TED censorship controversy sparks backlash from Deepak Chopra and a raft of top scientists and highlights a major revolution in consciousness-studies – long suppressed by materialist reductionism – now exploding on the internet

Two Open Letters last week from Deepak Chopra and several highly acclaimed scientists including Stuart Hameroff and Menas C. Kafatos, reprimanding TED’s removal from the TEDx Youtube channel of the talks by Graham Hancock (The War on Consciousness) and Rupert Sheldrake (The Science Delusion), with unsubstantiated claims of “pseudo-science” – highlight we could be on the brink of the major science revolution of our times – a revolution in our understanding of consciousness.

In their original letter, Dear TED, Is It ‘Bad Science’ or a ‘Game of Thrones’?, published in the Huffington Post (18^th April), Deepak Chopra, MD. FACP, Stuart Hameroff, MD, Menas C. Kafatos, Ph.D., Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., and Neil Theise, MD suggest that the talks of Hancock and Sheldrake were removed because they endorsed ‘non-local consciousness’ – the idea that consciousness exists beyond the human brain.  Citing examples of scientific breakthroughs from Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein whose theories overthrew the prevailing body of accepted knowledge, their Open Letter stated, “The greatest breakthroughs rarely come by acts of conformity”.

In a response article, TED, Censorship, Consciousness, Militant Atheists, and Pseudo Science!, Chris Anderson, curator of TED, pointed out that for every paradigm-shifting Galileo there are thousands of bad scientific ideas, hence TED’s policy to “steer clear of talks that bear hallmarks of unsubstantiated science”.

Chopra’s response on Friday 19th April, Reply to Chris Anderson, TED and the TED Community: We’re Halfway There, But, complete with comments from 18 leading scientists, was devastating, highlighting that science only evolves with paradigm changes not by defending existing dogmatic belief systems. It also stressed that the “pseudo-scientist” label could be applied to anyone doing vital research in consciousness and its relationship with fields like physics, psychology, neuroscience.

Menas C. Kafatos, Fletcher Jones Professor of Computational Physics, Chapman University, Orange, CA, commented:

“Fields like global climate, neuroscience and consciousness and even quantum field theory, advance through intersection of ideas and methodologies, not by censorship…We are now facing a grand revolution in scientific thought, through the dialogue between quantum theory, consciousness work, biology, and philosophy and psychology. TED has a great opportunity to help advance this transformation. I hope you do.”

Kathleen D. Noble, Ph.D, Professor of Consciousness School of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, University of Washington, commented:

“The kind of backlash exemplified by TED has occurred again and again since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for proposing what astrophysicists now call “the multiple worlds theory”, and it is always is at its most vociferous and vicious as a new way of thinking is emerging. But, as Thomas Kuhn reminds us, the old guard eventually and inevitably gives way to the new.”

Currently teaching an upper-division undergraduate course entitled “Consciousness, Ethics, and the Natural World”, Kathleen Noble  asked her students what they thought about TED’s censoring of Rupert Sheldrake (whose work they had studied), and concluded from their responses:  “These are students at a mainstream research university for whom Sheldrake’s ideas are common sense rather than ‘pseudoscience’.  Clearly, this latest scientific revolution is upon us.”

Neil Theise, Professor of Pathology and Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Beth Israel Medical Center, added:  ”Sheldrake and Hancock may be wrong in their ideas, but we do not yet know. Even if they are, the creativity of their work and their insistence on looking at aberrations and exceptions is certainly of value, at least to point the way to the kinds of creative explorations TED hopes to foster.”

And consciousness researcher Christopher Holvenstot wrote: “Experiential approaches, including Graham Hancock’s exploration of alternative states, represent an important aspect of our subject matter, and therefore our research. We are saddened to see his brave and very personal contribution disparaged as ‘pseudo-science’.”

For a brief resume of the TED censorship saga to date: TED’s removal of Hancock and Sheldrake’s talks last month sparked a mass public internet outrage, leading TED to make the talks available in limited Vimeo format on the TED website, where they can be viewed in context on this TED Blog page. Hancock and Sheldrake both refuted all allegations of “pseudo-science”, issued challenges for a free and fair public debate (unanswered by TED) and their TEDx presentations swiftly became the most popular TED talks ever, with mass popular support calling for the talks to be reinstalled to the TEDx Youtube channel.

Meantime, TED revoked the licence for TEDxWest Hollywood ‘s conference “Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?” (which ultimately went ahead on 14^th April without TED’sponsorship), again with claims of “pseudo-science”.  Presenters due to speak here included three scientists exploring non-local consciousness – Russell Targ, Larry Dossey and Marilyn Schlitz. While TED turned a deaf ear to criticism, the Independent on Sunday wrote about The TED conference censorship row (7th April), and the article also appeared in the Belfast Telegraph (10 April).

Commenting on the latest rebuttals of TED in the Huffington Post by Deepak Chopra and the community of scientists, Graham Hancock said:

“This controversy has brought to light a fundamental fault-line that is emerging in the science of consciousness between the old paradigm of materialist reductionism (represented by people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) and a new paradigm of non-local conscious. The new paradigm, represented by all the scientists who wrote to the Huffington Post on 19th April is open to the revolutionary possibility at the centre of both my talk and Rupert’s talk, namely that consciousness may not be generated by the brain but rather “transceived” by the brain – i.e. that consciousness may be a fundamental “non-local” property of all dimensions of the universe and that rather than being an epiphenomenon of brain activity, it may instead be that the brain acts as an interface that allows consciousness to manifest ‘locally’ on the material plane.

“If the new paradigm proves to be correct, and it is intriguing to see these powerful voices raising that possibility, then the issue is by no means limited to consciousness but calls into question many of the fundamental assumptions on which Western science has been built for the past 400 years. It is a revolution in the making, spearheaded by quantum physics and consciousness studies, with implications for our understanding of reality that are likely to be at least as profound as the implications of the dismantling of the Ptolemaic model by the Copernican revolution from the 16th century onwards, ushering in a new age of science.”

For background on this TED censorship scandal, visit Graham Hancock’s website and three previous press releases on the Conscious Frontiers Blog 

And Hancock’s author Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/Author.GrahamHancock

Does Objective Reality Exist?

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris, a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.

The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings suggest that objective reality may not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

How Does a Hologram Work?

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness may be an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration. Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different.

But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them. When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment. According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

The Interconnected Nature of the Universe

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe may be infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain may be connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky. From this vantage point, everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level, reality may be a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools, it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

The Holographic Mind

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality. Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was not able to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s, Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for.

Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage -- simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through some gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that many pieces of information seem instantly cross-correlated with other pieces of information -- another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with every other portion, the mind is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions.

Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

Holographic Evidence

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability. Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism. [listen to samples here and here - earphones needed]

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support. It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, a kind of superficial illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too may be more a sensory illusion than objective reality.

We may actually be "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

The Holographic Paradigm

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others.

A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature. Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

With this model, it is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point, and to understand a number of other unsolved puzzles in psychology.

In particular, psychiatric researcher Dr. Stanislav Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

In the 1950s, while conducting research into the use of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the sexually arousing portion of the male of the species' anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman's experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual's consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations "transpersonal experiences", and in the late '60s he helped found a branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof's newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

Connecting Hard Science With the Holographic Paradigm

The holographic paradigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain -- as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows.

What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images can ultimately be as real as "reality".

Even visions and experiences involving "non-ordinary" reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his intriguing book "Gifts of Unknown Things," biologist Lyall Watson describes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then "click" off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if "hard" reality is only a holographic projection. Perhaps we agree on what is "there" or "not there" because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

Limitless Implications

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson's are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality may be but a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram's holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists.

And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect's findings "indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality".

For lots more fascinating material along these lines, don't miss Michael Talbot's highly engaging book The Holographic Universe.

A supercomputer simulation of the evolution of the universe (credit: Andrey Kravtsov/University of Chicago)

There is a fastest, optimal, most efficient way of computing all logically possible universes, including ours — if ours is computable (no evidence against this). Any God-like “Great Programmer” with any self-respect should use this optimal method to create and master all logically possible universes.

At any given time, most of the universes computed so far that contain yourself will be due to one of the shortest and fastest programs computing you. This insight allows for making non-trivial predictions about the future. We also obtain formal, mathematical answers to age-old questions of philosophy and theology.

Transcript of Jürgen Schmidhuber’s TEDx talk at UHasselt, Belgium, Nov. 10, 2012

I will talk about the simplest explanation of the universe. The universe is following strange rules. Einstein’s relativity. Planck’s quantum physics. But the universe may be even stranger than you think. And even simpler than you think.

Is the universe being created by a computer program?

(Konrad Zuse)

Many scientists are now taking seriously the possibility that the entire universe is being computed by a computer program, as first suggested in 1967 by the legendary Konrad Zuse, who also built the world’s first working general computer between 1935 and 1941. [1]  Zuse’s 1969 book Calculating Space discusses how a particular computer, a cellular automaton, might compute all elementary particle interactions, and thus the entire universe.  The idea is that every electron behaves the same, because all electrons re-use the same subprogram over and over again.

First consider the virtual universe of a video game with a realistic 3D simulation. In your computer, the game is encoded as a program, a sequence of ones and zeroes. Looking at the program, you don’t see what it does. You have to run it to experience it.  Reality has still higher resolution than video games. But soon you won’t see a difference any more, since every decade, simulations are becoming 100–1000 times better, because computing power per Swiss Franc is growing by a factor of 100–1000 per decade.

A few decades imply a factor of a billion. Soon, we’ll be able to simulate very convincing heavens and hells. It will seem quite plausible that the real world itself also is just a simulation.  To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a computer, everything looks like a computation.

Skeptics might say: What about quantum physics, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and Bell’s inequality? Don’t they imply that the universe cannot be produced by a deterministic program? Not at all. Bell himself knew well that deterministic universes including deterministically computable observers are fully compatible with all available physical observations.

The universe as the sum of all mathematics

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“Calculating space,” a painting by Konrad Zuse

When my brother Christof was a teenager in the early 1980s in Munich, he told me and others: the universe, or quantum multiverse, is the sum of all mathematics. I believe he is the reason why such ideas emerged in Munich.

He was younger than me. He still is. He also was smarter than me. He went on to become a physicist at Munich, Caltech, Princeton, and CERN, and he lived in Berne next door to where Einstein lived.

It took me a while to understand what my brother meant. In 1996, I formalized his idea through a computation. I generalized Everett’s many worlds theory, pointing out that there is a very short and fast program that not only computes our own universe, or multiverse, but also all other logically possible universes, even those with different physical laws. For example, universes with anti-gravity.

In fact, there is a fastest, optimal, most efficient way of computing all logically possible universes, including ours — if ours is computable (no evidence against this).

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(Credit: TEDx)

The optimal method can be programmed with only ten lines of code. I wrote it down for you — here it is! [Holds up a piece of paper.] [2]

Any God-like “Great Programmer” with some self-respect should use this optimal method to create and master all logically possible universes.

Suppose he runs it for a while. At some point, many of the executed programs will have computed universes that contain you! You, as you are sitting here and staring at me with incredulous eyes.

You could even become a “Great Programmer” yourself, using the optimal method [holds note up again] to simulate all possible universes in nested fashion. (But this would not necessarily help to figure out the future faster than by waiting for it to happen. The computer on which to run this program would have to be built within our universe, and as a small part of the latter would be unable to run as fast as the universe itself.)

Anyway, now it’s easy to see that due to the nature of the optimal method, at any given time, most of the universes computed so far that do contain yourself will be due to one of the shortest and fastest programs computing: YOU.

Predictions

This insight allows for making non-trivial predictions about the future. There are many possible futures of your past so far. Which one is going to happen? Answer: given the probability distribution induced by the optimal method, most likely one of the few regular, non-random futures with a fast and short program.[3] (Because the weird futures where suddenly the rules change and everything dissolves into randomness are fundamentally harder to compute, even by the optimal method. Random stuff by definition does not have a short program.)

This implies that the decay of neutrons, widely believed to be random, most likely is not random, but pseudo-random, like the decimal expansion of PI, which looks random, but isn’t, because it is computable by a short and fast program.

Why quantum computing may never scale

The optimal method also implies that quantum computation will never work well, essentially because it is consuming so many basic computational resources. I first made this prediction a dozen years ago. Since then there has not been any progress in practical quantum computation, despite lots of efforts. (The biggest number factored into its prime factors by any existing quantum computer is still 15.) Quantum computation is sexy, but dead.

What about free will? Free will is overrated. In my group at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, we often program simulated worlds including simulated observers with simulated artificial brains. Through pseudo-random trial and error they even learn from experience to become smarter over time, acting as if they had free will. They have no idea that every thought in their artificial neural networks is computed by a deterministic program. (In a way, they do have free will — it’s just deterministically computed free will.)

Computational theology

Nevertheless, computer science is now giving us formal, mathematical answers to old questions of philosophy and theology. One of the results of my Computational Theology is this: your own life must be very important in the grand scheme of things.

You may think that your life is insignificant, because you are so small, and the universe is so big. But given the Great Programmer’s optimal way of computing all universes, it is probably very hard to edit your life (or mine) out of our particular universe: Any program that produces a universe like ours, but without you, is probably much longer and slower (and thus less likely) than the original program that includes you.

So with high probability, your life essentially has to be this way, with all of its ups and downs. Your life is not insignificant. It seems to be an indispensable part of the grand scheme of things.[4]

This is compatible with religions claiming that “all is one,” “everything is connected to everything.” May this thought lift you up in times of frustration.

Footnotes:

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(Credit: iStockphoto)

1. A recent KurzweilAI news article mentioned somewhat related ideas by Max Tegmark (1997/1998). How does Schmidhuber’s approach differ?

“My paper on all computable universes called ‘A computer scientist’s view of life, the universe, and everything’ got submitted/published in 1996/1997,” Schmidhuber told KurzweilAI.

“Back then, Max also was based in Munich (at LMU). He put forth this somewhat vague and not really formally well-defined notion of a mathematics-based ensemble of universes.

“He assumed a uniform prior distribution on this ensemble, which unfortunately cannot even exist, as there is no uniform distribution on countably infinite things. Over the years, Max and I had quite a few little chats about this :-) . I think a mathematical analysis of this type really must focus on the formally well-defined, limit-computable mathematical structures/universes.

“Max also completely ignores computation time, while the talk above is all about computation time, which makes a big difference between easy-to-compute and hard-to-compute universes, and greatly affects their probabilities, and thus the most likely futures of observers inhabiting them. I also addressed such differences in an additional 2000 paper on all formally describable universes (and also in the 2012 survey paper for H. Zenil’s book, A Computable Universe).

“I also wrote that I suspect my brother Christof Schmidhuber is the real reason why such ideas emerged in Munich. At the age of 17 he declared that the universe is the sum of all math, inhabited by observers who are mathematical substructures (private communication, Munich, 1981).

“As he went on to become a theoretical physicist at LMU Munich, Caltech, Princeton, and CERN, discussions with him about the relation between superstrings and bitstrings became a source of inspiration for writing both the first paper and later ones based on computational complexity theory, which seems to provide the natural setting for his more math-oriented ideas (private communication, Munich 1981-86; Caltech 1987-93; Princeton 1994-96; Berne/Geneva 1997–; compare his notion of “mathscape”).”

2. The preprint of a recent overview paper by Schmidhuber includes pseudocode (a simplified generic version) for the ten lines of code mentioned in the talk (see also slides):

FAST Algorithm
for i := 1, 2, . . . do
Run each program p with l(p) ≤ i for at most 2^i−l(p) steps and reset storage modified by p
end for

[here l(p) denotes the length of program p, a bitstring]

Schmidhuber explains: “This is essentially a variant of Leonid Levin’s universal search (1973), but without the search aspect. The code systematically lists and runs all possible programs in interleaving fashion. It can be shown that it computes each particular universe as quickly as this universe’s (typically unknown) fastest program, save for a constant factor that does not depend on the universe size.

From this asymptotically optimal method, we can derive an a priori probability distribution on possible universes called the Speed Prior. It reflects the fastest way of describing objects, not necessarily the shortest. (BTW, note that any general search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many inhabited universes as byproducts.)”

3. Assume you are running computations for all universes in parallel, says Schmidhuber. Some contain you at a given time. So among those universes computed so far that contain you, which are the most likely ones, that is, what’s your most likely future? In a Bayesian framework, “Speed Prior” permits non-trivial answers to questions of this type.

4. “Because most likely the universe to which you owe your current existence has a high a priori probability,” explains Schmidhuber. “Other possible variants of your life are less likely because they are harder to compute, even by the optimal method.”

The insights mentioned in this talk were first published between 1996 and 2000, and further popularized in the new millennium. Detailed mathematical papers as well as popular high-level summaries can be downloaded from Schmidhuber’s overview site on all computable universes.

For information on a Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence through courses taught by Schmidhuber and colleagues, visit this site: Master’s Degree in Informatics with a Major in Intelligent Systems

For new jobs for postdocs and PhD students in Schmidhuber’s research group, visit this site: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/eu2013.html