Bootstraping Existence

 

At the dawn of the 20th century physicists were convinced that they had won. The cosmos and its mysteries laid bare before human intellect; the cogs of creation, set in motion by the Divine watchmaker, all but understood. Then Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg threw a wrench in the machine and since then nothing made sense.

Quantum Mechanics was not only notoriously difficult to understand but was also counterintuitive to human experience. A mysterious world of collapsing probabilities, faster than light entangled communication and uncertainties. It looked like the Watchmaker was, in fact, playing dice with the Universe.

That is until a lowly science emerged with the aim of creating “computers” and in the process stumbled upon the machinery of both reality and of consciousness.

Bootstrapping Reality

Pong, a rudimentary video game, heralded the era of computer graphics. A clumsy, primitive use of mathematical functions and silicon transistors. A fun pastime at best. Half a century later, computer graphics are indistinguishable from reality.

A 3D world is comprised at the lowest, quantized level, out of pixels. The objects that comprise the world are represented as data sets and are only rendered into view for the observer. Communication between pixels is instantaneous no matter the (virtual) distance because they do not exist as physical objects bound by the laws of the known physics, but only as information quanta.

Everything we experience visually in a computer-generated simulation is analogous to Quantum Mechanic’s incomprehensible yet observable truth.

The Universe is a simulation.

Intelligence is Artificial

Even if the modern, state-of-the-art computer simulations give tremendous credit to the Simulation Hypothesis, there was one last holy grail, one more grand mystery that no science had managed to solve. The field where religious mysticism still reigned supreme.

The human cognition, that unquantifiable wonder of reasoning and self-awareness. The driving force behind humankind’s supremacy upon Earth’s dominion. A gift from God, impossible to duplicate and to unravel.

Neuroscientists probed and theorized; philosophers pondered; priest sang praises to the Lord.

Then that lowly science that began once to build “computers” decided to throw massive amounts of compute and data onto an old idea called neural networks. Like computer graphics before it, it tried to mimic something from the “real” world, the function of a human neuron.

And it worked.

Large Language Models or LLMs prove that given a structured mechanism for abstract representation, such as language, a neural network can develop reasoning and deductive abilities.

Turns out the mind (nous) is a self-emergent phenomenon from a complex, self-referencing, information processing network.

The Watchmaker

Computer science stumbled twice within half a century to the underlying mechanics of two of the biggest mysteries of our existence, the nature of Reality and the nature of the Mind.

Where does that leave us?

Glimpsing the machinery of existence does not belittle its purpose, if there is any, on the contrary, it makes it even more fascinating.

Everything you remember, hope and dream is still real to you. Abstract information in a universal noosphere conjured into existence by your brain.

There is one issue though. God.

Turns out he was not a divine mystical being crafting reality with love and a watchmaker’s precision.

He was a programmer.