Tag: reality

Scientists Say They Have Proof the Universe Isn’t a Simulation—The Math Makes It Impossible

For decades, philosophers, technologists, and even billionaires like Elon Musk have toyed with the idea that our universe might be a highly sophisticated computer simulation. The idea represents one of modern science’s most haunting and enduring hypotheticals, a kind of digital cosmology.

However, according to a study by an international team of theoretical physicists, the mathematics itself may finally settle the debate. Their conclusion? It’s impossible that we’re living in a simulation.

In a paper published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, researchers argue that the same mathematical principles that limit what computers can calculate also limit what any simulation of the universe could ever reproduce. In short, the universe contains truths that no algorithm—no matter how advanced—can ever compute.

“It has been suggested that the universe could be simulated. If such a simulation were possible, the simulated universe could itself give rise to life, which in turn might create its own simulation,” lead author and theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Mir Faizal, said in a statement. “This recursive possibility makes it seem highly unlikely that our universe is the original one, rather than a simulation nested within another simulation.”

“This idea was once thought to lie beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. However, our recent research has demonstrated that it can, in fact, be scientifically addressed.”

The idea that reality could be computed—sometimes called “It from Bit,” after physicist Dr. John Archibald Wheeler’s phrase—has long fascinated scientists. In this view, the cosmos itself could be described as a vast informational process: every atom, photon, and galaxy, a pixel in a cosmic program.

Yet Dr. Faizal and his co-authors—renowned cosmologist Dr. Lawrence M. Krauss, Dr. Francesco Marino of Italy’s National Institute of Optics, and researcher Arshid Shabir—argue that this idea collapses under the very laws of logic itself.

Using the mathematical frameworks of Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski, and Gregory Chaitin, researchers demonstrated that any “Theory of Everything” built entirely on computation must, by definition, be incomplete.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, for example, proved that in any sufficiently complex mathematical system, there are true statements that can never be proven using the rules of that system.

Tarski’s theorem showed that truth itself cannot be defined entirely within a formal language. And Chaitin’s work revealed that some mathematical truths are fundamentally uncomputable—they contain more information than any algorithm can encode.

The researchers argue that these theorems also apply to the foundations of physics. Any theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought framework that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics—would be a kind of algorithmic system. And just like mathematics, it would inevitably face its own unprovable truths.

“Together, the Gödel–Tarski–Chaitin triad delineates an insurmountable frontier for any strictly computable framework,” the researchers write.

In other words, if the laws of physics can’t be reduced to pure computation, then neither can the universe.

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If Reporters Ignore Reality, Of Course We Can’t Trust Them To Report On It

President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, reportedly refused to respond to New York Times reporters who included their “preferred pronouns” in their email signatures. Leavitt said it’s a Trump administration policy to ignore questions from reporters who deny “biological reality.”

“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” Leavitt told the New York Times’s Michael Grynbaum in an email. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story.”

Considering the way the media class covered Trump over the last decade, it seems like common sense to avoid so-called reporters who so plainly expose their left-wing bias. These people are not grounded in reality and, therefore, cannot be trusted to report the facts to the American people. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

Still, this should be a policy for all Americans, not just the Trump administration. While they claim to report the news with no left-leaning slant, putting pronouns in their bio exposes their bias in the most obvious way.

The Washington Post reporter Karine Elwood is an excellent example of this. She wrote a profile on April 3 about a trans-identified male, Eliza Munshi, who is “forced” to compete in track events on the male team. Elwood framed the story purposefully to push the reader to empathize with the boy despite overwhelming evidence that male athletes have a clear advantage over female athletes. Additionally, female athletes have been seriously harmed by male athletes during competitions.

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From transgenderism to transhumanism, the agenda to redefine reality for mass compliance

Western civilisation, that grand experiment of reason and Enlightenment values, now finds itself grappling with an identity crisis. From the philosophy that brought us democracy, the scientific method, and even good wine pairings, we’ve somehow arrived at a peculiar era where society is encouraged to believe that reality is less a fixed landscape and more of a political Rubik’s cube. Specifically, the landscape of gender has become a battleground of biological, cultural, and political ideals—dominating headlines, monopolising discourse, and, oddly, managing to ignore the statistical insignificance of its demographic audience. Transgender individuals constitute roughly 0.3% of the West population, and yet the world seems to revolve around their pronouns, identities, and access to public bathrooms, all in the name of progress.

Our intellectual elite, decked in designer ideology, assures us that distinguishing between biological sex and gender is sophisticated; it’s the in thing, the thinking person’s new orthodoxy. To question this, to state something as blatantly archaic as “biology is real,” is to expose oneself as backward, uninformed—a blight upon the socially conscious. But it’s hard not to wonder if we’re all just playing a grand game of ideological dress-up, where we pretend we’re making leaps forward in human understanding while, in reality, we’re toeing a line many people can’t quite bring themselves to believe. Accommodating and encouraging children that identify as animals, stigmatising other children as bullies for calling out this absurdity, and giving credence to what was once accepted as make-believe, imagination, and play. Still, most people seem to mumble along with it, lest they be the odd one out, clinging to common sense like a moth to a guttering flame.

Transgender news coverage has increased by over 1600% in the past 10 years, while the tone of these stories has gone from sensationary to militantly positive and supportive, guiding discussions toward an unprecedented level of scrutiny over the nature of identity itself. Our cognitive maps are being redrawn by the universities, media, and big business DEI with all the precision of a drunk darts player, influencing society’s concept of reality. These implications reach far beyond gender identity and into the potential future of humanity—one where human limitations and even natural family structures are increasingly questioned and redefined through technology. It appears to be clearly by design and yet another baby step towards an insidious, transhumanist control agenda.

Such blurring of reality and ideology has an unsettling historical precedent. Where other empires rewrote the annals of history, modern movements seem intent on rewriting the basics of human biology. Consider the USSR, Maoist China, and the Khmer Rouge, all of which did their best to erode the sanctity of the family unit, that most fundamental societal structure. Even the Nazis, despite pushing traditional values, encouraged loyalty not to family but to the state, with children trained to report on their parents’ non-conformist views. Today’s West doesn’t seem far off—except that the disintegration of kinship is wrapped in softer packaging. Tradition and generational wisdom are rebuffed as vestiges of oppression, and the notion of family as a guiding principle of society is branded a relic, an artifact better suited for history museums than modern culture.

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Reality Is Not a Social Construct

Human behavior is, to a large extent, socially constructed. People often act based on social norms, expectations, or habits rather than by attempting to ascertain the nature of reality itself. In that context, it is true to say that people’s perceptions of reality are socially constructed, as explained by the Thomas theorem:

Another way of looking at this concept is through W.I. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality.

In “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” Murray Rothbard defines praxeology as “the logical implications of the universal formal fact that people act, that they employ means to try to attain chosen ends.” People attempt to make decisions based on their best evaluation of the reality of the situation. If we have a good grasp of that reality, our decisions are likely to lead toward our goals; a weak grasp of reality is likely to yield disastrous decisions. Rothbard observes that “all that praxeology asserts is that the individual actor adopts goals and believes, whether erroneously or correctly, that he can arrive at them by the employment of certain means” (emphasis added). Our perception of reality may be erroneous or correct. When we fall into error, we do our best to review and correct our perception of reality in order to make better decisions in the future. This commonsense principle is reflected in the popular slogan FAFO: “FAFO is an acronym for ‘eff around and find out.’ It’s a cheeky way to tell people that if they play with fire, they might get burned—or to announce that they already have been.”

The commonsense view that our decisions are influenced by cultural and social norms is often overstated to convey the mistaken idea that there is no such thing as objective reality: reality itself is a social construct that depends on how you perceive or define it. This partly reflects a form of recklessness—abandoning the effort to investigate or distinguish true from false—sometimes because inquiry is deemed too costly and sometimes from a desire to avoid interpersonal or intergroup conflict by proclaiming that everyone is correct. It suits the egalitarian ethos of our time to declare that everyone has the right answer. I have “my truth,” and you have yours. In mathematics, teachers have been urged to be inclusive by teaching pupils that there are no right or wrong answers.

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Unbelievable: New AI Ad Will Make You Question Reality

Social media is going wild over a woman advertising body wipes for men.

The only thing is — everything about the woman, from her voice, to her eyes to her hair, are entirely AI generated.

In a head-spinning example of a new AI advertising platform known as Arcads, which creates ads using “AI actors,” a woman appears as though she’s delivering a social media lecture on male hygiene.

However, it soon becomes clear she’s reading a pre-written script pushing a product, and her eyes don’t exactly match up with the cadence of the words she’s saying.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” wrote one X user.

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Trans Ideologues Would Rather Revolt Against Reality Than Admit They Were Wrong

Gender ideology has a reality problem. Just look at the latest cover story for New York Magazine, in which the trans-identified writer Andrea Long Chu denounced reality itself, writing that “the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism.”

Well, that is a … novel philosophical assertion.

It is tempting to dismiss Chu’s denunciation of reality as an insane gambit by a flailing ideology, but declaring war against reality might just be crazy enough to work. This approach provides the collapsing gender ideology movement a way out of myriad difficulties — instead of relying on shoddy science to support medical “transition,” including for children, gender ideologues can instead appeal to a supposed right to physical self-determination and modification, even for children. Liberals like the idea of liberating mankind from the limits of our humanity, and so even as Chu retreats from the usual arguments of gender ideology, he invites the left to join in this more radical vision.

This effort to find a better justification for gender ideology pushes Chu to argue that it was a mistake for the left to hang “trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity.” This approach won some victories, but it “failed to form a coherent moral account of why someone’s gender identity should justify the actual biological interventions that make up gender-affirming care.” 

The radical bodily alterations of “gender-affirming care” have been justified by elevating “gender identity” to the status of a person’s essence, deeper and more real than the body itself. But people are realizing that a “gender identity” is metaphysical conjecture, not medicine or biology. Thus, Chu sees reliance on gender identity as a trap for transgender advocates. It is superstitious to imagine that there is something like gendered souls that sometimes, somehow, get stuck in the wrong bodies. 

He also sees that searching for reasons and explanations for transgenderism may prove deadly to the cause of gender ideology. By making the case for “transition” (again, especially for children) contingent on generating favorable evidence (medical, sociological, psychological) for it, the transgender movement has become more vulnerable as that evidence has failed to materialize. Furthermore, requiring reasons for transition tends to establish some form of gatekeeping, in which transition is doled out only to those determined to be truly transgender. 

Chu fears that subjecting the transgender movement, and especially its medical wing, to rational, evidence-based scrutiny will restrict and ultimately destroy it. Instead, he wants transgender activists and their allies to:

[S]top relying on the increasingly metaphysical concept of gender identity to justify sex-changing care, as if such care were only permissible when one’s biological sex does not match the serial number engraved on one’s soul. … [W]e must rid ourselves of the idea that any necessary relationship exists between sex and gender; this prepares us to claim that the freedom to bring sex and gender into whatever relation one chooses is a basic human right.

He thereby makes explicit what has always been the position of gender ideologues, which is that there should be medical transition on demand for everyone. He writes, “We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.” This is not about medical need, but about a subjective desire to flee from the reality of one’s embodied self.

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Quantum Theory’s ‘Measurement Problem’ May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality

Imagine a physicist observing a quantum system whose behavior is akin to a coin toss: it could come up heads or tails. They perform the quantum coin toss and see heads. Could they be certain that their result was an objective, absolute and indisputable fact about the world? If the coin was simply the kind we see in our everyday experience, then the outcome of the toss would be the same for everyone: heads all around! But as with most things in quantum physics, the result of a quantum coin toss would be a much more complicated “It depends.” There are theoretically plausible scenarios in which another observer might find that the result of our physicist’s coin toss was tails.

At the heart of this bizarreness is what’s called the measurement problem. Standard quantum mechanics accounts for what happens when you measure a quantum system: essentially, the measurement causes the system’s multiple possible states to randomly “collapse” into one definite state. But this accounting doesn’t define what constitutes a measurement—hence, the measurement problem.

Attempts to avoid the measurement problem—for example, by envisaging a reality in which quantum states don’t collapse at all—have led physicists into strange terrain where measurement outcomes can be subjective. “One major aspect of the measurement problem is this idea … that observed events are not absolute,” says Nicholas Ormrod of the University of Oxford. This, in short, is why our imagined quantum coin toss could conceivably be heads from one perspective and tails from another.

But is such an apparently problematic scenario physically plausible or merely an artifact of our incomplete understanding of the quantum world? Grappling with such questions requires a better understanding of theories in which the measurement problem can arise—which is exactly what Ormrod, along with Vilasini Venkatesh of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Jonathan Barrett of Oxford, have now achieved. In a recent preprint, the trio proved a theorem that shows why certain theories—such as quantum mechanics—have a measurement problem in the first place and how one might develop alternative theories to sidestep it, thus preserving the “absoluteness” of any observed event. Such theories would, for instance, banish the possibility of a coin toss coming up heads to one observer and tails to another.

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