The Ostrich-Shaped Universe

Folks, according to ancient Hindu cosmology, the Earth was believed to rest in a hierarchical structure on the heads of four elephants (in the four directions), which in turn rested on the back of a giant turtle, which rested on the head of a divine cobra (Source). Without going into the merits or demerits of that idea, or studying its symbolism, or reducing it to modern categories, I’ll say that the Hindus were on to something. Modern cosmologies can be constructed in terms of animal symbolism. Let me explain.

I watched with interest the first installment of The Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole, hosted by Morgan Freeman, who incidentally played “God” in both “Bruce” and “Evan Almighty” movies. A respectable host, bridging lectures given by various subject matter experts, lends an authoritative aura to the thing. The series “explores the deepest mysteries of existence - alien life, black holes, dark matter and lots more” as billed by its website.

I do have several bones to pick about many of the things said in the different segments, but today I will focus on this one, Your Second Life, in which a computational physicist suggest that the universe behaves as one large computer simulation and that we, in fact, may be living in one, running in a supercomputer programmed by “our future selves.” Now, the idea that the universe is, or shares a lot of the characteristics of a computer program isn’t new. I read about it for the first time in Frank Tipler’s 1997 book, Physics of Immortality:Modern Cosmology, God & the Resurrection of the Dead, in which Tipler, a cosmologist, argued precisely that point except from an opposite direction. Tipler argued that we’re not living in the simulation but that our remote descendants will create the simulation and revive us in a restored, newly created universe inside a supercomputer. His argument, as I remember, was intricate, but different from the CalTech’s physicist quoted in Through the Wormhole (“Rich T-something”, I couldn’t catch the name in the online video) who says that we are in fact living in the simulation because, he asserts, “who can say we aren’t” or words to that effect. Those of you who are fans of the movie trilogy, “The Matrix” or play The SIMs, are already halfway into the practical conceptualizations of such paradigms.

A whole site is dedicated to the question Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? Check it out and you’ll catch on the serious philosophical brain power being devoted to the question.

Anyway, this is where the cosmological animal representation comes in. As the scientist in Through the Wormhole would have it, we live in our simulation in which we – or someone – meaning, some advanced human descendant is looking at ourselves. So the animal that comes to mind is an ostrich with its head up its rear-end (like the photo above, click it to enlarge it). The ostrich looks up its business end and beholds an entire universe, with planets populated by ostriches themselves with their heads up their butts, contemplating their own universes, with planets populated by ostriches…ad infinitum.

OK, so mine is an argument ad ridiculum. I’m poking fun at what I saw on TV because, although entertaining, no cogent argument was ever made. Our scientist’s one argument? “Who is not say that we are not living in the simulation already”? An argument from silence is not probative, but it can give rise to a fairly long yarn.

There’s no empirical proof that we live in a computer simulation. All such proof must come from outside “the system” but the outside of the system would be always beyond us because we are an integral part of some advanced circuitry that, as soon as it turned off, leads to our unceremonious extinction. We can’t transcend the system, not even to probe it. Therefore, there’s no way to empirically demonstrate these notions. They are mere speculations as evanescent as the Enterprise-D’s holodeck. There’s little science but lots of science-fiction here.

It’s more likely that the universe is ostrich-shaped as described, or the least we could say is that both the universe-as-computer simulation and ostrich-shaped have the same statistical likelihood of being true to the facts.

Think about that next time you look up at the stars.