Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowThe Observer Effect and the Double Slit Experiment: Ben and Matt vs. Reality
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."
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.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt Our colleague Nol is still on an adventure, but will be returning very soon.
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. 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.
Beautiful, beautiful. That describes exactly what each and every one of us does when we open our eyes in the morning.
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 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, how would you explain reality?
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.
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, 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.
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.
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 this show, but they're not bad at it. They're not bad at that one.
Oh well, I don't know. I think I think a lot of us are a little bad at it.
I know, a little bad show a little bad.
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.
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 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?
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.
You got a ghost hunting cat, I think.
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.
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 group perception strays too far from the majority perspective or consensus, we call those people insane.
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 or not you believe that right now, at.
Least you have to observe and measure. Yeah, but.
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 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.
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 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. 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, 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.
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.
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 is the double Slit Experiment and observer effect.
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 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 we're going through every day. But why don't you tell us about this guy?
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 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 chemical reactions, or should we think of it like a series of little pew pew pew particles.
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 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.
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, 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
M yeah, it looks like someone drew a barcode by just sort of putting little dots, yeah around.
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.
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. 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, 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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 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. Poor k Nolos dose. Man, it's nuts.
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 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.
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.
No, there's no end to the number of people who have a hypothesis, right.
Oh yeah, we got to get Terrence Howard.
On the phone one at times one what happened to the other one?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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 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?
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 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 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. That's kind of weird.
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?
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 thing that was around earlier that we still don't understand.
Yeah, okay, well, yeah, it's it's a simulated closed system reality.
Right.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 that I'm still uncomfortable with.
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 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 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.
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, 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.
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.
Oooh no, totally, wow.
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, 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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
That's the sixty experience.
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, 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, 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.
What okay, if it goes back that far, what is the even what could it mean?
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 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. 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 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 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.
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, 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.
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 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?
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 real hack in there is that your hands and head movement are controlling what you're experiencing.
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, 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 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?
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 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 my life, but I still want it.
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. 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 I do now?
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 in the end, in this reality, it truly is at best sharpening your perception.
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, 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 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.
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.
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.
And I.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need to bring it back.
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 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 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, 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. Have you ever played online and got caught up in a like a lag situation? Oh?
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 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, 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 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.
Twenty thirteen, it's about ten years ago.
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.
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, 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 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, 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.
Ben, you said that in your video. Froze as you said, and then it picks back up. That was nuts.
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 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. Do you think we'll reach a point where someone would be unable to distinguish a virtual reality from a physical reality.
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.
At that up.
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.
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 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.
Which was often solved by getting a little creative with your seat.
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, 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, 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
I hope not. I like the hands.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
And we don't even have to play the noise. I think we can all hear it. Oh, well, should we play it?
Anybody born in the nineteen hundreds, Yes.
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 reality and not know?
I think maybe someone's born into a system.
Like matrix style. Could it happened.
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.
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.
Batteries, Yeah, batteries and goo. They make such good goo.
Guys, have you ever had quality human goo? Oh? Boy, I don't know if we should keep that one.
We take it over. You want all kinds of different.
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. 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, 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 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.
Yeah, for empathy.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's going a long way. You know, we'll see how it does.
Yeah, I don't know.
Man.
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 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.
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 when I do, I understand that.
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 a thing, I don't really understand what it is or how it feels.
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?
Try this, I understand.
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 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? I don't know, that's maybe that's just too fluffy.
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 everything that we know and think we know and experience.
Is a potential.
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 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 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 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 processing any of that stuff, but the software knows what is supposed to go.
There, right, Yeah, Yeah, it.
Just hasn't injected it through the hardware system.
It hasn't loaded the map, so you speak, yeah, I think that's a beautiful thought.
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?
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 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 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.
I'm genuinely impressed at one hundred percent.
It's not cool. Don't like, it's not something to be proud of.
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. It's amazing beautiful, I mean.
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 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 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?
But what if it's object permanence for all things that have eyes and ears and noses.
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. 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 is not looking at it, stuff goes horribly wrong. Yeah, that's so cool, I think. Now I'm sorry I've derailed this.
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.
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. 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 just gonna be honest. I'll be like, guys, I gotta.
I've been banking vacation days since twenty nineteen in hopes that Control two would one day be released.
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? 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 each other.
This is I love the idea, Ben, I love this idea, and let's do it.
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.
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.
Because that's the observer, right, that's the ultimate observer.
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.
Code, we know the engine.
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.
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 at that crevice? What happens when we pull the plate or the surface back? What do we see beneath?
Mister Anderson?
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.
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 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 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 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.
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. 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 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.
I just got the first weapon in control too.
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 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.
It might change itself to either accommodate you or to trick you.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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