:02):
But virtual in the fifteen or fourteen hundreds and so on,
it basically meant really close to real, right, not concrete,
but close enough that unless you actually smack the stone,
you would think this was the thing. It wasn't used
(32:24):
in computing until nineteen fifty nine. So the fast forward
through the etymology here. The earliest use of the full
term virtual reality is actually French la realite that you,
and it comes from nineteen thirty eight, and it is
entirely from this playwright who talked about theater as an
(32:45):
alternate version of reality, curated reality theater is double and
that so he writes that in thirty eight. It gets
published in nineteen fifty eight, and then just a year later,
the boffins and the pioneering parents of computing start using
the phrase virtual reality to talk about software.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Oh yeah, well I would just say software and hardware, right,
because the virtual realities that have been created don't do
anything for your appropriate reception if they're just on a screen.
Because humans, as you said, have been exposed to light
projected for a long time, which is just our screens now, right,
(33:25):
So if you're playing a video game system, it's not
really a virtual reality experience. You got to have that trickery, right,
which is this is Jerrem Lanier, I think, is how
you say it. He's a big, big deal.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Yeah, I agreed. A legend in his own right. He's
often called the founding father of virtual reality. He's a
fascinating guy. We've referred to his work in previous episodes.
I love, love, love love hearing this guy talk. I
love learning his thoughts, even if I don't always agree.
He he worked at Atari in the eighties. He left
(34:03):
and he founded the first company to sell VR goggles
and wired gloves like you're talking about the hardware you need.
Did you ever have a power glove?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I did have a power glove, for sure, but I
never got to mess with this stuff. And I think
we mentioned it on a different episode maybe last time
we did a simulated reality episode or something. We talked
about how simple the software was, like what you actually
saw and interacted with when you had those goggles on
and wore those gloves. That was just a couple of
polygons basically that moved super slowly. But still that the
(34:40):
real hack in there is that your hands and head
movement are controlling what you're experiencing.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Right, Yeah, And you know, there might be some of
us tonight who say it's wrong for us to call
it trickery, but it is. You know, they are just polygons.
Come on, come on, we're not being jerks. We're telling
you it's not the same as the other world world prime,
(35:09):
you know what I mean. And this is this can
be a beautiful and terrifying thing. You know. Lanier has
talked at length about the online world, and the funny
thing is the further we get in this new arms
race of innovation, the more prescient his statements become. He
(35:33):
knows what he's talking about. He wants people to be
ready for some very weird stuff, you know, like I
don't know. Fiction is priming as for it too, Like
remember a Ready Player one?
Speaker 2 (35:46):
I do, Yes, we're I guess it was a lot
of the economy then at that point is wrapped up
in those virtual worlds that are creating. There's like a
one there's one company that rules all of those words.
And I've watched it not that long ago, and I
really do enjoy the story. But I don't think we're
(36:06):
there yet, but we're getting closer and closer to the
point where people want to spend time in those virtual
worlds the same way. I'm literally sitting here thinking about
the world of Fallout four, and I want to get
back in there for just a little bit because I haven't.
I haven't played it in a couple of days. But
it's not it doesn't have no bearing on anything in
(36:27):
my life, but I still want it.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
And it does have I mean, those experiences are close
enough to you know, your experience walking around in this environment, right,
Those experiences are close enough that they can trigger neurological reactions,
even hormonal changes. I think there is something real about them.
(36:55):
You know what I mean to some degree. And of
course everybody's been a gamer or reads a lot, you
might have that weird feeling when you beat a game,
you know, and the credits roll, or you finish a
book and you think, oh, I'm back, Yeah, what do
(37:17):
I do now?
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Well, and you also are gifted with this feeling of accomplishment,
even though all you did was press some buttons for
a long time and set on the couch for too long.
But you know, look, and I say that as a
lover of games, and I will defend my right and
you're right to play them, and that it's actually pretty
good for us in a lot of different ways. But
(37:38):
in the end, in this reality, it truly is at
best sharpening your perception.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Right right perception, and right now, as we record on
June third, four, it is virtually certain there we go
that people know when they are in one of these
human created environments. They know when they are in a curated,
(38:09):
constrained experience. That's why and Ready Player one, everybody knows
they're logging into a thing and they're going online. Everybody
knows that they're incentivized socially and economically to do so,
but they are very much aware there is a different
preceding world. But then there's another thing. One of our
(38:31):
favorite films on this show throughout its history is The
Matrix in The Matrix's nested reality, and most people don't
know they're in it. They don't get to consent.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Well, yeah, all of their sensory systems are hooked up
to hardware that makes them believe they are in reality,
which is a creepy thing to think about. And I've
been thinking about it since nineteen ninety nine and iils
shall never cease thinking about it until I'm unplugged Trinity
or whoever she drops down and gets me out of here.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
I also I keep thinking, you know, I think you
can be haunted by good thoughts, just the way you
could be haunted by a spirit.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
And I.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Will never forget the explanation line. It's a throwaway line
in this amazing film where they say maybe we're something like,
maybe we're in a simulation. Now they didn't know what
everything tasted like. That's why everything tastes like chicken. Oh God,
do you remember that line?
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, but I couldn't tell you what it's from. Right
to us, it's from the Matrix. Oh it is from
the Matrix? Yeah, is that when they're talking about steak,
he's trying to what's his name, Joey Pantoli one Joey
Pants is like, man, this steak is so good. Yeah,
I want steak.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
I think maybe that's it. We got to rewatch it.
But yeah, right to us, because it'll give us an
excuse to rewatch the film. You know, it's weird and
we've known each other for so long and I don't
think we've ever watched it together. Just keep talking about it.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Yeah, well, hey, quick shout out for the episode of
Movie Crush where I talked to Chuck about the Matrix
and we go deep on. I think that line is
in there in our discussion bit about the chicken.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Nice. Movie Crush is great. I never got a chance
to be on it, but I loved hearing the conversations
and Chuck is a phenomenal interviewer.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
We need to bring it back.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah, we'll see what he says. You know, and I
think they're on tour right now, so check out stuff
you should know on the road if you get a chance.
Show not to be missed for the nature of like,
if we wanted to or if some entity wanted to
arrive at a seamless virtual world, a matrix level world
(40:44):
in which people could not distinguish between the world d're
in now and a created or curated one. Lanier had
a couple of big speed bumps, and in twenty thirteen
he talked about something that Matt you would mentioned earlier,
the two big problems hardware and software. He said, hardware
(41:05):
is going to solve itself eventually, just with economy of scale.
The more you make, the more iterations you make of
a thing, the cheaper the thing becomes in the grand
religion we call economy. But the software is the pickle. Right.
Virtual worlds have to respond much more quickly for human users,
(41:28):
but you have to have multiple people coming in and connecting.
The network has to be seamless, and he says it's
going to take a while to figure out how to
make the network work without hiccups, and that you know,
I wanted to ask you about this, Matt. It reminds
me of the concept of lag when you're playing video games.
(41:49):
Have you ever played online and got caught up in
a like a lag situation? Oh?
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, I've broken several controllers because of Lad's broken them.
I've lost several very important to online characters due to
lag and getting logged out because I think my family
needed to make a phone call. My fifty six K
modem was attached and when they unplugged it and it
was over. But yes, this concept of lag, if your
perception of reality could be so easily interrupted by like
(42:18):
a couple of frames getting dropped or skipped right, then
you would lose that proprioception trickery and it would no
longer feel like a virtual world of connecting this back
to our shared reality, this one that you're listening to
this podcast in. I've never experienced lag like that we've experienced. Maybe, well,
(42:41):
I know I have experienced some weird things with reality,
like a blip in time, or when the lights all
flicker at once, or a weird sound, or you know,
seeing a specter in my doorway where it makes you
feel like, oh, well, maybe this reality isn't exactly what
we all think it is, or it doesn't function the
way we all think it does. But I've never seen
(43:01):
anything like lag, which is a terrible and real problem
when it comes to processing that much information at once
for multiple people. But I would argue, and what'd you say?
Linear said this a long time ago.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Twenty thirteen, it's about ten years ago.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
So I think we're actually there now. If you think
about some of these large scale games that are run
in the cloud essentially at once and served to everybody
essentially via a supercomputer of sorts, I think we might
be there.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, we're getting very close, right. And one thing that's
fascinating about human technology is as it improves, it tends
to emulate parts of nature. Right, the most sophisticated systems
and structures and processes are echoing things that already naturally occurred,
(43:57):
because that's the most efficient way for that stuff to work,
and natural reality also already needed hardware and software. The
hardware is your body and all the physical forces surrounding
you've seen and unseen. And the software is your mind
as you're listening now. I'm trying to make my eyes
(44:19):
look less crazy. Sorry, your mind as you're listening now,
and the minds of every other living thing you encounter.
The tricky part is not all the software is the same.
And I'm still stuck to your point. Yes, I agree,
massive online role playing or massive online gaming in general,
(44:40):
is reducing a lot of lag I'm just thinking about
waking up one evening and you walk outside and you
have a laggy connection with the world. You know, that
would be so weird.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Ben, you said that in your video. Froze as you said,
and then it picks back up. That was nuts.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
Let's not let look too closely, right, Let's take reality
at its word. All right, Well, we'll check our connections.
Uh and uh, you know, play some mats. Okay, we
have returned, as we said, Matt, you and Paul and
(45:24):
I are recording this on June third, twenty twenty four.
And I love the point you made that we are
in an era of breakthroughs, right, escalating breakthroughs, feedback loops
of innovation, and I think a lot of the stuff
that was once considered science fiction is becoming science fact. Right.
(45:46):
Do you think we'll reach a point where someone would
be unable to distinguish a virtual reality from a physical reality.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Hopefully not, and hopefully creators of such realities would know
how dangerous that could be. I think you would build
in something, whether it's a hud like a head's up display,
or something that would make you aware at all times
that you are not in actual reality.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
At that up.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Well, it could be that, but just something in the
corner that's literally a menu or something, or a place
where you could place your hand, and everybody knows if
you put your hand here, you will bring up the
menu every time, or a button or something to where
a human being, you'd make it a lot less likely
that a human being could get fully.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
Lost, right yeah, kind of similar to I think in
some countries it was China, there were moves to restrict
the amount of time people could spend immersed in like
you know, an internet cafe, right, yeah, because people were
(46:54):
going so deep, going so hard, to the point where
the only thing that took them out of that experience
was the physical need for stuff like food, water, and excrement,
you know.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Which was often solved by getting a little creative with
your seat.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
Yes, yes, getting a little spicy with the seat. And
we know, like, I appreciate what you're saying there, because
I think it is statistically inevitable that humans and machines
will continue to meld together like increasingly inextricable. You know,
(47:35):
it sounds it sounds nuts to say, what if there's
a world in a few years where you have an
AI avatar that legally represents you. It does. It's like
your valet, your digital doppelganger. It does all the stuff
that you need or that you don't want to do. Uh,
And that sounds nuts. But not too long ago, people,
(48:00):
I thought it was ridiculous that someone would always have
a cell phone or a smartphote. You know, why would
you spy on yourself? And now billions do it.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Well, yeah, you can see it already in the workings
of things like Siri and Alexo, where you can program
those pieces of hardware and software to give you an
update on your day. Right here. You can give it
access to your email, right in your schedule and all
this stuff. And even in Microsoft with ourly enterprise systems,
you can it will say, Hey, morning, Ben, here's what's
(48:33):
on your plate for the day. This person has a
question about this, this person has a question about that.
You need to do this, and you can. It's I
don't think it's automated fully to the point where you could,
through that system just give it a couple of quick
answers and then it would reply to all the emails
and do the things exactly the way you'd want it to.
But I imagine that's coming up very soon where you have
(48:54):
like a meeting in the morning, you know, five minute
meeting to get the rundown, take care of all all
your stuff, and then anything else that pops up, you
get alerted to it.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
And it's normalized now because it's a common thing that
people can experience. Right, Google or Alexa. We have given
these identities to these things. We have put a language
and nomenclature upon them. I mean, also, let's just say
it out loud, a lot of us are listening to
this on those same smartphones we're describing, or on the
(49:28):
Alexa right or the Amazon Echo or what have you.
I also, I think what's gonna happen is humans are
gonna finally get past the hands. I think that's another
step too.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
I hope not. I like the hands.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
I like, you know, I'm a fan of hands. Yeah,
I'm a fan of hands. I will die of that
hill if I have to, if need be. But you know,
it's gonna sound crazy like for anyone who just had
a child this year, first off, congraduate relations. Secondly, if not,
by the time your kid is thirty, by the time
(50:06):
your kid has a kid that turns eighteen. If the
world doesn't collapse, it is going to sound crazy that
you used to type with your hands.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, used to type with your hands, used to do
so many things with your hands. But now you kind
of just you can wave if you want in a
couple of different ways. You can still use them. Just
don't like touch anything.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Why would you touch stuff? What are you old? You know? Like,
I do think it's funny how we normalize these things.
But it'll maybe go the way of the old modem
scream like we were talking about with the fifty six
bit connection. Was that one of those things where it
goes through the phone line and it has that weird noise.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yeah, Ultimately it's using your phone system, the same lines
that connect your phone to the outer world in the network.
It's using that to dial literally dial in to the
Internet to a server somewhere.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
And we don't even have to play the noise. I
think we can all hear it. Oh, well, should we
play it?
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Anybody born in the nineteen hundreds, Yes.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Dary Fault, Yes, please play it. Oh, you'll love to
hear it. You'll love to hear it. Do you think
it's likely, though, or possible that a that within the
lifetime of people listening. Now, would it be possible for
an individual to one day live entirely within a constructed
(51:37):
reality and not know?
Speaker 2 (51:40):
I think maybe someone's born into a system.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Like matrix style. Could it happened.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
I don't know. I feel like that's not going to
happen unless it plays out literally like the matrix where
man versus machine and man for some reason is useful
to machine. But I don't think it would be right.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
That was the nicest part of the Matrix mythos was
the computer Empire, the robot Empire. Machine Empire decided, well,
we'll keep them around for something.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Batteries, Yeah, batteries and goo. They make such good goo.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Guys, have you ever had quality human goo? Oh? Boy,
I don't know if we should keep that one.
Speaker 2 (52:27):
We take it over. You want all kinds of different.
Speaker 3 (52:30):
Good perception and perspective. Yeah, this might be helpful when
we're talking about this before we get to a back
to observer effect, which is what we're kind of setting
up here, right, It may be helpful given that every person,
a meat person or a digital person, what have you.
Everyone is living in a kind of self constructed reality.
(52:53):
Perception is your reality. But it is your specific reality.
It's the stuff you experience assume to be correct. Other
perceptions are not the same as yours, and that's part
of the reason people argue so often. So it might
be better to think in terms of perspective. You know,
(53:13):
perception says, I am the ultimate arbiter of my world, right,
I am the protagonist the way I encounter and experience
and understand things, that's the main thing. And if someone
has a problem with that, they're wrong. But if we
move from perception to perspective, then we can ask how
a reality is different, what is it that this person
(53:37):
or this entity is experiencing, And we can try to
The weird way to put it is it's like trying
to understand the alien software of another mind, and it's
a tough thing to do. You know, I guess it's empathy.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Yeah, for empathy.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's going a long way. You know,
we'll see how it does.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
Man.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
I have an eight year old, so I know that
the only way for him to truly learn lessons doesn't
matter how many times I tell him what the lesson is,
what the parameters of it are, what the outcomes potentially
are Unless he does a thing and experiences the consequences
of that thing, it doesn't seem to sink into his head.
And I'm sure I was the same way. I'm sure
(54:22):
most of us are the same way. I just don't
know how any of us can truly understand something until
it has happened to us, right, or we have observed
it and perceived it and then basically applied our perspective
to it.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
Yeah, it reminds me of It was a little bit
of a personal thing. I'll keep it short. It reminds
me of an adage I learned from my mother before
she passed. She was a teacher for some time, and
she had some I'm trying to remember. It was something like,
when I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember
(55:01):
when I do, I understand that.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
That's amazing. Maybe you know, maybe I feel that way.
I totally feel that way, except well, well, yeah, the
only the only thing I Some people learn really well
when they hear and not well when they see. Right,
So just that's the only thing, buttally exactly, but I
totally understand exactly what that means. If I haven't done
(55:27):
a thing, I don't really understand what it is or
how it feels.
Speaker 3 (55:32):
Also, there's nothing in that little proverb about the smell,
you know what I mean, what happens when you smell?
How does that? What if someone what if someone said, oh,
my primary learning style is smell? Could you explain algebra
in like a more old factory way here?
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Try this, I understand.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
Take a whiff of this calculus. I mean, okay, so
now we're we're ill exploring questions that spoiler, people haven't answered.
But it does bring us back to the observer effect,
the double slid experiment, the thing no one can really explain, like,
when we observe a thing, to what degree are we
(56:16):
participating in that particular perspective of experience? When that person
to your earlier example, Matt, when that person walks by
and says hey, you hear them say hey, whether or
not you say something back to them, to what degree
are you, by observation, participating in and affecting their reality?
(56:37):
I don't know, that's maybe that's just too fluffy.
Speaker 2 (56:40):
No, No, it goes back to maybe my my most
weird thoughts on this whole thing, And it goes back
to virtual worlds, and it goes back to imagining what
it would be like if this world, this reality we experience,
is some kind of information field of potentials, and in
(57:04):
everything that we know and think we know and experience.
Speaker 3 (57:08):
Is a potential.
Speaker 2 (57:09):
And I imagine it as a chair in an empty room.
This room you've been into before. You constructed that chair,
You made it out of wood, right, and it's just
sitting there. You know that it's there, but you leave
and you die and you're gone. But then a couple
hundred years later, another human being finds this room and
(57:33):
walks into it and looks at that chair. What I'm
imagining is that in between those two instances where this
chair was seen, you know, separated by hundreds of years,
is that chair actually sitting there in that room? Or
is the potential of that chair, the information that is
(57:54):
contained of what that chair is. Is it just sitting
there idly, almost as data that isn't being currently processed.
It's just kind of it is the information field that
is a chair that has constructed very specific materials in
a specific way, and all that information is there at
(58:14):
all times. But until somebody opens that door again and
looks at that chair, is it actually sitting in there?
And I really it feels to me the way a
virtual world is created, especially a very very large one,
where certain parts of a map of a world are
not loaded, but it is known the hardware is not
(58:35):
processing any of that stuff, but the software knows what
is supposed to go.
Speaker 3 (58:39):
There, right, Yeah, Yeah, it.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
Just hasn't injected it through the hardware system.
Speaker 3 (58:45):
It hasn't loaded the map, so you speak, yeah, I
think that's a beautiful thought.
Speaker 2 (58:50):
I don't know, I feel like there's something to that here,
but you know, it then goes back to the observer
and what is the observer? Is it an animal? Is
it a plant? It is? What is consciousness? What is
the thing that observes so that the everything is and
exists and is being processed through hardware?
Speaker 3 (59:11):
Yeah, send us your pets for some very not weird experiments. Yeah,
just in the mail, just in the just please don't,
please don't. We love your pets and we love the photos,
but we we think they enjoy their lives with you folks.
I think that is a fascinating thought, Matt, because it
(59:31):
reminds me again right now, probably in the old in
the old evenings, the best comparison would be losing oneself
in a story, right, But I think now the best comparison,
the most relevant and immediate, is what you're describing the
experience of gaming, especially in an immersive game. I sometimes
(59:53):
will log into my old Skyrim stuff where i've i've
and I'm not bragging here. I got one hundred percent
and completion because I didn't want to go outside. You know,
I'm not proud of it. I should have done better
things with my time. But now I just walk around
in this made up world. I don't even fighting body.
Sometimes I'm just like buying soup.
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
I'm genuinely impressed at one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
It's not cool. Don't like, it's not something to be
proud of.
Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
You should start making videos. One of my favorite ASMR guys,
I think his name is the ASMR Nerd, and he
does a bunch of videos, the whole series where he
walks around Skyrim, just the sounds of the footsteps and
the ambience and the wildlife sometimes the music, and he's
just talking. Oh and here we have a lovely fjords.
(01:00:43):
It's amazing beautiful, I mean.
Speaker 3 (01:00:45):
But also, you know, like you said with another video
gaming sample, like you beat elden Ring, right, like you
you you knocked the crap out of that, and it's
still party is still kind of in there sensing. But
that that's another example of this observation in an immersive
(01:01:10):
world because things will take time to load, you know,
And the question is the question is where do things
go when you're not looking at them? And I love
the point you're bringing up about theory of mind. When
you're seeing your your son grow cognitively and physically and
(01:01:31):
think through things. Right, you watch that guy learn language,
which is amazing. And this I think part of the
theory of mind is the idea of object permanence. Right
does the thing exist when I do not physically see, touch,
or hear the thing?
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
But what if it's object permanence for all things that
have eyes and ears and noses.
Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Right in tongues? Yeah, yeah, that's That's where I'm going
to man like think about. It's the old tree falling
in a forest concept, and I'm wondering. You know, it
reminds me of since we're talking about games, it reminds
me of extraordinary objects or artifacts of power in control.
(01:02:18):
What are they called? Ah something? You know what I mean?
Objects of power is real? Okay, objective power. I think
one of those spoiler folks. There, there's something I can't
remember what it was, Maybe it was a refrigerator or whatever,
but it's locked up and someone has to stare at
it all the time because if they don't, if someone
(01:02:39):
is not looking at it, stuff goes horribly wrong. Yeah,
that's so cool, I think. Now I'm sorry I've derailed this.
Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
I loaded that game back up again to show my
girlfriend and she was genuinely interested. And she does not
like video games, but it's because of all those artifacts.
You get to find, all the papers that documents, all
that stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
God, that's so great. Can't wait. If you are interested
in learning, if you like this show and video games remotely,
you will love the show Control Matt, I can't thank
you enough again for putting me onto that game. They
have another the studio as one called Alan Wake. Alan
Wake two recently came out and we're waiting for Control too.
(01:03:23):
Are that which point they're gonna do another one? At
which point I cannot wait to see what kind of
ridiculous excuses you and Noel Barcelona Brown and I send
to our colleagues right like, how are we going to
explain that we're calling in sick for video game. I'm
(01:03:44):
just gonna be honest. I'll be like, guys, I gotta.
Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
I've been banking vacation days since twenty nineteen in hopes
that Control two would one day be released.
Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
It'll just be a run of classic episodes. But there's
something else to Matt. This is what it leads me
to think. And I'm very interested in your observations here, observations. Okay,
what if we created a virtual space, a virtual world
or reality, and we conducted the double slit experiment there?
(01:04:18):
What if we you know, what if we had everybody
listening at home, and you and me and Paul and
Noel physically at a great distance from each other, logging in,
and some portion of the group just looks at one slit,
some portion looks at another. They're not in contact with
(01:04:40):
each other.
Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
This is I love the idea, Ben, I love this idea,
and let's do it.
Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
First of all, I don't know if it'll I don't
know if it's worth doing. I just think it's trippy.
Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
Well, the second thing is I think it would The
outcome would depend exactly and precisely on the physics engine
that functions in that virtual world.
Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
Because that's the observer, right, that's the ultimate observer.
Speaker 2 (01:05:02):
Well, because the physics engine has code that says, this
is how light functions in this environment, and this is
how light interacts with these materials in this environment. Right,
So you would I think you'd be able to predict
that every time, simply because we know the underlying.
Speaker 3 (01:05:17):
Code, we know the engine.
Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, but in our reality, we still don't know what
that is. We don't know what it looks like, we
don't know who wrote it, if anybody wrote it, if
it even is code. Maybe it's just something else.
Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
And that's the question too. As civilization arrived at the
point where just from scrabbling around at the corners of experience,
we found, you know, a chink in the armor, right,
a gap in the plates. And if that is true,
if that is the case, what happens when we worry
(01:05:55):
at that crevice? What happens when we pull the plate
or the surface back? What do we see beneath?
Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Mister Anderson?
Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
That's great? Oh, and then what if we set up
the okay real world? Then what if we set up
the double slit experiment and we let it run somehow
for a thousand years? And we never intervene and we
never check on it until a millennia has passed, and.
Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Then we'll be like, oh, look it's an interference pattern. Well,
like that's what that's why there there are people to
this day as of April twenty twenty three. Uh there, well,
I mean it's still right now, it's probably happening. There
are people who are trying to modify the experiment even further.
There's a group, uh they just published in Nature last
(01:06:44):
year from Imperial College. They were trying to do the
double slit experiment but with time dilation and like could
like I don't understand it, y'all. I'm gonna give you
this so you can look it up on your own.
It's in the Quantum Insider. It's written by Matt Swain,
April fourth, twenty twenty three. The title is Time is
(01:07:08):
on My Sides with an s researchers show double slit
experiment also applies to time and it has to do
with putting some kind of material in front of the
slits that basically slows down the light. I think I
don't know if that's right or not. I've read the
entire article and I still couldn't tell you exactly what
(01:07:30):
it means, but it was iridium tin oxide that they
used to make time slits in quotation, I don't know,
I don't know what that means.
Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Sorry, we have to tell you the research. No, this
is also I mean, this is another thing that maybe
a future episode with your help, fellow conspiracy realist. Because
time is part of reality, or at least the way
your perception and perspective of time. Right, we all just
sort of agree that it's Monday, you know what I mean.
(01:08:01):
We all sort of agree that in one part of
the world it's three pm, and then in another part
it's two pm at big because you know, yeah, at
railroad tycoons or whatever, and farming. But when you when
you drill down into the concept of time, things also
get fuzzy because time is just like reality, part of
(01:08:25):
a thing everyone has collectively agreed that they pretend to understand.
And just don't make it complicated, you know what I mean.
Someone asks you about your schedule, don't don't say, here's
the history of why the calendar is weird and it's
not perfect, you know, and we're actually a few seconds
off all the time.
Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
I just got the first weapon in control too.
Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
Exactly right, I think you mean Pervis day, right, whatever,
I don't know. In any case, Matt and Paul and I,
we think you can agree, the mystery only deepens. We
are now at a point with scientific evidence where we
(01:09:10):
can say reality seems to be dependent on factors human
civilization does not understand. The scariest thing that this teaches
us is that it appears that when one observes reality,
reality looks back at you. It might know that you're watching, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
It might change itself to either accommodate you or to
trick you.
Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
And to this date we have not interviewed an electron
nor a photon for their perspectives on the confounded nature
of reality. If they are particles, even if you know,
even if they just are particles that wave at us
sometimes right, if they see us on the streets the
mean streets of reality. If you are a photon or
an electron, or a person or a digital intelligence, and
(01:10:03):
you have some thoughts here, again, like Matt and I
said at the beginning, if you can explain the double
slit experiment, like if you can solve light, you know,
please write to us. We don't know if anybody's ever
asked you. If you have the answer to that, find
us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You could also give us
a phone call.
Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
Yeah, you could call one eight three three std WYTK
right after you call Fermilab and explain to them whatever
you figured out because or well, you know whatever, those
other places are that are doing this all the time.
But if you call our number, you can leave us
a three minute voicemail message, give yourself a cool nickname,
and say whatever you'd like do. At some point say
whether or not we can use your name and message
(01:10:45):
on the air. If you got more to say, they
could fit in that three minutes, Attachments, links, whatever you got.
Why not send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
We are the entities that read every email. We get
the well aware of folks, just like reality stares back.
Sometimes the void answers you conspiracydiheartradio dot.
Speaker 2 (01:11:04):
Com stuff they don't want you to know is a
(01:11:25):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt
Our colleague Nol is still on an adventure, but will
be returning very soon.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben. We're joyed as always with our
super producer Paul Michig, controlled decad Most importantly, you are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Let's begin tonight's exploration with a fantastic, if arguably a
bit pretentious quotation from the excellent writer David Foster Wallace.
(00:53):
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they
happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way,
who nods them and says, Martin, boys, how's the water?
And the two young fish swim on for a bit,
and then eventually one of them looks over at the
other and goes, what the hell is water? That's by?
This is water? David Foster Wallace.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Beautiful, beautiful. That describes exactly what each and every one
of us does when we open our eyes in the morning.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Right, and we have to participate in this thing that
civilization has decided to call reality. Spoiler, no one knows
how it works. What is reality? It's a question that's
haunted philosophers, profits, and scientists throughout the span of known history.
Conundrum that probably, to be honest, pre dates technology like
(01:44):
fire or the written word. We're still trying to figure
it out, and in tonight's episode, we are returning to
our own exploration of these strange, heady concepts. Here are
the facts, Matt. Since we're both fans of small talk,
(02:04):
how would you explain reality?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Oh? Hey, pal, how's the air? Reality is the collective
thing that we all experience that we then get together
and say, hey, this rocks sure seems hard and solid. Yeah, yeah,
this water sure seems wet and kind of cold at times. Yeah,
it's existence. Reality is experience through a meat body.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I like that, because we're talking
already about sort of the filters through which reality is experienced.
For human beings, reality comes through a surprisingly small set
of inputs and filters. You know. Most of them are
what we call physical senses. You taste or smell things,
(02:54):
you touch things, you see them. You might hear them,
but there are deeper cuts. We've talked about pro preception.
You know, that's why you can close your eyes and
touch your nose and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
But it all goes back to a physical piece in
your ear right and some of the other things in
your body that give you those things like balance. And
in the end, it is a physical sense. But it's more,
as you're saying, than the five right.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then also one thing that philosophers
quarrel over pretty often is the other aspect of what
determines reality, which is the internal or cognitive processing of
past experiences, the attempts at predicting future changes in your environment.
And you know, we give humans a hard time on
(03:40):
this show, but they're not bad at it. They're not
bad at that one.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
Oh well, I don't know. I think I think a
lot of us are a little bad at it.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
I know, a little bad show a little bad.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, because we really do color our own lenses, right,
or the stuff that's happened to us before, that we've
done before really does shape the way you see things.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yeah, I was listening. I'm glad you said that, because
I was listening to some conversations with a fascinating scientist
named Robert Sapolski, and he's talking about some of the
same stuff we're idating on here. You know. Also another
thing to add to the bag of badgers is that
(04:22):
we as a civilization know many other life forms have
a different sort of kit of sensory inputs, right, like
electromagnetic sensitivity for birds and sharks. And isn't it can't
a lot of animals, non human animals, I mean, can't
they see into like ultraviolet and infrared spectrum?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Oh yeah, Well, think about a cat's eyes. That's where
that's why they're so cool to us, because they can
sense stuff that we cannot.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
You got a ghost hunting cat, I think.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
So Apparently there was a specter right outside my doorway
last night that I did not observe, but somebody else
did and the kitty cat I didn't notice, the kitty
cat notice anything.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
Well, give a time, you know what I mean. New
at the job. So every ghostthutter has a first day,
I imagine, And we also know that it gets more
complicated because not all humans experience reality the same way.
Your existential mileage may differ, and when an individual or
(05:30):
group perception strays too far from the majority perspective or consensus,
we call those people insane.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
But that concept alone gets to the heart of I
think this episode. In the end, we kind of have
to choose the way we want to believe the world
exists entire right, So when you get down into the
deeper levels, like an individual person and can they actually
perceive something that we cannot, you have to decide whether
(06:02):
or not you believe that right now, at.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
Least you have to observe and measure. Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
It also blows our mind. We humans can build the
most sensitive equipment that can find gravitational waves if we
want them to, which there is no other way for
humanity or any other life form to detect those things
that we're aware of. Right now. We can build this
giant array right that can find gravity waves, but it
(06:31):
doesn't mean anything. Those sensors don't mean anything if it
doesn't have an output that turns it into something we
can either see or hear or to.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Get somehow perceive. And also it doesn't solve the problem
that humanity still quarrels with, with, which is this what
is gravity? Why, at, how and where and when? Gravity?
I mean it's the same question with reality. You know
when gravity is when you know all your gravity are
(07:02):
belong to us. I don't get it. I don't understand gravity.
We also know that reality is neither as to your point,
is neither as consistent nor as constant as it appears
at first blush. You go through your day to day.
Stuff tends to fall at the same I'm throwing things.
(07:23):
Stuff tends to fall at the same measurable pace. You know,
light usually behaves the way one would expect it, as
long as you don't look too closely, because the closer
you look, the weirder stuff gets. There was a great
quote from a group OF's journalist writing and new scientists
that were talking about reality, and they said the following quote,
(07:46):
we don't know when it began, how big it is,
where it came from, and where it is going. And
we certainly have no clue why it exists, which I
think is a question a lot of us don't consider often.
Why is reality? I think.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
I looked at that article, Ben, and I was like,
I can read up my New Scientist right now, or
I can read a different article and I read a
different article. But that's a great way to open. I
think I was like one of the first lines in
that article.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
And it seems something's haunt you. You know what I mean.
These folks are definitely good to hang out with, and
they're making an excellent point. You know, the rules get
fuzzy at the very very small and the very very
large scale. And this brings us to something that I
think inspired inspired you for this episode this evening, which
(08:39):
is the double Slit Experiment and observer effect.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Yes, we have to go way back to ye old
eighteen hundreds. In fact, the year after it switched over
eighteen oh one, when this fellow named Thomas Young came
up with a thing that we now know as the
double Slit experiment, which is very very important. That's why
we're doing this episode. It is the initial experiment that
(09:06):
led humanity down a bit of a rabbit hole, and
it's pretty incredible because it's influenced so many other very
good thinkers to think very hard about the nature of reality,
and it's attempted to give us a window, maybe a
two slided window, into what this whole thing is that
(09:27):
we're going through every day. But why don't you tell
us about this guy?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Sure? Yeah, Thomas Young is what we will call it.
Boffin a renaissance man. You might say he's an egghead.
He's super into all sorts of stuff. He's really good
at math. He contributed research to everything from egyptology to physics.
And then one day, Lakers said, around the turn of
the century, this guy said, I wonder if Isaac Newton
(09:55):
is wrong about light. Now, light may seem like an
academic debate. People were really hot about this at this
time in human history. There was this ongoing argument, what
is the substance of light? How does light travel? Should
we think of it like Christian Hugans propose, like a wave,
just a maybe wave of stuff emanating from things in
(10:18):
chemical reactions, or should we think of it like a
series of little pew pew pew particles.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
Well, yeah, well, and when we perceive a light again,
we go back to our base experience. You turn on
a light and now there's light everywhere that that light
can basically shine on. Right, And just that concept of
how does it travel, how does it function? Right? This
is a huge deal. The I would say, well, no,
I know. The prevailing thought there is that they are
(10:47):
light particles. And then there's another school of thought that is, hey,
maybe it is waves. Maybe it does function as waves.
So we thought, well, maybe here's a cool way to
approve that by shining light through two slits.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yeah, it's it is one of the most famous experiments,
as he said, in all of human history. The tools
are maybe distressingly simple. You can play along at home.
You just need a light source, a thin card with
two holes or slits cut within it, side by side,
(11:20):
and then you need to screen. That's right, right, yeah,
And so our buddy young, I guess took a took
a long enough break from Egyptology to conduct this experiment.
And his idea was pretty simple. He said, look, just
like you were saying, Matt, if we if we can
(11:41):
measure the way the light moves, we will determine whether
it is a wave or a series of particles. If
the light is content, If the light is comprised of particles,
then it will shoot through those two slits and at
the screen you will just see two dots, right, And
if it's a wave something different, right, well yeah, or you.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Would at least see the two slits, right, the outline
of what the slits look like projected on whatever the
device it is. That you're using to see the light.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Right, Yeah, and the thing is most of well, a
great deal of human science is discovered by accident. People
are looking for one thing and they discover another. Right,
That's how alchemist ended up with chemistry. So Young also
follows this sort of tendency. He doesn't see what he
(12:36):
reasonably imagined or predicted. Instead, when he shines this light
through this double slit experiment, he sees an alternating pattern
of dark and light bands on the screen. The best
way to describe it maybe is it's kind of like
a Pointillism version of a barcode.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Right, Yeah, that's most intense at the places where you
would imagine those two slits would have light shine through them,
and then kind of dissipates, getting lesser and lesser as
you move away from the two slits.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
M yeah, it looks like someone drew a barcode by
just sort of putting little dots, yeah around.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Well, that's when Thomas Young isn't shooting particles of light yet, right,
Thomas Young is just using a light source, right, So,
like you're not getting as much of the dots as
like the lines.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Right right, right, he is at he has not yet
well The better way to say it is the double
slit experiment is still in its infancy. It still has
that new car smell. It hasn't been reproduced and refined
over and over. But the patterns that we see remain inexplicable.
(13:51):
So our buddy Young is trying to explain this. He's surprised.
He wants to understand it, and he says, okay, well,
this means light travels through space like a wave of water,
highs and lows, crest and troughs. And thinking this way,
he said, all right, here's what's happening. Light waves are
traveling through these two you know tunnels, right, very small tunnels,
(14:15):
and when they get out, they are they are like
expanding on the way when they emerge from these restrictions,
these two slits. And what I'm seeing, he says, is
that bright bands are forming where these two waves of
light overlap, they add together, so they make things brighter
(14:37):
because they're light. And when I see the dark bands,
he says, it's where the crested troths somehow cancel each
other out. That makes sense, he thinks, kind of, Well.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, it was very similar to observations that had been
done with fluid dynamics and water, and when you've got
interference patterns. Basically, if you try to imagine dropping two
things in the water about let's say, four feet away
from each other in the same body of water, when
those things hit that body of water, you get the
(15:13):
waves that move out from it right in circles. We've
all seen this before. Imagine those two sets of circles
start to interact with each other as they're moving, and
you get the exactly what Ben's describing, these interference patterns.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
And this experiment, as we said, has been replicated countless
times with very levels of refinement, with varying levels of
sophistication and measurement. But we're still not at the crazy part,
and maybe we need a little bit more background for that.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Yeah, okay, so Young is using a light source, you know,
as we were saying, and light sources have gotten more
and more complicated and intricate over the years. We've also
humanity has figured out how to shoot basically beams of light,
think lasers, think very specific photon emitters. These are things now,
(16:07):
So you can send out a single particle and or
wave of light, a single instance, let's say, of a
light and so when you can now do that, and
you've still got this double slit experiment going. You find
some weird things because sometimes when you shoot those single
light particles and or waves out, one will travel through
(16:28):
either the left slit or the right slit, And it
gets really weird when you try and detect which of
the two slits a single particle goes through.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Yeah, that's the creepy part. If either path through those slits,
and I hate that we're saying slit so much, but that's,
you know, the name of the experiment. If either path
is monitored, then stuff will seem to pass through a
discrete choice. It will go either through aperture A or
(17:03):
through aperture B. But if you shoot the light through
and you do not measure it, and you do not
monitor it, then those photons, regardless of how sophisticated or
crude your light emitting device is, those photons will appear
to have passed through both of those spaces at the
same time and then interfere with themselves, acting like a wave.
(17:28):
Poor k Nolos dose. Man, it's nuts.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
It seems to say that our basic understanding for a
long time of what light and perhaps matter, even at
the tiniest forms is still elementary, and we don't fully
understand what it is. And that is freaky because scientists
(17:52):
since that time, since the eighteen hundreds, as you said, Ben,
have been attempting to refine this experiment in ways, you know,
using very different things. We're gonna get in to. But
nobody still I hate to I feel like I'm spoiling everything.
Nobody still has an exact grasp on what the heck
these particles slash waves really are and how they actually function.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Not even a spoiler. It would be a spoiler if
someone listening tonight knew what was going on, right to us,
conspiracy iHeartRadio dot com like help science improve.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
No, there's no end to the number of people who
have a hypothesis, right.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Oh yeah, we got to get Terrence Howard.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
On the phone one at times one what happened to
the other one?
Speaker 3 (18:39):
So this is the observer effect, which will be familiar
to a lot of us. It's the idea that a
system may be influenced or affected or disturbed simply by
the act of observing that system in progress, or a
better way to say it is the idea of measuring
that system may influence the results of those measurements.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
Right, but it seems to influence the behavior exactly exactly,
And that's the troubling thing that's kind of our deep water, right,
whether particles or waves. In the observer effect, you know,
maybe a metaphor or a comparison, a simile, excuse me,
it is the best way to think about it. The
(19:23):
observer effect is kind of like that old story about
watching a pot of water and waiting for it to boil.
But in the observer effect, the fact that you are
looking at the water changes weather or not the water
boils and how it boils. And that is, by the way,
as far as we know, looking at a pot of
(19:45):
water about to boil, your perspective does not influence that.
You can unless you are unless you have like low
key pyrokinesis, you are not making water boil faster or cryokinesis.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
That's why this is so frustrating. We've created technology, a
pot in a way to make fire underneath that pot,
and some clean water to put in that pot, and
we put all those things together and we know, hey,
eventually that water's going to boil, right, I know it.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
For sure, right with based on our understanding of linear
time as well, which gets even weirder. I mean, this
takes us to the concept of wave collapse, right, the
old dilemma of Schrodinger's cat, The cat is both alive
and dead until you open the box. I don't know,
I think there was. This is already kind of weird,
(20:36):
but I was thinking, Matt about different ways to play
with the concept of observer effect. It's you know, we
often take it to mean in popular science that a
conscious mind can somehow affect reality. And perhaps that is true,
but there's no current proof that the observer or the
(20:59):
measuring device needs to be conscious. It makes me wonder, like,
if we got different non human animals together and had
them watch the double slit experiment, would that affect it?
You know what I mean? And if so, which animals
count as observers in that regard.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
I think all of them, man, I think anything that
has senses is conscious in some degree or another. Like
I've fully come to believe that now. It just over
the years been we as we've been learning about what
we would call animal intelligence. Like all honestly, Man, you've
inspired me a lot with your fascination with it, because
it makes me want to learn more, especially when it
(21:40):
comes to like Corvid's and some of the things we've
kind of had a deep dive into and cetaceans. It
feels like like even plants now when we did that episode,
even plants may have a consciousness that we have previously
just kind of thrown out and said, that's not consciousness.
They're not thinking about thinking like are you sure though?
Speaker 3 (22:04):
You sure about that's why? Yeah, yeah, well I appreciate that.
I mean, I think we're we we're often on the
same page with these sorts of these sorts of questions
because one thing we can all agree on, hopefully those
of us playing along at home as well, is this
every experiment like this. It might be challenging, it might
(22:27):
be scary. Uh, reality is philosophically terrifying because it's a
thing that no one can escape and no one understands.
All of it shows us that there's a there is
a tremendous amount of stuff we do not know about
the universe or universes. I'm being that guy that we
(22:47):
in which we reside. I mean, I guess it's an
ad break. But without getting into further into some of
the murky waters of quantum thought, McCann. We also know
that humans, despite not understanding regular reality, are building new realities.
(23:09):
That's kind of weird.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
It is weird, and I love those realities, a lot
of them. Some of them might detest, but a lot
of them I'm really into, especially the ones that have
good stories and gameplay, which is really just what makes
a good game. Anyway. What can those virtual worlds teach
us about this very real world?
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Yeah? What does it mean? What could it mean for
reality today? For reality in the future. Here's where it
gets crazy. All right, how would we explain virtual reality?
The most crappy explanation is it's a version of a
(23:53):
thing that was around earlier that we still don't understand.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, okay, well, yeah, it's it's a simulated closed system reality.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
It's a device, a system of devices that can trick
your meat sensors into believing that those sensors are interacting
in some other place, at some other time, in some
other way.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Yeah. Well, put, I think what personal experiences do you
recall the first time you engaged with something we'll call
virtual reality in like the technological sense.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
Yeah, I think it was a friend. It was my
cousin who had one of these like an early oculus
that you had to plug in, so it was your
computer was directly plugged into it through cables. It wasn't
one of these little, you know, wireless guys that are
running around today. And I remember the feeling specifically of
doing the It's kind of like the playing thing that
(24:56):
Noel's talked about on the show here before, where you're
up at a very tall height and this device tricks
you into feeling as though you are very high up
and you have, or at least I experienced bodily reactions
to that feelings the way my body would react if
I was on the edge of a.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Building because it hacked your pro preception exactly. Yeah, yeah,
And I like the idea of emulating input such that
the body's sensory filters say this is real, or it's
real enough that we're not going to take the chance
of you falling off this plank, exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
And that goes to everything in some of the zombie
games that have come out over the years, some of
the games where there's a real fear, a fight or
flight response to something that you see as adversarial coming
at you, or you can hear it right, it sounds
like it's around the corner. It hacks you in ways
(25:56):
that I'm still uncomfortable with.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
Yeah, and we need to know more. I mean, this
is the surprising thing. All right, brief history of virtual reality,
and we're going somewhere with this, folks. The term itself
is relatively new, Like when most people hear the phrase
virtual reality, you're thinking of immersive technological experiences. But the
(26:19):
concept is inarguably ancient. It's metaphysical belief, it's gnosticism, it's
Plato's cavern, it's imagination. Every time you have a dream,
you have created a virtual reality or just a day dream.
You know, it's like, like you said, a closed system
of experience. That's what a virtual reality is, which means
(26:42):
that every thought you have that you really think about,
you're kind of making another world. Nothing weird, we're fun
at parties. It's a Matroshka doll of nested realities, worlds
within each other.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Well, yeah, and how you think about yourself affects the
worlds you create, and then all the other characters that
inhabit those worlds. Right, And the way you think about
individuals and the way you hear a phrase from somebody, right,
or if you're walking down the street and somebody says
hey to you, What what does that mean? When somebody
says hey to you when you're walking down the street,
(27:19):
your little your bubble of reality that you're projecting ends
up changing. Oh my god, it changes that source, right
it We all do it.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
It's a You know what's interesting about that that concept
as well is that it leads us to the argument
that one is never truly interacting with another or instead
interacting with your perception of a person.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Oooh no, totally, wow.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
Sanias have us over. But like I think you raise
an excellent point there, Matt. I mean, the rules get
fuzzy when we talk about virtual reality. You can witness,
like you were talking earlier about Catharsis right, you can
witness versions of reality in film, in books, in a
good song. And on some level we could say, oh,
(28:13):
I know, this isn't the real world, but experiencing those
glimpses outside of agreed upon analog reality has this crazy effect.
You said something I want to go back to. I
was not aware of this. In the early days of film, right,
no one has seen a film. What is that In
the early days of film, One of the famous stories
(28:34):
is a group of people a symbol to watch some
moving camera and it's still all silent film at this point,
and it the part of what they're seeing features a train, Paul,
can we get like a scary train noise? Perfect? They
see a train moving toward the camera, hurtling along the
(28:57):
rails from the camera's point of view. We've all seen
stuff like that before, right, but these folks had never
seen a film before. They freaked out. They're like, jump
it away, like, is.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
That an actual train that is coming at us right now? Well,
then forget about the first time a gun was pointed
at the camera. That was horrifying as well. And those
little tricks, like even the movement of trees in the background,
just sitting in a darkened theater and there's light projected
on the wall and it looks as though the trees
are moving. Love I man, I wish Paul was on
(29:31):
this episode because he could tell us all about the
history of some of this stuff with his film knowledge.
But man it it is weird how we've been tricking
ourselves mostly with light and sound for so long for fun.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah. Profit, well, there there's a profit motive. But you
could say we've been tricking ourselves with the concept of
currency in general. But also there's interesting there are these cyclical,
interesting breakthroughs in olfactory smell technology, and it just hasn't
caught on yet because you know, it's weird.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
That's the sixty experience.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Right, I mean this sounds funny. Now maybe with the
benefit of retrospect we can say, oh, those folks were silly.
But even just the idea of putting yourself in a
moment where a gun is pointed at you in any context,
that is a frightening thing, and it shows us a
very important lesson perception is kind of reality. You know,
(30:35):
at this point, perception is reality. You could also say
perspective is power. We'll get to it. But humans have
been creating new realities all the time forever, and with
each technological innovation, like you were saying, the ability to
create these worlds only expands, and these worlds become more sophisticated,
(30:57):
they have a closer fidelity to the world you're used to.
They may one day become indistinguishable. And I was surprised
to learn just the term virtual dates back to the
fourteen hundreds. Had no idea, well.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
What okay, if it goes back that far, what is
the even what could it mean?
Speaker 3 (31:19):
It comes from It ultimately comes from a Latin phrase
meaning excellence, potency or efficacy or literally manliness. That's a
weird one, oh yeah. But the idea is, if something
is virtual, it is it has for similitude, it is
(31:41):
very much like the real thing. So, okay, you know
when some we say in American English, pretty often it's
virtually impossible to blah blah blah, or it's virtually certain
that so and so, and usually I think colloquially that
means there is a ninety percent plus chance of something.
(32:02):
But virtual in the fifteen or fourteen hundreds and so on,
it basically meant really close to real, right, not concrete,
but close enough that unless you actually smack the stone,
you would think this was the thing. It wasn't used
(32:24):
in computing until nineteen fifty nine. So the fast forward
through the etymology here. The earliest use of the full
term virtual reality is actually French la realite that you,
and it comes from nineteen thirty eight, and it is
entirely from this playwright who talked about theater as an
(32:45):
alternate version of reality, curated reality theater is double and
that so he writes that in thirty eight. It gets
published in nineteen fifty eight, and then just a year later,
the boffins and the pioneering parents of computing start using
the phrase virtual reality to talk about software.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Oh yeah, well I would just say software and hardware, right,
because the virtual realities that have been created don't do
anything for your appropriate reception if they're just on a screen.
Because humans, as you said, have been exposed to light
projected for a long time, which is just our screens now, right,
(33:25):
So if you're playing a video game system, it's not
really a virtual reality experience. You got to have that trickery, right,
which is this is Jerrem Lanier, I think, is how
you say it. He's a big, big deal.
Speaker 3 (33:40):
Yeah, I agreed. A legend in his own right. He's
often called the founding father of virtual reality. He's a
fascinating guy. We've referred to his work in previous episodes.
I love, love, love love hearing this guy talk. I
love learning his thoughts, even if I don't always agree.
He he worked at Atari in the eighties. He left
(34:03):
and he founded the first company to sell VR goggles
and wired gloves like you're talking about the hardware you need.
Did you ever have a power glove?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
I did have a power glove, for sure, but I
never got to mess with this stuff. And I think
we mentioned it on a different episode maybe last time
we did a simulated reality episode or something. We talked
about how simple the software was, like what you actually
saw and interacted with when you had those goggles on
and wore those gloves. That was just a couple of
polygons basically that moved super slowly. But still that the
(34:40):
real hack in there is that your hands and head
movement are controlling what you're experiencing.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Right, Yeah, And you know, there might be some of
us tonight who say it's wrong for us to call
it trickery, but it is. You know, they are just polygons.
Come on, come on, we're not being jerks. We're telling
you it's not the same as the other world world prime,
(35:09):
you know what I mean. And this is this can
be a beautiful and terrifying thing. You know. Lanier has
talked at length about the online world, and the funny
thing is the further we get in this new arms
race of innovation, the more prescient his statements become. He
(35:33):
knows what he's talking about. He wants people to be
ready for some very weird stuff, you know, like I
don't know. Fiction is priming as for it too, Like
remember a Ready Player one?
Speaker 2 (35:46):
I do, Yes, we're I guess it was a lot
of the economy then at that point is wrapped up
in those virtual worlds that are creating. There's like a
one there's one company that rules all of those words.
And I've watched it not that long ago, and I
really do enjoy the story. But I don't think we're
(36:06):
there yet, but we're getting closer and closer to the
point where people want to spend time in those virtual
worlds the same way. I'm literally sitting here thinking about
the world of Fallout four, and I want to get
back in there for just a little bit because I haven't.
I haven't played it in a couple of days. But
it's not it doesn't have no bearing on anything in
(36:27):
my life, but I still want it.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
And it does have I mean, those experiences are close
enough to you know, your experience walking around in this environment, right,
Those experiences are close enough that they can trigger neurological reactions,
even hormonal changes. I think there is something real about them.
(36:55):
You know what I mean to some degree. And of
course everybody's been a gamer or reads a lot, you
might have that weird feeling when you beat a game,
you know, and the credits roll, or you finish a
book and you think, oh, I'm back, Yeah, what do
(37:17):
I do now?
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Well, and you also are gifted with this feeling of accomplishment,
even though all you did was press some buttons for
a long time and set on the couch for too long.
But you know, look, and I say that as a
lover of games, and I will defend my right and
you're right to play them, and that it's actually pretty
good for us in a lot of different ways. But
(37:38):
in the end, in this reality, it truly is at
best sharpening your perception.
Speaker 3 (37:46):
Right right perception, and right now, as we record on
June third, four, it is virtually certain there we go
that people know when they are in one of these
human created environments. They know when they are in a curated,
(38:09):
constrained experience. That's why and Ready Player one, everybody knows
they're logging into a thing and they're going online. Everybody
knows that they're incentivized socially and economically to do so,
but they are very much aware there is a different
preceding world. But then there's another thing. One of our
(38:31):
favorite films on this show throughout its history is The
Matrix in The Matrix's nested reality, and most people don't
know they're in it. They don't get to consent.
Speaker 2 (38:42):
Well, yeah, all of their sensory systems are hooked up
to hardware that makes them believe they are in reality,
which is a creepy thing to think about. And I've
been thinking about it since nineteen ninety nine and iils
shall never cease thinking about it until I'm unplugged Trinity
or whoever she drops down and gets me out of here.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
I also I keep thinking, you know, I think you
can be haunted by good thoughts, just the way you
could be haunted by a spirit.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
And I.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Will never forget the explanation line. It's a throwaway line
in this amazing film where they say maybe we're something like,
maybe we're in a simulation. Now they didn't know what
everything tasted like. That's why everything tastes like chicken. Oh God,
do you remember that line?
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Yeah, but I couldn't tell you what it's from. Right
to us, it's from the Matrix. Oh it is from
the Matrix? Yeah, is that when they're talking about steak,
he's trying to what's his name, Joey Pantoli one Joey
Pants is like, man, this steak is so good. Yeah,
I want steak.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
I think maybe that's it. We got to rewatch it.
But yeah, right to us, because it'll give us an
excuse to rewatch the film. You know, it's weird and
we've known each other for so long and I don't
think we've ever watched it together. Just keep talking about it.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Yeah, well, hey, quick shout out for the episode of
Movie Crush where I talked to Chuck about the Matrix
and we go deep on. I think that line is
in there in our discussion bit about the chicken.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
Nice. Movie Crush is great. I never got a chance
to be on it, but I loved hearing the conversations
and Chuck is a phenomenal interviewer.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
We need to bring it back.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Yeah, we'll see what he says. You know, and I
think they're on tour right now, so check out stuff
you should know on the road if you get a chance.
Show not to be missed for the nature of like,
if we wanted to or if some entity wanted to
arrive at a seamless virtual world, a matrix level world
(40:44):
in which people could not distinguish between the world d're
in now and a created or curated one. Lanier had
a couple of big speed bumps, and in twenty thirteen
he talked about something that Matt you would mentioned earlier,
the two big problems hardware and software. He said, hardware
(41:05):
is going to solve itself eventually, just with economy of scale.
The more you make, the more iterations you make of
a thing, the cheaper the thing becomes in the grand
religion we call economy. But the software is the pickle. Right.
Virtual worlds have to respond much more quickly for human users,
(41:28):
but you have to have multiple people coming in and connecting.
The network has to be seamless, and he says it's
going to take a while to figure out how to
make the network work without hiccups, and that you know,
I wanted to ask you about this, Matt. It reminds
me of the concept of lag when you're playing video games.
(41:49):
Have you ever played online and got caught up in
a like a lag situation? Oh?
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, I've broken several controllers because of Lad's broken them.
I've lost several very important to online characters due to
lag and getting logged out because I think my family
needed to make a phone call. My fifty six K
modem was attached and when they unplugged it and it
was over. But yes, this concept of lag, if your
perception of reality could be so easily interrupted by like
(42:18):
a couple of frames getting dropped or skipped right, then
you would lose that proprioception trickery and it would no
longer feel like a virtual world of connecting this back
to our shared reality, this one that you're listening to
this podcast in. I've never experienced lag like that we've experienced. Maybe, well,
(42:41):
I know I have experienced some weird things with reality,
like a blip in time, or when the lights all
flicker at once, or a weird sound, or you know,
seeing a specter in my doorway where it makes you
feel like, oh, well, maybe this reality isn't exactly what
we all think it is, or it doesn't function the
way we all think it does. But I've never seen
(43:01):
anything like lag, which is a terrible and real problem
when it comes to processing that much information at once
for multiple people. But I would argue, and what'd you say?
Linear said this a long time ago.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
Twenty thirteen, it's about ten years ago.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
So I think we're actually there now. If you think
about some of these large scale games that are run
in the cloud essentially at once and served to everybody
essentially via a supercomputer of sorts, I think we might
be there.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, we're getting very close, right. And one thing that's
fascinating about human technology is as it improves, it tends
to emulate parts of nature. Right, the most sophisticated systems
and structures and processes are echoing things that already naturally occurred,
(43:57):
because that's the most efficient way for that stuff to work,
and natural reality also already needed hardware and software. The
hardware is your body and all the physical forces surrounding
you've seen and unseen. And the software is your mind
as you're listening now. I'm trying to make my eyes
(44:19):
look less crazy. Sorry, your mind as you're listening now,
and the minds of every other living thing you encounter.
The tricky part is not all the software is the same.
And I'm still stuck to your point. Yes, I agree,
massive online role playing or massive online gaming in general,
(44:40):
is reducing a lot of lag I'm just thinking about
waking up one evening and you walk outside and you
have a laggy connection with the world. You know, that
would be so weird.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Ben, you said that in your video. Froze as you said,
and then it picks back up. That was nuts.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
Let's not let look too closely, right, Let's take reality
at its word. All right, Well, we'll check our connections.
Uh and uh, you know, play some mats. Okay, we
have returned, as we said, Matt, you and Paul and
(45:24):
I are recording this on June third, twenty twenty four.
And I love the point you made that we are
in an era of breakthroughs, right, escalating breakthroughs, feedback loops
of innovation, and I think a lot of the stuff
that was once considered science fiction is becoming science fact. Right.
(45:46):
Do you think we'll reach a point where someone would
be unable to distinguish a virtual reality from a physical reality.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Hopefully not, and hopefully creators of such realities would know
how dangerous that could be. I think you would build
in something, whether it's a hud like a head's up display,
or something that would make you aware at all times
that you are not in actual reality.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
At that up.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Well, it could be that, but just something in the
corner that's literally a menu or something, or a place
where you could place your hand, and everybody knows if
you put your hand here, you will bring up the
menu every time, or a button or something to where
a human being, you'd make it a lot less likely
that a human being could get fully.
Speaker 3 (46:34):
Lost, right yeah, kind of similar to I think in
some countries it was China, there were moves to restrict
the amount of time people could spend immersed in like
you know, an internet cafe, right, yeah, because people were
(46:54):
going so deep, going so hard, to the point where
the only thing that took them out of that experience
was the physical need for stuff like food, water, and excrement,
you know.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
Which was often solved by getting a little creative with
your seat.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
Yes, yes, getting a little spicy with the seat. And
we know, like, I appreciate what you're saying there, because
I think it is statistically inevitable that humans and machines
will continue to meld together like increasingly inextricable. You know,
(47:35):
it sounds it sounds nuts to say, what if there's
a world in a few years where you have an
AI avatar that legally represents you. It does. It's like
your valet, your digital doppelganger. It does all the stuff
that you need or that you don't want to do. Uh,
And that sounds nuts. But not too long ago, people,
(48:00):
I thought it was ridiculous that someone would always have
a cell phone or a smartphote. You know, why would
you spy on yourself? And now billions do it.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Well, yeah, you can see it already in the workings
of things like Siri and Alexo, where you can program
those pieces of hardware and software to give you an
update on your day. Right here. You can give it
access to your email, right in your schedule and all
this stuff. And even in Microsoft with ourly enterprise systems,
you can it will say, Hey, morning, Ben, here's what's
(48:33):
on your plate for the day. This person has a
question about this, this person has a question about that.
You need to do this, and you can. It's I
don't think it's automated fully to the point where you could,
through that system just give it a couple of quick
answers and then it would reply to all the emails
and do the things exactly the way you'd want it to.
But I imagine that's coming up very soon where you have
(48:54):
like a meeting in the morning, you know, five minute
meeting to get the rundown, take care of all all
your stuff, and then anything else that pops up, you
get alerted to it.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
And it's normalized now because it's a common thing that
people can experience. Right, Google or Alexa. We have given
these identities to these things. We have put a language
and nomenclature upon them. I mean, also, let's just say
it out loud, a lot of us are listening to
this on those same smartphones we're describing, or on the
(49:28):
Alexa right or the Amazon Echo or what have you.
I also, I think what's gonna happen is humans are
gonna finally get past the hands. I think that's another
step too.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
I hope not. I like the hands.
Speaker 3 (49:44):
I like, you know, I'm a fan of hands. Yeah,
I'm a fan of hands. I will die of that
hill if I have to, if need be. But you know,
it's gonna sound crazy like for anyone who just had
a child this year, first off, congraduate relations. Secondly, if not,
by the time your kid is thirty, by the time
(50:06):
your kid has a kid that turns eighteen. If the
world doesn't collapse, it is going to sound crazy that
you used to type with your hands.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
Yeah, used to type with your hands, used to do
so many things with your hands. But now you kind
of just you can wave if you want in a
couple of different ways. You can still use them. Just
don't like touch anything.
Speaker 3 (50:29):
Why would you touch stuff? What are you old? You know? Like,
I do think it's funny how we normalize these things.
But it'll maybe go the way of the old modem
scream like we were talking about with the fifty six
bit connection. Was that one of those things where it
goes through the phone line and it has that weird noise.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yeah, Ultimately it's using your phone system, the same lines
that connect your phone to the outer world in the network.
It's using that to dial literally dial in to the
Internet to a server somewhere.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
And we don't even have to play the noise. I
think we can all hear it. Oh, well, should we
play it?
Speaker 2 (51:10):
Anybody born in the nineteen hundreds, Yes.
Speaker 3 (51:14):
Dary Fault, Yes, please play it. Oh, you'll love to
hear it. You'll love to hear it. Do you think
it's likely, though, or possible that a that within the
lifetime of people listening. Now, would it be possible for
an individual to one day live entirely within a constructed
(51:37):
reality and not know?
Speaker 2 (51:40):
I think maybe someone's born into a system.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Like matrix style. Could it happened.
Speaker 2 (51:47):
I don't know. I feel like that's not going to
happen unless it plays out literally like the matrix where
man versus machine and man for some reason is useful
to machine. But I don't think it would be right.
Speaker 3 (52:00):
That was the nicest part of the Matrix mythos was
the computer Empire, the robot Empire. Machine Empire decided, well,
we'll keep them around for something.
Speaker 2 (52:13):
Batteries, Yeah, batteries and goo. They make such good goo.
Speaker 3 (52:19):
Guys, have you ever had quality human goo? Oh? Boy,
I don't know if we should keep that one.
Speaker 2 (52:27):
We take it over. You want all kinds of different.
Speaker 3 (52:30):
Good perception and perspective. Yeah, this might be helpful when
we're talking about this before we get to a back
to observer effect, which is what we're kind of setting
up here, right, It may be helpful given that every person,
a meat person or a digital person, what have you.
Everyone is living in a kind of self constructed reality.
(52:53):
Perception is your reality. But it is your specific reality.
It's the stuff you experience assume to be correct. Other
perceptions are not the same as yours, and that's part
of the reason people argue so often. So it might
be better to think in terms of perspective. You know,
(53:13):
perception says, I am the ultimate arbiter of my world, right,
I am the protagonist the way I encounter and experience
and understand things, that's the main thing. And if someone
has a problem with that, they're wrong. But if we
move from perception to perspective, then we can ask how
a reality is different, what is it that this person
(53:37):
or this entity is experiencing, And we can try to
The weird way to put it is it's like trying
to understand the alien software of another mind, and it's
a tough thing to do. You know, I guess it's empathy.
Speaker 2 (53:53):
Yeah, for empathy.
Speaker 3 (53:54):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's going a long way. You know,
we'll see how it does.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (54:00):
Man.
Speaker 2 (54:01):
I have an eight year old, so I know that
the only way for him to truly learn lessons doesn't
matter how many times I tell him what the lesson is,
what the parameters of it are, what the outcomes potentially
are Unless he does a thing and experiences the consequences
of that thing, it doesn't seem to sink into his head.
And I'm sure I was the same way. I'm sure
(54:22):
most of us are the same way. I just don't
know how any of us can truly understand something until
it has happened to us, right, or we have observed
it and perceived it and then basically applied our perspective
to it.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
Yeah, it reminds me of It was a little bit
of a personal thing. I'll keep it short. It reminds
me of an adage I learned from my mother before
she passed. She was a teacher for some time, and
she had some I'm trying to remember. It was something like,
when I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember
(55:01):
when I do, I understand that.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
That's amazing. Maybe you know, maybe I feel that way.
I totally feel that way, except well, well, yeah, the
only the only thing I Some people learn really well
when they hear and not well when they see. Right,
So just that's the only thing, buttally exactly, but I
totally understand exactly what that means. If I haven't done
(55:27):
a thing, I don't really understand what it is or
how it feels.
Speaker 3 (55:32):
Also, there's nothing in that little proverb about the smell,
you know what I mean, what happens when you smell?
How does that? What if someone what if someone said, oh,
my primary learning style is smell? Could you explain algebra
in like a more old factory way here?
Speaker 2 (55:51):
Try this, I understand.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
Take a whiff of this calculus. I mean, okay, so
now we're we're ill exploring questions that spoiler, people haven't answered.
But it does bring us back to the observer effect,
the double slid experiment, the thing no one can really explain, like,
when we observe a thing, to what degree are we
(56:16):
participating in that particular perspective of experience? When that person
to your earlier example, Matt, when that person walks by
and says hey, you hear them say hey, whether or
not you say something back to them, to what degree
are you, by observation, participating in and affecting their reality?
(56:37):
I don't know, that's maybe that's just too fluffy.
Speaker 2 (56:40):
No, No, it goes back to maybe my my most
weird thoughts on this whole thing, And it goes back
to virtual worlds, and it goes back to imagining what
it would be like if this world, this reality we experience,
is some kind of information field of potentials, and in
(57:04):
everything that we know and think we know and experience.
Speaker 3 (57:08):
Is a potential.
Speaker 2 (57:09):
And I imagine it as a chair in an empty room.
This room you've been into before. You constructed that chair,
You made it out of wood, right, and it's just
sitting there. You know that it's there, but you leave
and you die and you're gone. But then a couple
hundred years later, another human being finds this room and
(57:33):
walks into it and looks at that chair. What I'm
imagining is that in between those two instances where this
chair was seen, you know, separated by hundreds of years,
is that chair actually sitting there in that room? Or
is the potential of that chair, the information that is
(57:54):
contained of what that chair is. Is it just sitting
there idly, almost as data that isn't being currently processed.
It's just kind of it is the information field that
is a chair that has constructed very specific materials in
a specific way, and all that information is there at
(58:14):
all times. But until somebody opens that door again and
looks at that chair, is it actually sitting in there?
And I really it feels to me the way a
virtual world is created, especially a very very large one,
where certain parts of a map of a world are
not loaded, but it is known the hardware is not
(58:35):
processing any of that stuff, but the software knows what
is supposed to go.
Speaker 3 (58:39):
There, right, Yeah, Yeah, it.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
Just hasn't injected it through the hardware system.
Speaker 3 (58:45):
It hasn't loaded the map, so you speak, yeah, I
think that's a beautiful thought.
Speaker 2 (58:50):
I don't know, I feel like there's something to that here,
but you know, it then goes back to the observer
and what is the observer? Is it an animal? Is
it a plant? It is? What is consciousness? What is
the thing that observes so that the everything is and
exists and is being processed through hardware?
Speaker 3 (59:11):
Yeah, send us your pets for some very not weird experiments. Yeah,
just in the mail, just in the just please don't,
please don't. We love your pets and we love the photos,
but we we think they enjoy their lives with you folks.
I think that is a fascinating thought, Matt, because it
(59:31):
reminds me again right now, probably in the old in
the old evenings, the best comparison would be losing oneself
in a story, right, But I think now the best comparison,
the most relevant and immediate, is what you're describing the
experience of gaming, especially in an immersive game. I sometimes
(59:53):
will log into my old Skyrim stuff where i've i've
and I'm not bragging here. I got one hundred percent
and completion because I didn't want to go outside. You know,
I'm not proud of it. I should have done better
things with my time. But now I just walk around
in this made up world. I don't even fighting body.
Sometimes I'm just like buying soup.
Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
I'm genuinely impressed at one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
It's not cool. Don't like, it's not something to be
proud of.
Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
You should start making videos. One of my favorite ASMR guys,
I think his name is the ASMR Nerd, and he
does a bunch of videos, the whole series where he
walks around Skyrim, just the sounds of the footsteps and
the ambience and the wildlife sometimes the music, and he's
just talking. Oh and here we have a lovely fjords.
(01:00:43):
It's amazing beautiful, I mean.
Speaker 3 (01:00:45):
But also, you know, like you said with another video
gaming sample, like you beat elden Ring, right, like you
you you knocked the crap out of that, and it's
still party is still kind of in there sensing. But
that that's another example of this observation in an immersive
(01:01:10):
world because things will take time to load, you know,
And the question is the question is where do things
go when you're not looking at them? And I love
the point you're bringing up about theory of mind. When
you're seeing your your son grow cognitively and physically and
(01:01:31):
think through things. Right, you watch that guy learn language,
which is amazing. And this I think part of the
theory of mind is the idea of object permanence. Right
does the thing exist when I do not physically see, touch,
or hear the thing?
Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
But what if it's object permanence for all things that
have eyes and ears and noses.
Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Right in tongues? Yeah, yeah, that's That's where I'm going
to man like think about. It's the old tree falling
in a forest concept, and I'm wondering. You know, it
reminds me of since we're talking about games, it reminds
me of extraordinary objects or artifacts of power in control.
(01:02:18):
What are they called? Ah something? You know what I mean?
Objects of power is real? Okay, objective power. I think
one of those spoiler folks. There, there's something I can't
remember what it was, Maybe it was a refrigerator or whatever,
but it's locked up and someone has to stare at
it all the time because if they don't, if someone
(01:02:39):
is not looking at it, stuff goes horribly wrong. Yeah,
that's so cool, I think. Now I'm sorry I've derailed this.
Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
I loaded that game back up again to show my
girlfriend and she was genuinely interested. And she does not
like video games, but it's because of all those artifacts.
You get to find, all the papers that documents, all
that stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
God, that's so great. Can't wait. If you are interested
in learning, if you like this show and video games remotely,
you will love the show Control Matt, I can't thank
you enough again for putting me onto that game. They
have another the studio as one called Alan Wake. Alan
Wake two recently came out and we're waiting for Control too.
(01:03:23):
Are that which point they're gonna do another one? At
which point I cannot wait to see what kind of
ridiculous excuses you and Noel Barcelona Brown and I send
to our colleagues right like, how are we going to
explain that we're calling in sick for video game. I'm
(01:03:44):
just gonna be honest. I'll be like, guys, I gotta.
Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
I've been banking vacation days since twenty nineteen in hopes
that Control two would one day be released.
Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
It'll just be a run of classic episodes. But there's
something else to Matt. This is what it leads me
to think. And I'm very interested in your observations here, observations. Okay,
what if we created a virtual space, a virtual world
or reality, and we conducted the double slit experiment there?
(01:04:18):
What if we you know, what if we had everybody
listening at home, and you and me and Paul and
Noel physically at a great distance from each other, logging in,
and some portion of the group just looks at one slit,
some portion looks at another. They're not in contact with
(01:04:40):
each other.
Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
This is I love the idea, Ben, I love this idea,
and let's do it.
Speaker 3 (01:04:45):
First of all, I don't know if it'll I don't
know if it's worth doing. I just think it's trippy.
Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
Well, the second thing is I think it would The
outcome would depend exactly and precisely on the physics engine
that functions in that virtual world.
Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
Because that's the observer, right, that's the ultimate observer.
Speaker 2 (01:05:02):
Well, because the physics engine has code that says, this
is how light functions in this environment, and this is
how light interacts with these materials in this environment. Right,
So you would I think you'd be able to predict
that every time, simply because we know the underlying.
Speaker 3 (01:05:17):
Code, we know the engine.
Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Yeah, but in our reality, we still don't know what
that is. We don't know what it looks like, we
don't know who wrote it, if anybody wrote it, if
it even is code. Maybe it's just something else.
Speaker 3 (01:05:34):
And that's the question too. As civilization arrived at the
point where just from scrabbling around at the corners of experience,
we found, you know, a chink in the armor, right,
a gap in the plates. And if that is true,
if that is the case, what happens when we worry
(01:05:55):
at that crevice? What happens when we pull the plate
or the surface back? What do we see beneath?
Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Mister Anderson?
Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
That's great? Oh, and then what if we set up
the okay real world? Then what if we set up
the double slit experiment and we let it run somehow
for a thousand years? And we never intervene and we
never check on it until a millennia has passed, and.
Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Then we'll be like, oh, look it's an interference pattern. Well,
like that's what that's why there there are people to
this day as of April twenty twenty three. Uh there, well,
I mean it's still right now, it's probably happening. There
are people who are trying to modify the experiment even further.
There's a group, uh they just published in Nature last
(01:06:44):
year from Imperial College. They were trying to do the
double slit experiment but with time dilation and like could
like I don't understand it, y'all. I'm gonna give you
this so you can look it up on your own.
It's in the Quantum Insider. It's written by Matt Swain,
April fourth, twenty twenty three. The title is Time is
(01:07:08):
on My Sides with an s researchers show double slit
experiment also applies to time and it has to do
with putting some kind of material in front of the
slits that basically slows down the light. I think I
don't know if that's right or not. I've read the
entire article and I still couldn't tell you exactly what
(01:07:30):
it means, but it was iridium tin oxide that they
used to make time slits in quotation, I don't know,
I don't know what that means.
Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Sorry, we have to tell you the research. No, this
is also I mean, this is another thing that maybe
a future episode with your help, fellow conspiracy realist. Because
time is part of reality, or at least the way
your perception and perspective of time. Right, we all just
sort of agree that it's Monday, you know what I mean.
(01:08:01):
We all sort of agree that in one part of
the world it's three pm, and then in another part
it's two pm at big because you know, yeah, at
railroad tycoons or whatever, and farming. But when you when
you drill down into the concept of time, things also
get fuzzy because time is just like reality, part of
(01:08:25):
a thing everyone has collectively agreed that they pretend to understand.
And just don't make it complicated, you know what I mean.
Someone asks you about your schedule, don't don't say, here's
the history of why the calendar is weird and it's
not perfect, you know, and we're actually a few seconds
off all the time.
Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
I just got the first weapon in control too.
Speaker 3 (01:08:50):
Exactly right, I think you mean Pervis day, right, whatever,
I don't know. In any case, Matt and Paul and I,
we think you can agree, the mystery only deepens. We
are now at a point with scientific evidence where we
(01:09:10):
can say reality seems to be dependent on factors human
civilization does not understand. The scariest thing that this teaches
us is that it appears that when one observes reality,
reality looks back at you. It might know that you're watching, yeah, and.
Speaker 2 (01:09:33):
It might change itself to either accommodate you or to
trick you.
Speaker 3 (01:09:40):
And to this date we have not interviewed an electron
nor a photon for their perspectives on the confounded nature
of reality. If they are particles, even if you know,
even if they just are particles that wave at us
sometimes right, if they see us on the streets the
mean streets of reality. If you are a photon or
an electron, or a person or a digital intelligence, and
(01:10:03):
you have some thoughts here, again, like Matt and I
said at the beginning, if you can explain the double
slit experiment, like if you can solve light, you know,
please write to us. We don't know if anybody's ever
asked you. If you have the answer to that, find
us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You could also give us
a phone call.
Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
Yeah, you could call one eight three three std WYTK
right after you call Fermilab and explain to them whatever
you figured out because or well, you know whatever, those
other places are that are doing this all the time.
But if you call our number, you can leave us
a three minute voicemail message, give yourself a cool nickname,
and say whatever you'd like do. At some point say
whether or not we can use your name and message
(01:10:45):
on the air. If you got more to say, they
could fit in that three minutes, Attachments, links, whatever you got.
Why not send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (01:10:52):
We are the entities that read every email. We get
the well aware of folks, just like reality stares back.
Sometimes the void answers you conspiracydiheartradio dot.
Speaker 2 (01:11:04):
Com stuff they don't want you to know is a
(01:11:25):
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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