It seemed as if something strange was happening in the building of the Department of Neurology at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, USA. There is a group of 48 people who enter daily in the evening and leave only in the morning, and if you decide to go to Dr. Irene Wamsley's lab, you will find them asleep and surrounded by devices that measure The physical, energetic, and neural changes in each of them, between the beds, go about as Amsley and her fellow researchers roam each one from time to time.
What is happening was not one of the scenes of the movie "Inception", but rather an experiment whose results were published a year ago in the journal "Sleep" 1, where the researcher woke the participants 13 times while they were sleeping and asked them about their dreams, and the results showed that almost 50% of dreams come back The study also found that 25.7% of dreams were associated with specific imminent events, and 37.4% of dreams with a future event were associated with one or more memories of past experiences.
Experiments further showed that future-oriented dreams are relatively more common later in the night.
The relationship between dreams and memory is strong. Currently, a team of scientists believes that our most bizarre dreams are nothing but a subjective convergence of “faint” memories that cause you to suddenly find yourself standing next to Napoleon Bonaparte to play together “FIFA” while standing on top of the Eiffel Tower, and Umm Kulthum With her fat and flesh, she stands next to you to sing "I will meet you tomorrow"!
But what if it was deeper than that?
What if those memories were originally false?
In the new German series "1899", produced by "Netflix", we meet a group of people on a ship called "Kerberos" heading from Europe to the United States of America, but some circumstances bring them near a missing ship four months ago, and from here the events begin to fall apart. In a world that seems to be as close as possible to a dream, the series takes place on the line of its predecessor (Dark), produced by the same work team, who exploited the dilemmas of time travel to create an excellent plot, but as usual, "Netflix", the new series exploits its plot to involve political and social issues that are not related relationship, and above all the issue of homosexuality.
Implanted memories
This time the series takes another path, related to both physics and neuroscience, that can start from how our memories shape our dreams.
As we explained a little while ago, our memories have an essential role in building the dream world, but what if those memories are not real, what if they are false in the first place and have been implanted in our brains?
Elizabeth Loftus (2) and her colleague John Palmer, cognitive psychologists from the University of Washington, were the first to draw attention to this point in the seventies of the last century, when they said that our memory is flexible, and can be modified with a degree of ease.
In (3) "The Lost in the Mall Experiment", the researchers, through devious methods that include falsifying photos with Photoshop, present four memories from childhood to the volunteers, all of which are real memories except for one that includes being lost in the mall and being returned to his family by a person. The experiment succeeded by 25 percent. -38%, where a quarter of the participants in a follow-up survey said that they had indeed been lost in the mall, and then began recalling memories of the incident that were completely familiar to their brains!
(Shutterstock)
And it seems that the matter will not need fabricated stories to modify memory. Seven years ago, neuroscientists (4) in France were able to implant false memories in the brains of sleeping mice using electrodes. This team created memories while the animals were napping, during which they believed that they had received a reward in a certain place, and then they woke up to look for the reward in that place.
Manipulating memories by tampering with brain cells has become routine in neuroscience laboratories (5).
The year before this experiment, a team of researchers had used a technique called optogenetics to teach cells that encode fearful memories in the mouse brain to turn the memories on and off, and then monitor the effect on the mouse, and another team used it to identify cells that encode emotional memories Positive and negative, so that it can turn positive memories into negative memories, and vice versa!
Dream or reality?
But that in turn brings us back to the world of dreams, and let's start from an important note, which is that usually during a dream we do not realize that we are dreaming, we always synthesize the events inside the dream so that our memory and our way of thinking are reflected in this imaginary world, so it appears as a completely realistic world despite its extreme strangeness and contradictions The phenomenon, and its extreme horror at times, but it does not even occur to us to think about whether we are inside a dream now, has it happened before and I was exposed to a very difficult situation, God forbid?
Perhaps in this state of shock, you wondered if you were dreaming and should wake up now.
In 1641, the French philosopher René Descartes (1641) asked whether the waking world might itself be a dream. If the dream world is just as real as the waking world (at least while we are in it), how can we know for sure? That we are not currently living in a dream from which we might wake up one day?
A group of philosophers will reply that although our existence in a dream seems real, there are other differences between the world of dreams and the world of waking.
For example, the waking world has a coherence that the dream world often lacks.
For example, in many novels, movies, and series (including this one), characters realize they are dreaming by asking themselves how they came to be in a certain situation?
Then they realize they can't remember, because the dream dropped them there.
(6)
But this difference vanishes completely sometimes, in near-death experiences, for example, or someone is exposed to a state of anesthesia, or even during some testing for a mental illness such as schizophrenia or some personality disorders or others, here the difference between reality and dream is very subtle so that the person lacks the ability To distinguish between them, a well-known symptom of psychosis for example is the loss of the ability to distinguish between reality and dream.
At that particular point, one of the aspects of the series "1899" appears. If we assume that these previous special cases can be generalized to modify the memories of a group of people and then put each of them in a state of dream designed to test their behavior in the context of a specific set of events or say tests, then what can is happening?
Of course, the series goes beyond that point to a completely fictional level, but there remains some realism in the core idea.
But the series does not stop at this point. Rather, it questions more deeply about a hypothesis proposed by Oxford University philosophy professor Nick Bostrom some twenty years ago. It believes (7) that there is a greater possibility than we think that we do not live in an actual world, but rather live inside a simulation!
simulation argument
The simulation argument goes like this: There is one of three possibilities. Either civilizations like our human civilization will be disturbed one day during their technological progress, perhaps because we did not bear all this progress and decided to fight, or they will bypass these complex problems and reach within hundreds of thousands or millions of years. A point where it has enormous computer capabilities that enable it to make simulations of its ancestors, that is, primitive copies of it (such as our civilization now), but it does not take that step for some reason, perhaps because it is not interested or because the matter is expensive without a generous reward, and the third possibility is to decide one of those Civilizations are too advanced to actually make simulations.
But there is an important observation in this context, if a civilization wants to build a simulation, it is likely that it will have the technical ability to make thousands, millions or even billions of images from simulations, exactly as we can now replicate algorithms and computer programs, now if we assume that a very weak percentage of Civilizations have exceeded the first possibility, and from that percentage, very few civilizations have passed to the third possibility, in which a huge number of simulated worlds can be made. The largest statistical possibility, by a large difference, then is that we - in our current form - live inside a simulation.
Could our scientific progress ever reach that stage?
This is an important question, and the answer is “yes”, without a doubt. If you look at our technical progress over the past 300,000 years, it will become clear that our human civilization is advancing in a non-linear manner, meaning that each stage doubles the progress it has achieved from the previous one. In computing only, this progress falls under what It's called Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on a computer's processor chip nearly doubles every two years, while the price of the chip remains the same.
For example, the capabilities of the "iPad" are now the same as those of a computer manufactured in the fifties at a cost of about $100 million!
Not only the ship.. but the whole universe
(Social Media)
In physics, there is a hypothesis that suggests a similar structure. The story goes back to the end of the 1970s, when a young physicist named Jacob Bekenstein (8) made a proposal that assumes that everything that is thrown into the black hole, such as an atom, a molecule, a car, a table, or anything we know, turns To two-dimensional information, attached to its horizon with a single square "Planck" area of information, but what is the information?
It is the state of every particle in the universe: its mass, position, velocity, spin, temperature... When we say the following information: “Ahmed’s car is in the Egyptian city of Mansoura, next to the Faculty of Law building,” the information is not found in the report in which it was mentioned, nor on the Facebook page. We may have written it in Morse code, Arabic, Latin, or computer language, all of this does not matter, because the information is located next to the Faculty of Law building.
In quantum physics, information is not matter and it is not energy, it is not something that we experience with a device or that can be touched.
At that point, the hologram principle (9) rears its head, as it states that it is possible for us to represent three-dimensional physics in the form of two-dimensional surfaces. Its complex physics can be represented by the physics of two-dimensional surfaces, because all of that is originally information, and all information can be written on a two-dimensional surface.
The Virgin Marriage Painting (social networking sites)
Consider, for example, the painting "The Marriage of the Virgin" by the famous artist Raphael. It is a two-dimensional painting that illustrates a three-dimensional space, and indeed it contains a huge amount of information that we can use to understand what is happening in front of us.
But can the painting show us the faces of the women there, far to the left?
No, because the painting does not have enough information to give it to us, this is only possible in the case of a hologram, a hologram is a three-dimensional entity - voxels - but its information is written on a two-dimensional horizon - pixels -, where the information of an entire three-dimensional space can actually be transferred to another 2D with huge edits, it's like downloading something to a disc and later showing it on your big screen, but in 3D.
Can't say for sure
Does this mean that we really live in a simulation, or that we "mostly" live in a simulation?
Indeed, Bostrom's simulation argument faces many criticisms.
For example, the hypothesis does not explain anything about how we can simulate "consciousness", the phenomenon which means that you are the one who realizes that you are reading this right now. We find any way to understand it, let alone simulate it, and we are not talking here about simulating one person only, but rather the trillions of people who lived on this planet throughout its history, or other planets.
(Shutterstock)
On the other hand, theoretical physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Corvezini indicated, in a study published in the journal "Science Advances" (10) several years ago, that we cannot build simulations that express the laws of quantum physics with any advanced technology that we know or can imagine. This is because simulating the evolution of interaction between only a few hundred electrons requires a computer larger than the size of the known universe. The same results were obtained by Silas Bean and his colleagues from the University of Bonn, Germany (11). They indicated in a study issued in 2014 that there is no way we know of that can During which we simulate the laws of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which represent - along with quantum mechanics - the fundamental foundations on which the physics of this universe is based as far as we know so far, and the failure to subject them to simulation is consequently a failure in the simulation hypothesis, which does not completely close it, of course, but it reduces of possibilities.
But in any case, the simulation hypothesis remains an existing possibility, and the maximum that can be described as a guess is based on philosophical and scientific rules. Until now, we cannot in any way be sure of its validity or incorrectness. Therefore, we cannot be completely certain that we We live in the real world.
It seems, then, that the series "1899", despite its wide imagination, had a slight amount of truth!
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Sources
1- Dreaming as a Constructive Episodic Future Simulation
2- Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory
3- Loftus & Pickerell (1995) Lost in a Shopping Mall
4- Explicit memory creation during sleep demonstrates a causal role of place cells in navigation
5- False memories implanted into the brains of sleeping mice
6- Is Life a Dream?
7- RE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
8- Jacob Bekenstein and the Development of Black Hole Thermodynamics
9- The Holographic Principle
10- Quantized gravitational responses, the sign problem, and quantum complexity
11- Constraints on the universe as a numerical simulation