Seven Steps Toward an Authored Universe

Speaker 1

Tom W. Bell’s religious views are passed from childhood faith Methodist style to militant atheism then struggling agnosticism, and of late, recreational theology.

Speaker 2

He earned a BA in philosophy from the University of Kansas. an MA in Philosophy from the University of Southern California, and a JD from the University of Chicago. Tom serves on the faculty of the Chapter University, Bowie School of Law. where he teaches all the first-year common law courses and electrics in high-tech and intellectual property. He has published papers on copyright, internal law, polycentric law. constitutional law, prediction markets, and the Third Amendment. That’s the one about poly. Just as a reminder. And notes include intellectual privilege. copyright, common law, and the common good, and your next government from the nation-state to stateless nations Cambridge University Press, fourth company in 2017. Through his consulting firm, Archimediate LLC, Bell advises companies developing special economic zones. on the design, installation, and support of entire legal systems since I’m going to come.

Tom W. Bell

I’m so pleased to be here. I am not a member of the NTA, but I really enjoyed learning about their interests and meeting all of you. And today I’m going to offer you some views that I hope you will have comments on. I have questions for you, and I hope the individual has questions for me. And I’m going to walk through this inquiry about an author universe in seven And that if we have a PowerPoint, I’ll start taking you through those. But basically, from you, I hope I’ll hear eventually. Maybe we won’t have time for QA here, but I’d like to hear how the views I put forth job with the doctrines of your faith as well as the specialized interests of the Mormons. Converting people to the faith, about spreading their views. And so I come to you as someone who has been through all kinds of views about the existence of God. And I’ve ended up with an argument which might help you convince people like me that it’s possible we live in an authored universe. An authored universe. Meaning there is a creator of our universe. So let’s see how that goes.

Tom W. Bell

We’ll start out with the seven steps quickly. I’ll go through them here by way of preview. The first one is: we’re just going to ask: is there authorship of our universe? That’s step one. We asked the question. Secondly, we’ll ask well, actually, I’ll tell you about some work, which I didn’t do, but I’ve read about, about simulated universes. We’ll talk about how that might instruct our inquiry. I’ll tell you about how I think universes tend towards equality over time Then we’ll talk about the reproduction of universes. That’s effectively what’s going on here. When people create simulated universes, they are reproducing our universe, which allows us to invoke principles of biology. when we think about universes. And lots of interesting things follow from that, including, I dare say, my small contribution to this area of interest for all of us is the meaning of life. What are we here for? I have at least a tentative answer to that. I really want to see what you think about that. And then we’ll wrap up by my conclusion that we might actually be able to figure out not yet, but we might be able to figure out whether or not we live in an authored universe. And I’ll tell you how.

Tom W. Bell

So let’s start with step one, naturally enough. I’m just going to say, again, our question is: is our universe authored? Now, let me be careful here. I’m not going to be able to establish the existence of an all-powerful, omnipotent, omniscient God. That’s not really what I’m after. That may be possible, but my argument won’t get us there. If this argument works, though, you will have reason to believe, perhaps, if your line of thought follows mine, that we live in an authored universe. So who created this universe? People pretty much like us. It’s basically us with a little more technology and a little more careful thinking and basically kind of ideology that we get out of discussions like this. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not omnipotent or omniscient, very far from it. And I don’t think even with all of us together we would have those powers. But if we got together, people like us with laboratories and funding and the right ideology. It’s conceivable we could create something very much like our universe, and we would exercise over that universe incredible powers. We could like pull the plug But that, of course, is not omnipotence. That’s like awesome power relative to that universe. But let’s just be clear: I’m not going to get us to God. I’m going to get us to maybe some really interesting, productive people, but not God. So there’s our image for that. But let’s move on.

Tom W. Bell

Let’s talk about simulations. I want to tell you about Nick Bostrom’s argument here. Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at Oxford, and he came up with this argument, which I find utterly convincing. He’s backed it up with math, and it goes in very brief like this: if a simulation of any kind of our universe is possible Then we almost certainly live in a simulated universe. I’ll say it again, and then I’ll give you an illustration. If it’s possible to, with a computer, this is a very primitive computer game, it’s SimCity. But if it’s possible with a really upgraded version of SimCity to create something like this universe around us, it’s basically this game with a lot more resolution. If it’s possible to make one of those Then it’s possible to make lots of them. If you write this computer program once, you hit Ctrl C and you make a copy. You can make lots of copies. Alright, that’s pretty logical.

Tom W. Bell

Let me just take a breath here to say that’s not necessarily true. Let’s just keep in mind the possibility. It’s something we could maybe talk about over dinner. It may turn out actually that creating a simulated universe is really tough. It’s like a super collider, you know, like the CERN super collider they have in Europe. You basically only get one of those. They’re so expensive to build. So that would change Bostrom’s argument. But let’s now just go forward with Bostrom’s argument. He said, if you can create one simulation, you hit Control C, you make lots of copies. A very interesting result follows from that. It means we almost certainly live in a simulation. Why so?

Tom W. Bell

Now, our simulation, if we live in a simulated universe, is not like this. When you’re in the universe, You’re like a fish in water. You don’t even notice the features that make it simulated. You take it for granted that it’s the real universe. So uh you may not sense this, but it turns out you can think of your universe as like one slot on a roulette wheel. A huge roulette wheel, and it spins, and you’re the ball bouncing around, and you don’t know what kind of universe you’re going to end up in. In Bostrom’s worldview, there’s one original real universe. where maybe people very much like us figured out, hey, let’s create a copy of our universe, and then they populated all the other slots in the roulette wheel with the simulations. So when we consider what kind of world do we live in, we should picture ourselves as that roulette ball bouncing around this massive roulette wheel with lots and lots of slots, almost all of which are simulations. If you can create that one simulation, you’re going to have all those other simulations in your roulette wheel, which means you and me probably are in a simulated universe. If anybody can create one simulated universe, they probably created lots of them, which it’s just a question of odds, probably puts us in a simulated universe. So that’s Nick Bostrom’s argument. So let’s see where this takes you. You may already be at the part where you go, whoa, mind blown, but there’s more.

Tom W. Bell

So I want to talk about equalization. What is what if suppose we live in a simulated universe, what do we know about the authors of our universe? I’ve said they don’t have to be gods. They’re basically people like us running much more sophisticated computers than we have. Maybe not much more s sophisticated, but more sophisticated computers than we have. What else do we know about the people who create our universe? Maybe not much, but I will say this: we know something about them. They like to create simulated universes. Indeed, that may be the only thing we know. Is that well, they get their giggles out of this. I hope, you know, we’re doing the song and dance you want, creators of our universe. But I think we can actually drive more. From the conclusion that if you think we live in a simulated universe, I think there’s reason to believe that universes kind of converge towards equality over time.

Tom W. Bell

So think about that SimCity game. You look at that now, you’re kind of frustrated. You play it, you go, oh man, it’s really low resolution, it’s just a game. You could get very absorbed, but it’s obviously very different from our world. And if you work in SimCity, Inc. and you’re making simulated worlds, you’re always trying to make it more exact. That’s what your customers want. So over time, we would expect convergence between the models of the universe. And the real thing. Here’s some guys working in a wind tunnel, and they have exactly the same phenomena, the same pressures, the same incentives that someone creating SimCity has. They want to create their model as accurately as possible because why? They got money on the line, right? If they don’t do this model right, that plane could blow up and they lose money, people die. And over time, with increasing sophistication, money, technology, they’re going to make their simulations more and more like The real world.

Tom W. Bell

And I think there’s a strong possibility if we live in a created, an authored universe, it will probably have a lot of the same features as the universe that authored it. Because, well, we’re vain. People love mirrors. When we create universes, it’s true we tweak them a little bit, like maybe this one has elves in it. But if essentially the physics engine is a lot like the physics engine in this Universe and the trees look like trees and the humans act like humans. It’s what we like. We tweak a little few things for entertainment sometimes, and sometimes we do simulations not even for entertainment. It’s to predict financial futures or to determine what this complicated machine will do once it starts flying. No entertainment involved. They want those simulations to be as Accurate as possible. So, equality over time should be a trend we see between an authoring universe where people much like us are sitting around creating universes and the universes they create. Over time, you’re going to see many of those universes are going to look like the universe that created them, because that’s what we want to see when we create universes. That gets us into some really interesting stuff.

Tom W. Bell

Because now we’re talking about reproductive processes. So we can start applying to cosmology and these questions of the authorship of our universe principles from biology. Now, the method of reproduction is different. When chickens reproduce, it is the egg that comes first, by the way. Right? Because there’s a proto-chicken that some scientists say is almost a chicken, but it’s lacking some mutation. I don’t know where they draw that line. And then you have the first egg that really has a baby chicken in it. I’m happy to solve that problem for you. But we have bigger fish to fry, like the meaning of life, which we’ll get to in a second. What are we here for? But you can apply these same principles.

Tom W. Bell

So let’s think about this for a second. So, if universes, like animals, can reproduce. What kind of feature should we see in the universes that are being reproduced? And it should be that they reproduce Also, this follows also from the equality of universes. So, let’s suppose you and me, we all get together, Lincoln gets a lot of funding, and we start creating universes. It’s fun. It’s maybe consistent with Mormon theology. It’s certainly consistent with the views I’m putting forth. And we start creating universes, and we’re going to make it look like our universe. What’s a really interesting feature about our universe? It’s got people in it that like creating universes. So when we create our universe, we’re going to try to put ourselves in it. There’s going to be people down in that universe creating universes. up to the limit of resolution.

Tom W. Bell

Nature doesn’t have that problem. It cranks out a little baby chick, which can’t reproduce, but it develops because it has these genes in it, which have been naturally selected, and the chick grows up into a rooster or a hen, and together they make babies. That’s how it works. No surprise there for you. I’ve heard some of these talks. They’re surprisingly racy. I kind of impressed, really. So anyhow, ah if we live in a simulated universe, it’s quite possible it’s a universe that has the power itself to reproduce. That There’s a possibility we live in a fertile universe. And that’s really exciting to me because it changes some thinking about, well, what are we here for? Chicks know what they’re here for. They know they’re here to grow up and become chickens and reproduce and continue the species. That might be true of our universe as well. So let’s apply some of these principles of sort of biological reasoning to the cosmology, to the universe around us.

Tom W. Bell

So now we can start to look at universes, including our universe, as really a living being. If someone somewhere created a simulation, it’s likely we live in a simulation. It’s also likely these are the steps of the argument that our simulation has features in it, like its authoring universe. quite possibly including the power to reproduce. So we could have a series of universes, fertile universes, that are reproducing themselves over time. Now, let’s think about this. Is that likely? It’s not just likely, friends. It’s pretty much inevitable. Let me tell you a parable to explain why it might work that way.

Tom W. Bell

Suppose you’re a space scientist. I wanted to be when I was a kid, a space scientist. And you travel to some planet and you discover on this planet, you know, sophisticated things, complicated bits of machinery, it looks like to you. Maybe machinery built out of carbon molecules. Basically, life. If you’re the scientist looking at these things, maybe they look like rocks until you crack one open and you realize, oh, it has all this internal structure. Oh my gosh, I just killed a rock. These rocks are. What are you going to think about these rocks? If there’s lots of them on this planet and they have this complex structure, you’re going to think they must be reproducing because you understand how biology works. So, if that’s true of animals, and they have this power of reproduction, they’ve been selected to have the power to reproduce. Where are all the animals that didn’t have the power to reproduce? They’re gone, they didn’t survive. So we look at universes, the ones that are around are those that have the power to reproduce.

Tom W. Bell

Right? Like you go find a chicken. What do you know about that chicken? It comes from a long line of chickens that knew how to reproduce, and you’re going to see this rooster strutting around and flutting its Fluffing its wings up, and the chickens, the hens laying eggs, because it’s what they do. It’s what they’re designed to do. That could be our universe. If it’s possible for universes to reproduce, Looks like it is. Maybe. At least we can create simulations. Wind tunnels, video games. Maybe we can make simulations that are sophisticated enough. to themselves for themselves to reproduce, if that’s the case, then almost every universe we find simply logic I’m not getting these conclusions by faith, right? Because I kind of gave up on faith. I’m trying to get there by logic and science and even math. I’ve done versions of this that involve some math. Our universe is almost certainly one that’s fertile. It wouldn’t be around otherwise. All the infertile universes dropped out of the picture.

Tom W. Bell

Now, I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, what if we’re in the first universe ever? There had to be a first universe. Probably had to be a first universe. We could be in the first universe, so our universe, maybe it’s infertile. There’s one universe pops up in the void. Doesn’t have the power of reproduction, withers and dies in a vacuum. That’s the end of it. That could be our universe. We have to put that on the table as a possibility. A little dispiriting. I don’t know, maybe it makes you feel special. Personally, I kind of like the idea of Eternal life in many different dimensions. I think it probably appeals to you, but let’s recognize it as a possibility. We live in an infertile universe. That is a possibility.

Tom W. Bell

But Bostrom’s argument suggests that is not very likely. In fact, as soon as we can create one universe that has the power to reproduce, foom, it takes over the environment. Just like when one animal on a barren planet has the power to reproduce, Boom, it takes over the planet. You revisit a few million years later, and it’s algae everywhere. That could be our universe. So, what do you get from this? Ah, the meaning of life. Maybe. Let me give you the argument. What are we here for?

Tom W. Bell

Well, I mean, what makes us happy? If we live in a fertile universe, It has been selected by the same pressures of natural selection that gave us chickens and whales and humans. Our universe has been selected to Want to reproduce. In a sense, it wants to reproduce. It’s got the hardware built in to reproduce. And that universe is going to reward behavior that helps it reproduce. Just like when the rooster starts strutting, it feels good. You don’t have to make an argument to the rooster, go do this. A rooster does it because it comes naturally to the rooster. Same with the hen. She lays the eggs. Nobody gives her an argument. She does it. That could be us in this universe. The universe could be ready to reward us for helping it reproduce. We are the agents to help our universe reproduce. That is what we’re here for

Tom W. Bell

If that’s true, we’re going to find great happiness. I don’t have to spell out all the metaphors here because you’re adults, but we’re going to find great happiness and pleasure in helping our universe to reproduce. And you can actually, this is a testable hypothesis. And I’m putting it to the test right now. And so far, so good. Because part of what our universe needs to reproduce is people like Lincoln and me and you walking around talking about the possibilities of making universes. And if that makes us happy, I think that is a sign. This is a testable hypothesis. That is a sign that indeed we do live in a fertile universe, or at least it’s potentially fertile. We’re kind of in a cute, gangly teenage universe. Its voice is starting to change, and it doesn’t know what’s going on. But we know what’s going on. We’re like the adults. I have a couple of teenagers. And we look at the teenagers and we go, kid, you don’t know what’s coming up, but I do. It’s going to be fun, kind of crazy. You’ll make it through a live. Don’t know about me, but you’ll probably make it. That could be us in this universe.

Tom W. Bell

It’s kind of gangly, it doesn’t really know what’s going on, but it wants to reproduce. And pretty soon, like teenagers figure out. People in this universe are going to figure out, dang, this reproducing universe feels great. It’s the most natural thing ever. Let’s do that. And that, my friends, could be the meaning of life. What we’re here for. There you go. You’re very welcome. I hope that works for you.

Tom W. Bell

So, this is what not really God But this is sort of what gods look like. It’s people like us using laboratories, recreating universes. That could be at least the author of our universe. So let’s wrap it up.

Tom W. Bell

The question is: Is our universe authored? Not telling you God exists. Is there an author of our universe? I would say, yes, possibly. Nick Bostrom has this great argument. If it’s possible to do it once, we almost certainly live in that kind of world. I’ve argued universes tend towards equality over time, so this is not some kind of freaky DD universe. It’s probably much like the universe of our authors. So, kind of by looking at ourselves, we kind of learn what our creators are like. That’s kind of neat. We apply the powers, the principles of reproduction to universes. We end up with this kind of biocosmological view that tells us the meaning of life. And we really don’t know, though. We really don’t know whether or not we live in an authored universe until what? Until we ourselves create a universe that we can look at and say, we’ve created a universe that is fertile. We kind of look in our big bowl of universe soup that we’ve been stirring to make a universe and we go, Oh my gosh, it’s taken over. Look, those little guys in there are creating universes just like we did. And what happens when we see that? We suddenly realize That’s us. That’s us relative. It’s possible to create this kind of universe, so it’s almost certainly the case that we live in that universe too. So by creating ourselves universes, we receive evidence, really almost irrefutable proof, that we ourselves live in a created and authored universe, and there is indeed somebody upstairs, some bodies, people like us, really. Creating worlds, and we happen to be blessed with their favor, and we return the favor to our own children, so to speak, when we create universes, and in that we’ll find great happiness. So there you go, that’s seven steps to an authored universe. Thank you very much.