Episode: 3049
Title: HPR3049: What computers taught me about reality
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3049/hpr3049.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:46:00

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This is HACO Public Radio Episode 3,049 for Thursday 9 April 2020.
Today's show is entitled What Computers Talk Me About Reality. It is hosted by Clartu
and is about 24 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is
Clartu tells us what computers taught him about reality.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Everyone just need to act up a radio. This is Clartu
and I wanted to talk about reality and perception. Reality can be a confusing term.
It seems on the surface to be apparent
what it's talking about reality is stuff that's real.
Yet we tend to have a certain way of looking at reality
in a hyper-localized sense.
In other words, the way you experience your own life is your reality.
Now that's weird because that's not necessarily your reality.
Reality is stuff that's real, right?
The word is kind of obvious. It's reality real. It is real.
But we usually say that the way that we experience our life is our reality
because that's as far as we know that's what reality is.
But reality is actually reality.
But to us, we have a certain perception of reality
and so rather than saying, for instance,
well, my perception of reality is such and such.
We just kind of think, well, this is my reality.
This is my experience. This is my life experience.
And this is what I know for sure.
Now, there's a lot of different interpretations of how valid that is.
For instance, I tended for a very long time to take a very wide view
of what reality could refer to.
For instance, if you believe in fairies and dryads
and go out into the woods to commune with those invisible creatures,
then that's your reality.
And depending on the amount of faith that you have in that reality,
it's either something that you're doing maybe on a lark
or it's something you do because you truly believe there are fairies
and dryads out in the woods.
And frankly, I don't think that there's anything wrong with that reality.
But at the same time, it's important to realize
that that's not necessarily the big global reality.
It's just your local experience.
And there is a difference between those two things
and it is important to understand that in some instances.
And I feel like when I started getting into computers,
my perception of what got designated as reality started to shift a little bit
because I started to realize that through a...
through an experience that I called my own reality.
So my life experience, I started to simulate through computers
a very predictable and reliable micro reality.
So what I'm trying to say is that in the real world,
I have a computer and in the computer,
I have a representation of principles from the real world.
This is an important concept because it's a life experience
embedded in a global reality.
That is using something that was constructed by people in reality
to simulate what we understand about reality.
And I like the kind of fuzziness of all those definitions
because it does represent, I think, what many of us feel
about real reality, that it can never be fully understood.
You know, we have these ideas, we have these understandings of reality.
But we all kind of know deep down that there's a bunch of stuff
we are not really sure about.
And it's important to recognize that.
It's important to even embrace it and to accept it.
It's important also not to get hung up on that.
Here's an example of how one might test the experience
that one is having versus reality.
Let's say that I'm playing a game.
I can take a specific game because recently I started on a bit of a,
I would say, a marathon getting through a full adventure path
in the Pathfinder card game.
If you want to hear more about the Pathfinder card game,
you can listen to episode 2282 of Hacker Public Radio.
But for now, let's just suffice it to say that it's a very long and drawn out game
in different stages.
And it's in the role playing tradition.
And so I have two characters represented on playing cards.
One is named Valeros and one is Cione.
Now, if I believe, I don't, but if I did believe that the avatars
of Valeros and Cione communed with me while I was playing a game
of Pathfinder card game, then that's my reality, right?
Like if anyone asks what I do with my evenings lately,
I might say I hang out with my friends Valeros and Cione.
And we delve into a series of dungeons together.
And we hunt down bad guys and they guide me.
They guide my hands and they inform my actions because I believe in them
and I believe that I am being influenced by them.
That's perfectly valid to believe that if you want to.
The important thing to realize though is that outside of your own experience,
outside of your life experience, you can't prove that Valeros and Cione
are communing with you during that game.
So to break something out of your own sort of bubble reality,
your personal reality, and get it out into the global space,
you need to be able to sort of prove that there is an influence there.
And we could do this. We could do this a couple of different ways.
I mean, there's lots of things I could think to do.
Since if Valeros and Cione were real, I might take a D3.
That's a three-sided die. I believe they're not there as such a thing.
And I could roll it. And I could say if Valeros wants something,
then he will force the die to roll a 1.
And if Cione wants something, she could force it to roll a 3.
And therefore I should never get a 2.
Because it should be 100% reliable that my spirit guides roll either a 1 or a 3.
And yet as I sit here and test this theory out, as I record this,
I'm consistently getting a pretty good mix of numbers, getting some 1s,
I'm getting some 2s, and I'm getting some 3s.
So regardless of your own sort of belief in whatever it is
that you have in your own functional reality and the thing that you are experiencing,
it doesn't necessarily mean that it's true for everyone else.
And it's very disruptive to our thinking, I think, to understand it,
to accept that there can be different realities.
And I think there are many people who would argue that there aren't different realities.
There's one reality. And there's a good argument for that.
Something that can be proven one way could be said to be the reality
and things that cannot be proven at all, or we could argue yet,
would then not be reality.
And just as with my little game example there,
I think that's kind of what computers influenced me to realize
that if you sit down at a computer in your beginning to learn to program,
then you might think, well, if I believe that this computer should act in a certain way,
then I can program it to act in a certain way.
And so your building sort of this simulated reality within this electronic gizmo
that you have in front of you.
And you can do that. You can do that through programming.
You can make your computer act as a specific way,
especially with open source. You've got a lot of tools to you
to completely alter the way that that computer behaves.
But at some point you'll find, and this is what surprised me, I think,
at some point you'll find that as you delve deeper and deeper into the computer,
there are certain truths that simply can't be influenced by you.
It's usually basic math.
And no matter how you use a programming language to influence the computer's behavior,
you start to notice a certain reliability, such that no matter how you attempt
to believe that the computer could behave differently,
there are certain things that it does that simply cannot be varied.
True is always true, false is always false,
and if condition always catches something that is true
and defaults to the else condition, if it is not true,
things will always loop infinitely until interrupted,
things that cannot be resolved, do not repeat, and so on.
There are just things that happen on a programmatic level
where if you send a series of electronic pulses to a little chip,
that is designed to process numbers in a certain way,
then it's simply going to continue to do that.
And now this ignores famous or infamous CPU, incorrect CPU dies,
such that weird things happen, like 1 plus 1 actually equals 3.
But even that kind of error is traceable, right?
There was a chip that had some kind of mathematical error in it.
But it wasn't as if something had happened that changed the laws of,
I guess, the universe or of reality.
It was simply that the chip was misprinted and they could identify that.
They could look at the die and say, OK, well, this is why that is happening.
And so it's all very traceable, and I guess what we call provable.
And I don't mean provable in the sense of, well, let's go to a court of law
and make our arguments.
I mean, it's provable through mathematics.
You can actually represent the process in a series of proofs
that are self-evident according to a series of laws.
And by laws, again, I'm not talking about legal things.
I'm talking about rules that we have written down,
because we've noticed that if you do this and that,
then such and such a result occurs.
And it literally wasn't until I started programming that I really truly believed,
that I understood that.
I don't think I ever believed that you could sit down in front of a computer
and wish it into behaviors.
You know, I knew that it was something that you had to do.
It was a tool that you had to manipulate.
But it wasn't until I sat down and had to do that manipulation
that I understood that there truly were some immutable principles
that just cannot change.
And I feel like this is, on one hand, saying sort of stating a lot of obvious stuff.
A lot of people have pretty firm faith in mathematics.
They have pretty firm faith in just sort of basic laws of nature.
Now, there's an inverse model available to us here as well.
For instance, if you are, let's go back to the game example.
If you're playing in a game, a simulated reality through, let's say, a role-playing game,
things that you wish for can be made, quote-unquote, real within that world.
It takes very little for you to make something real in a simulation,
in a simulated addition or a version of reality.
For instance, if you're playing in an RPG that's purely happening in your mind,
you can say, oh, my character suddenly has a unicorn.
And your character can have a unicorn, all of a sudden.
The moment that you speak it, it is within that realm, within that micro-simulated reality.
It's true. It's verifiable. It is factual.
There's no question that there's a unicorn standing next to your character now,
because you said it. You imagined it, you thought it up, and so it happens.
Now, in the real world, you cannot do that.
I mean, I guess if you're very, very delusional in the real world,
you may think that you have done that.
But I think that if you legitimately said, okay, now I have a unicorn,
and then expected others to look at you and acknowledge that there was a unicorn standing next to you,
generally speaking, you're going to come up against opposition.
And I think it would be certainly very difficult to prove in the kind of physical sense
that there was a unicorn next to you physically, because there's not physically.
But in your simulated reality, that doesn't apply.
You can create things that are true and factual and provable,
because it's a simulation.
So that's the inverse of how it actually works.
But it's 2020, and we have people believing that, for instance,
the world could legitimately be flat.
Or we have people who think that vaccination could cause,
it could be a conspiracy to cause autism.
We have a lot of sort of ideas that are a little bit out of scope sometime,
of our own local, even our local reality.
Things that sometimes we do want to believe,
we want to say that this could be true,
because technically our life experience hasn't proven it otherwise.
And that's a valid concern.
If you doubt, for instance, just to take something kind of kooky,
and if you really do doubt that the world is a globe,
then in a sense, possibly,
you do owe it to yourself to prove that it's a globe,
or that it is not a globe.
You should be able to resolve that doubt for yourself.
And in fact, I would even go further and say that you should resolve
that doubt for yourself.
You should not let that go unknown if it's something that you question.
It's an important principle, I think,
to question things that people are telling you.
I mean, we have to do that.
We encourage that, even as computer users,
as open source people, we often say,
don't take someone's word for it.
Look it up. Go to the source.
Look at that source. Find out if that's true.
Someone emails you and tells you that your account is about to expire,
unless you email back your password to them.
Investigate further. Find out who this person is.
Question things. It's vital.
But the corollary to that admonishment is to prove it,
to question it, and then seek proof.
Seek that definitive answer.
Now, there are some really sort of high and out there kind of things
that you just can't prove, right?
I mean, some things, whether there are fairies and dryads
that exist in the wood, for instance, you can't prove
that they don't exist.
And so it's going to be difficult for you in your local reality
to come to a definitive answer.
And sometimes you're going to choose to just have faith
that those things do exist, with or without proof.
And I guess the thing that I want to notice is that
a lot of times, if there's something that requires faith
to sort of exempt it from the requirement of proof,
then I think that we have a responsibility to acknowledge
within ourselves that that reality that we've built up,
based on upon our own belief system, is a local reality.
It's not necessarily, but it's not a global reality, right?
In the sense that not everyone is going to be able to
acknowledge or adopt that same faith, that same level of faith
that you have in whatever you've decided.
And in some cases, if it affects no one else,
I don't think that that's really that big of a deal.
I think that's fine.
In other cases, there are reasons that a local reality
could really be damaging to others.
I mean, an obvious example of this would be,
if your local reality doesn't acknowledge the existence
of something like COVID-19, which is a rather hot topic right now,
at the time of this recording.
So if your local reality, because you've not experienced
COVID-19 yourself, so to you, it's not real, quote unquote,
that's fine, but then going out into public
and possibly encountering it, and then possibly furthermore,
being a carrier of it, and then passing it on to someone
who is vulnerable would quite literally be harmful to other people
in that big sort of global reality outside of your own life experience.
That's an obvious example, but there are many other examples
that we could think of, or that we could look back through history and find.
And I think it's responsible.
It's a responsibility that we have to look at that,
look at the way that our life experience,
and the decisions that we make based on our own life experience,
how those decisions affect other people.
It can be annoying to think about that sometimes because, frankly,
some of the things that we choose on our own
because of our life experience shouldn't affect other people.
It doesn't seem to make sense that they are negatively affected
or that they sometimes seem like other people
just claimed to be negatively affected by some decision that we've made.
And that can be annoying to think, well, I'm not going to,
I don't want to change my behavior because outside of my reality people are saying
that the way that I have decided to do behave
is insulting or is affecting them in some negative way
or is harmful in some way.
But then you go back to that premise,
the one that I talked about, like if you're programming a computer,
and there are reliable and repeatable ways of doing something,
and you can sit in front of your little Python script
and wish and believe and have faith all you want
that at some time, one time that you run it,
one will not equal one.
And that's never going to happen.
It'll just never, the computer will never deviate from that,
for all intents and purposes, universal truth.
And sometimes universal truths, they may not be exactly,
they may not resonate with you on a local level.
They might not mean anything to you
and the way that you experience a life.
And yet, if it's out there, if it's outside your bubble of your own reality,
then you have to accept that in some way it exists,
in some way it's true for someone.
And sometimes it's worth modifying behavior for that.
And ultimately, I think it's important to realize that
our life experiences are, as strange as it may seem,
a subset of the larger, greater, global reality.
It seems strange to think that for us as humans, I think,
because we tend to take a very egocentric view of the universe.
I mean, that's how we're built.
We're just kind of hard-coded that way.
I think probably if we weren't coded that way,
self-preservation wouldn't necessarily be a thing.
And as I understand it, self-preservation's pretty important
on sort of a global scale, because species have to survive
and if no species wants to preserve itself, then a species wouldn't survive
because everyone would just not care if they died or not.
So it's important. It's a significant thing.
And yet, the truth remains that our experiences exist
within a larger reality.
There are other people around us. There are other systems around us.
We're all components of something larger.
And while there's a certain level of extensibility
and customization possible within this larger system,
that is your own little life experience,
the larger system is important to everyone.
Without the larger system being healthy
and an optimal condition, everyone suffers.
So working towards a better system, in general,
is important for everyone.
And I mean literally every one, as well as everyone,
in those sort of big malaise of everyone's out there,
just sort of everyone.
Those are my thoughts on reality.
I hope they've been interesting to you. Thanks for listening.
I'll talk to you next time.
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