A-modal completion is the ability of our brains to fill in the missing pieces of objects that see partially. Tali Sharot tells Morgan Freeman that about 80% of us have developed a reality distortion mechanism to over-estimate positive outcomes. Sharot has written her book The Optimism Bias to explore this optimistic outlook. The holographic principle states that the 3-dimensional reality may in fact be 2-dimensional.
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LearningTranscript
00:01Do we live in the real world?
00:05Or is it all in our minds?
00:08Do we see the universe as it is?
00:11Or do our senses deceive us?
00:16Scientific observation reveals hidden realities.
00:20The judgment of our senses cannot be trusted.
00:24And our basic assumptions about life and the universe may be false.
00:33Is existence an illusion?
00:36Is reality real?
00:44Space.
00:46Time.
00:48Life itself.
00:49The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:09What is real?
01:11We assume it's everything we encounter in our daily lives.
01:15But how can we be certain the universe we see around us actually exists?
01:22And how can we know that the world we see matches what anyone else experiences?
01:29Our senses certainly make reality seem real enough.
01:33These things are solid.
01:35But what if they actually aren't?
01:42Our reality may be a fragile tissue of illusions.
01:48Illusions about ourselves, our society, and even the whole of the natural world.
01:55When I was young, a magician came to town.
02:04He was pretty good.
02:07Watching him made me doubt the reliability of my own eyes.
02:11No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't see how he did it.
02:15What was I missing?
02:18And why was I missing it?
02:28Lawrence Rosenblum is a professor of perceptual psychology at the University of California, Riverside.
02:34He also dabbles in magic.
02:37More than most, Larry understands the mechanisms magicians use to warp reality.
02:42Ladies and gentlemen, the image, Larry!
02:45Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
02:55Tonight I'd like to teach you a little bit about perception.
03:05How did that trick work?
03:06Well, as I was throwing the ball up, you were following my eyes with your attention.
03:11That continued through the last throw, which was not a real throw.
03:14That technique of misdirection is just one of the many techniques that professional magicians use.
03:23Illusionists like David Gabay perform tricks that fool us again and again, no matter how closely we watch.
03:30They take advantage of our brains' eagerness to make sense of the world.
03:36David's not helping our brains create a reality as much as guiding our attention of the perceptual information in different ways.
03:45And in that way, I think that David has a lot to teach us.
03:49David's trick exploits a mental shortcut called amodal completion.
03:55Here's how it works.
03:58Let's say you see a rabbit.
04:01Then your view of the rabbit is partially blocked.
04:04Is the rabbit still there?
04:07Of course.
04:09You know that because your brain matches it up with a three-dimensional model of a rabbit you have filed in your memory.
04:16Your brain fills in the missing piece.
04:19We have millions of these models stored in our minds.
04:25We use them to assemble a seemingly continuous picture of the world.
04:29What we think of as reality.
04:36Our sense of reality is profoundly affected by the way our senses work together.
04:40For instance.
04:42Ba.
04:44Ba.
04:45Ba.
04:46Ba.
04:48Ba.
04:49What do you hear?
04:50Ba.
04:51Ba.
04:53Larry seems to be saying, ba, ba, ba.
04:57But here's what happens when the picture is changed just a bit.
05:01Ba.
05:02Ba.
05:03Ba.
05:04Ba.
05:05Now it sounds like he's saying, fa, fa, fa.
05:08Ba.
05:09Ba.
05:10But close your eyes and listen.
05:11Ba.
05:12Ba.
05:13Ba.
05:14The sound hasn't changed.
05:15Larry's still saying, ba.
05:16Ba.
05:17Ba.
05:18Ba.
05:19Ba.
05:20In the case with an auditory ba and a visual ba, what happens is the visual information ends up overriding the auditory information because it's so salient, it is so easy to see.
05:31Ba.
05:32Ba.
05:33Ba.
05:34And the perceptual brain, in this case mostly the auditory brain, ends up using that information to kind of push the ba to sound more like a ba.
05:42And that's what people end up believing they're actually hearing.
05:48Many different sensory systems interact within our brains.
05:52Our minds take this information and tell a story about it.
05:56We call it reality.
05:57We're perceiving a lot more than we realize.
06:00And what I mean by that is that there are entire channels of information that are getting to the brain underneath our level of awareness.
06:08But at any one time, not only are you seeing something and attending to what you're seeing, but what you're not attending to is affecting you as well.
06:17And that isn't just from information you get through your eyes, but information you get through your ears and through your nose and through your skin.
06:24And all that is happening as we're sitting there experiencing what we think is a visual reality.
06:29The other senses are affecting it all.
06:31But for all we perceive, there is much we miss.
06:42Most of us share the same set of senses.
06:45Yet some of us see things very differently than others.
06:49Can any of us perceive the world as it truly is?
06:55Professor Charles Falco is one of the few who can.
06:59He explores the invisible world, the reality we can't see.
07:05The human vision system only captures a really tiny fraction of the light that's available.
07:13If we look at a bust like this, we see it looks red to the naked eye.
07:18But if we image this in the ultraviolet, possibly this bust will fluoresce because of some of the chemical composition that's in it.
07:26Infrared typically penetrates fairly far through red pigment.
07:31So we'll be able to see what's underneath the pigment, if there's something between the pigment and the plaster bust itself.
07:38In his laboratory at the University of Arizona, Charles has exotic instruments that can examine objects at resolutions across all ranges of visible and invisible light.
07:50X-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, and machines that seem millions of times sharper than human eyes.
07:59This electron microscope can read the rough molecular surface of the bust's seemingly smooth red paint.
08:07The crown jewel of his collection is a machine that reads the space between atoms, giving physicists a completely different way of looking at how molecules are constructed.
08:20If you only have your eyes, you look at something, you think you understand it.
08:26Turns out that the more tools you have to look at something, it reveals much more information.
08:33So reality is a much more complex thing than we think about.
08:37The more ways we have studying of reality, the more we realize reality is a bigger picture than we could possibly have understood before.
08:44There is no evolutionary pressure to create an animal that sees reality as it really is.
08:54We have evolved to see the reality we need to see.
08:58When we see something, how our brain interprets it isn't usually what exactly is imprinted on our eyeball.
09:05We're not a camera. We have a brain behind our retinas.
09:10And the brain processes the information and tells us what it wants us to see.
09:16There's so much visual information in the world around us that it turns out our brain gives us a limited spotlight of attention,
09:25where we focus our attention on exactly what's in front of us, ignoring things that go on everywhere else.
09:35When your attention is attracted by something, neurons enhance the sensitivity of the central region of your field of vision,
09:43and suppress the sensitivity of the surrounding regions.
09:47And this is how we see the world, through binoculars.
09:52We see only a tiny fraction of the reality that's in front of us.
09:56There's so much sensory information, so much visual information, that in fact it's impossible to process it all.
10:04So everyone's brain, every animal's brain, has been programmed by evolution to accept only a small fraction of the information and process it.
10:13Otherwise it would be total overload.
10:14But reality isn't defined solely by how you or I see the world.
10:22It's something we share.
10:24We check our observations against the observations of others.
10:28If we didn't agree on what is real and what is not, society couldn't function.
10:32But this man believes our shared reality is the greatest illusion of all.
10:43I am not real.
10:46You are looking at thousands of glowing colored dots on a screen.
10:50The pattern of these dots changes once every 30th of a second, creating the illusion of movement.
10:59And I'm not saying these words right now.
11:02This is a captured impression of something I said in the recent past.
11:07Or is it?
11:10What if I did this?
11:13You've been conditioned to believe that when something says live, it's really happening right now.
11:20Our society is tied together by these shared beliefs.
11:25But how much of it is real?
11:27And how much is just an elaborate fantasy?
11:34For much of his life, scientist and philosopher Jim Baggin has been haunted by a simple question.
11:40What is reality?
11:43All reality is a fantasy created in our own heads.
11:47We are locked in the prison of our own minds.
11:50And as a consequence, we have to create for ourselves an understanding of what reality is like on the basis of what we can absorb, what we can learn, what we can see.
11:59So when we see with our eyes, what we perceive, of course, is not reality as such.
12:09Our brains are, after all, just clumps of tissue weighing about three and a half pounds with the consistency of cold porridge.
12:15It's only when we interpret the electrical signals generated by our brain in our conscious mind do we create our individual reality.
12:26And begs the question, what happens when those electrical signals are shut off?
12:31Well, I'm about to find out.
12:32Jim's going to have his hearing and vision blocked out for 15 minutes.
12:40This simple form of sensory deprivation sends him into an alternate reality.
12:46He loses track of time and experiences vivid hallucinations.
12:54In the absence of sensory input, Jim's world-making machinery manufactures a reality with no connection to the world outside his body.
13:03Deprived of two of my most important senses, what happens is the brain scrambles for inputs from other senses.
13:15So you become very conscious of the taste in your mouth and the hardness of this bed that I'm lying on.
13:21I began to drift into some dreamlike states, but then I become aware that my eyes are, in fact, wide open and I'm fully awake and conscious.
13:30When your senses are shut off, your brain makes up its own version of reality.
13:40But according to Jim, we all live in a false reality.
13:45A hyper-reality created by society, filled with illusions that have become more real to us than the physical world around us.
13:53We are all part of a community of minds.
14:00A world created by billions of brains working in concert over thousands of years.
14:07The modern consumer society is the latest twist our mass mind has evolved to advance the species.
14:14Money lies at the heart of this society, but in many ways it is the most hyper-real of all of our creations.
14:25I have here a fifty dollar bill and a fifty pound note.
14:31Current currency conversion rates tells us that the pound is about one and a half times greater in value than the dollar.
14:36And these little pieces of paper hold such a spell over our lives.
14:41They tell us almost who's going to live, who's going to die.
14:45But really, value is something that's part of the hyper-reality that we've created.
14:50I don't know what the real value of a piece of paper made of three parts cotton fiber and one part linen really is,
14:56but I can tell you it's a lot less than fifty dollars or fifty pounds.
15:00Money would be valueless if we didn't all believe in it.
15:08Our shared reality is an illusion we have to struggle to maintain.
15:13And if we fail to strictly observe its rules, reality can crumble.
15:19Once these structures are out there, as it were, they develop laws of their own.
15:25They develop a life of their own, almost.
15:27And that misinterpreting those rules and distorting those rules and changing those rules.
15:33We do that at our peril.
15:35There is perhaps no greater example than the recent near collapse of the global financial system.
15:42The global banking crisis of 2008 resulted from bankers playing with the rules of the game.
15:49And as a consequence, the value of money literally overnight was destroyed.
15:54Wall Street is in a peril after a record drop.
15:59For a brief moment, people became conscious that money is essentially an illusion.
16:04But if we stop believing in the global monetary system, society could collapse.
16:11So we choose to keep on believing.
16:14Civilization was brought almost to its knees.
16:16But the fact that civilization didn't disappear perhaps tells us that hyperreality, despite the fact that it exists only in our minds, is still too tough to kill.
16:26Why is it so easy for us to live in a fantasy world?
16:31What is it about being human that compels us to create a hyperreality?
16:36Is it social pressure or is it born into us?
16:44This neuroscientist believes the answer is buried deep in our brains.
16:49And our denial of reality may be essential to the survival of our species.
16:56The human brain is a storyteller.
17:04It tells us tales about the way things are, and it allows us to imagine the way things could be.
17:12But what if the stories we tell ourselves aren't true?
17:17How would we know?
17:20What if all our brains are wired to lie about reality and our place in it?
17:32This man is about to ride his motorcycle through the traffic-clogged streets of London.
17:38When he does, he will enter an alternate reality.
17:47Motorcyclists make up less than 1% of vehicle traffic in Britain.
17:55But they suffer 14% of total deaths and serious injuries.
17:59Bikers in the U.S. are about 37 times more likely to die in a crash than people in a car.
18:07But in this man's reality, those numbers don't apply, at least not to him.
18:12Despite knowing the grim statistics, he, like millions of other bikers, continues to ride his motorcycle.
18:22Why do so many people consistently disregard risk?
18:28At University College London, neuroscientist Tali Sherrote has discovered there's a reality distortion mechanism built into the human brain.
18:38She wrote a book about it called The Optimism Bias.
18:44So, The Optimism Bias is our tendency to overestimate the positive things in our lives and underestimate the likelihood of negative things in our lives.
18:53So, for example, people overestimate their success professionally, their longevity.
18:58They underestimate their likelihood of suffering from cancer, of getting divorced.
19:04We're more optimistic than realistic, but most of us are oblivious to the fact.
19:09We're not aware of it.
19:11Nearly 80% of the population is affected by this bias.
19:15It's easy to see it in action, as Tali demonstrates with a random group of students.
19:20So, I'm going to give you a list of abilities and characteristics, and I want you to think for each of these abilities where you stand relative to the rest of the population.
19:30So, the first one is getting along well with others.
19:33Who believes they're at the bottom 25%?
19:36Okay, no one.
19:38Who thinks they're at the top 50%?
19:41Okay, so that's most people up here.
19:45Um, so what we find is that most people rate themselves above average on most abilities.
19:51And that's, of course, statistically impossible, because we can't all be better than everyone else.
19:55Um, who here thinks that they will have talented kids?
19:59That's most of us here.
20:01And who here thinks they will be successful in their professional life?
20:05It's commonly believed that when your expectations are not met, you alter your expectations.
20:22Yet, Tali's experiments show that most people, despite all evidence to the contrary, remain optimistic in the face of reality.
20:30She decided to find out why.
20:36Using a brain scanner, Tali monitors what happens in our heads when we process information.
20:43Today, this man will learn if he's out of touch with the real world.
20:49Okay, so you're going to see, um, a negative life event, such as cancer.
20:54And what you need to do is estimate your likelihood of experiencing this event in your lifetime.
20:58Then you will see the average likelihood of someone like you experiencing that event.
21:04Nick, the biker, will be asked to calculate his chances of experiencing 80 different negative events in the future.
21:13Nick thinks his chances of getting lung cancer are about 10%.
21:18Actually, it's 30% for a man of his age and lifestyle.
21:22Now he's presented with more negative events.
21:26With each new scenario, he gives a prediction, before finding out the real statistic.
21:33When Nick hears good news, his brain scans show plenty of activity in the frontal lobes.
21:39But when he hears bad news, there is much less activity.
21:43Now Nick will take the test again to see whether these facts have changed his beliefs.
21:51What we usually find again and again is that people change their estimates quite a lot in the second session
21:57for items where they got information that was better than their own estimate.
22:03So for example, if Nick says that his likelihood of suffering from Alzheimer's is about 30%,
22:08and we tell him, well, the average likelihood of Alzheimer's is only 10%,
22:12we find that most people change their estimates the second time around.
22:16They would say, well, maybe my average likelihood of Alzheimer's is only about 12%.
22:19And we see in the frontal lobes enhanced activity when people get information that's better than what they expected.
22:31But when people get information that's worse than expected, it doesn't sink in.
22:37Despite being told he has a 30% chance of dying of lung cancer, Nick barely changes his estimate from 10% to 13%.
22:46Our brains seem to resist negative information, but only when it applies to us.
22:55So we're mostly optimistic about ourselves, and we're optimistic about our kids, about our families,
23:01but we're not optimistic about other people.
23:04So people tend to be even slightly pessimistic about the future of the country and the future of the world.
23:10People do have quite pessimistic expectations of where the economy is going, for example,
23:14but they tend to think that they will be okay.
23:18And this is why the warnings on cigarette packages go unheeded.
23:22Yes, smoking kills six million people a year, but smokers believe that it kills the other guy.
23:29They are unique. They will survive.
23:33That's the downside of living in a false reality.
23:37But there is a strong positive aspect to it as well.
23:42So optimism changes the way we see the world.
23:46But it also changes objective reality.
23:50And it does so because it acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
23:54So positive expectations changes our actions and our interactions with the people around us, with the world.
23:59And that actually changes the world around us.
24:04And this reality distortion field, Talley believes, is essential to the survival and advancement of the human race.
24:12Hope may not always be realistic, but it makes the world a better place.
24:19We all live in many realities.
24:26There is the reality in our minds, and there is the reality we share with others.
24:33We now know these realities can't be entirely trusted.
24:38But what about the physical world that exists outside of our minds?
24:42Surely, in the rock-solid, cause-and-effect world of nature, we can rely on things to be indisputably real.
24:57Maybe not.
25:01In many ways, we are blind to the true nature of reality.
25:08Our perceptions are limited.
25:10Our brains distort the truth.
25:15So can we ever know what is real?
25:18That's the mission of science.
25:21To probe deep into the massive puzzle box of nature to find its ultimate truths.
25:27But how successful have we been?
25:30What if we are blind to an entire extra dimension of space?
25:35There are two kinds of physicists.
25:42Theoreticians, who make informed guesses as to why the world works the way it does.
25:48And experimentalists, who break things apart to see what's inside.
25:53Steve Naan is an experimentalist.
25:57I absolutely believe that reality is a real thing.
26:01But that does not mean that we completely understand it.
26:03When you look at the first maps of the world, what you notice immediately is our major pieces missing.
26:10But as we explored more, our accuracy on the maps got much, much better, and we discovered continents like the Americas or Antarctica or Australia.
26:18Today, thanks to satellites, our maps are incredibly accurate.
26:23But when it comes to the deeper levels of reality, we're kind of like those first maps here.
26:28We don't know everything that's out there.
26:29Physicists map the subatomic levels of reality using the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
26:40The LHC is the biggest microscope in the world.
26:45It smashes together protons at 99.99999% of the speed of light.
26:54Steve was one of the small army of scientists who found the signature traces of the Higgs field in July 2012.
27:05The Higgs field is responsible for the existence of matter in the universe.
27:10But this remarkable discovery may be just the beginning.
27:14Many more strange things could emerge from the LHC.
27:18Perhaps even gateways to unseen new realities.
27:24Huh?
27:26There may be dimensions of space and time beyond the ones we know.
27:31Dimensions that could explain one of the greatest mysteries of physics.
27:37There are four fundamental forces that drive everything we know.
27:42There's the electromagnetic force, there's the strong force, and the weak force.
27:48And then there's the one that we know the least about, and that's gravity.
27:52Gravity is a trillion, trillion, trillion times weaker than the scale of those other forces.
27:58So, what's going on with gravity? Why is it so much weaker?
28:03That's one of the questions we'd like to be able to answer at the LAC.
28:05Many physicists suspect the three dimensions we know are slices of a much larger universe.
28:14In other as yet undetected dimensions, gravity may be as strong as the other three forces.
28:22The proof would be discovering high-energy clones of familiar particles.
28:26Suppose that you found some new particles that were sort of kissing cousins to the particles you love and know, only at higher mass.
28:36So, for each electron, you have another electron that's at much higher mass.
28:41And for each quark, you have another quark at higher mass.
28:44That would be a signature for extra dimensions, and it would actually provide possibly a clue for what's going on with gravity.
28:50Because some particles can travel in this extra dimension, and some particles cannot.
28:56But if you could go off in that extra dimension somewhere further away, gravity becomes just as strong as the other forces.
29:04Things would be very different in this hidden reality.
29:08For one thing, they would be much heavier.
29:12Take this basketball. Let's pretend that it is a particle that can travel in the extra dimension.
29:16If it's here where we are in that extra dimension, and I drop it, gravity pulls it to the ground, and the floor is strong enough to push it back up into my hands.
29:27But suppose that it then moves somewhere else in this extra dimension where gravity grows exponentially stronger.
29:34If I drop it over there, the floor wouldn't be strong enough at all, and the ball will go straight through the ground, crashing through the building below us.
29:42Back at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the beams will soon be smashing together with enough force to prove whether or not this gravity-heavy dimension actually exists.
29:56The LHC may shake up the orthodoxy by proving these theories right or wrong.
30:03I myself do not take sides. My job is to find out what is really there and what is really not there.
30:11There are many different possibilities. Like the map makers of old, we are exploring Terra Incognita and trying to draw new maps of the true nature of reality.
30:21The universe may have more dimensions than the ones we know, but there is another even more radical possibility.
30:32What if there are fewer dimensions than we think?
30:36What if there is less to reality than there appears to be?
30:42We live in a world of cause and effect. The universe appears to behave in predictable ways.
30:52But down deep, at the subatomic level, reality shifts and changes.
30:59The world we know gives way to quantum strangeness, where all realities happen at once, and the outcome of any event is unknowable.
31:09Can an object be in two places at once?
31:15Can things appear out of thin air?
31:19Not in the reality we live in.
31:23But nature has many layers.
31:26And the closer we look, the more we find reality as we know it breaks down and magic is real.
31:35Okay guys, an amazing sleight of hand. Just follow the coin, and guess the hand. You ready?
31:47Do this one again? Just see?
31:52David Tong is not a professional magician.
31:57He's a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University Center for Mathematical Sciences, where he studies the magic of the quantum world.
32:05Okay, in my defense, I could argue that this is just an example of quantum uncertainty.
32:13For particles like electrons, you never know where they're going to be from one minute to the next.
32:18In fact, by the time you get down to the fundamental level of reality, it looks like everything is something of an illusion.
32:24In the subatomic world, at the smallest known level of reality, particles like electrons don't obey the laws of common sense.
32:37They obey the laws of quantum mechanics.
32:41In the quantum world, the properties that a particle seems to have depends on the experiment you do.
32:47You can measure the position of a particle with as much accuracy as you like, or you can measure its speed, but you can't measure both at the same time.
33:01Similarly, an electron can appear as a particle or a wave, but never as both at the same time.
33:09Quantum objects are fuzzy, like the edges of shadows.
33:16Doesn't make sense, but this really is the way nature works at the most fundamental level.
33:23Quantum mechanics is simply the best scientific theory that we've ever developed.
33:28It underpins everything we understand about the universe.
33:31It's never been found to be wrong.
33:33But where does this leave us? What is the true reality?
33:36The prevailing theory of quantum mechanics suggests we will never know, because we can never measure all the properties of quantum objects with absolute certainty.
33:48It's like the story of Plato's cave.
33:51Two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato suggested that we could never understand the true meaning of reality.
33:56He said we're a little like prisoners, chained in a cave and forced to look at the back wall.
34:02Behind the prisoners, there's a distant fire which throws shadows on them.
34:06Shadows of the life that's going on behind the prisoners.
34:09But they never get to see that life.
34:11All they see are the shadows.
34:13And after a while, they think reality is some two-dimensional dancing image.
34:17They've got no way of ever turning around and seeing this beautiful, colorful, three-dimensional world behind them.
34:22Now, this is a little bit like quantum mechanics.
34:26We can never understand everything about the quantum wave.
34:28We can never measure all the information which is contained in it.
34:32All we can see are projections, like the shadows of the true reality.
34:36But David says the truth may be even stranger than that.
34:41The shadows on the wall may be the true reality.
34:48This is the contention of the holographic principle.
34:52Mathematicians attempted to calculate the amount of information you can cram into a black hole.
34:58They realized the amount is proportional to its surface area, not to its volume.
35:03And if this is true for a black hole, their reason is probably true for any region in space.
35:10Right now, we could all be inside a huge black hole and not even know it.
35:15Reality may actually be two-dimensional.
35:22Think of everything in the universe as bits of information.
35:26Like the information stored in the books on this wall.
35:28When the books lie flat like this, they appear two-dimensional.
35:32But, of course, when I pull them out, we see that the books are three-dimensional at heart.
35:38The information is three-dimensional.
35:40The holographic principle says that this is an illusion.
35:44Not just this, but you, me, the Earth, the stars, even space itself.
35:49Everything that's three-dimensional is actually an illusion.
35:52The true reality is the books lining the wall.
35:56The true reality lives in two dimensions.
35:59And this explains why quantum objects look fuzzy to us.
36:03They are projections that don't actually exist in three-dimensional space.
36:08And what we think of as this three-dimensional world is just a holographic projection
36:13from a surface somewhere in the universe to create the space we see.
36:18It's as if Plato's prisoners had it right all along.
36:22The shadows are real.
36:23What's behind them was the illusion.
36:26Right now, there is no way to prove whether the holographic principle is a genuine description of reality
36:33or the shared delusion of theoretical physicists.
36:36But there may be another explanation for quantum weirdness.
36:41What if reality gets blurry because it was never there to begin with?
36:47Some scientists say our reality could be a deliberately created illusion.
36:58Using the tools of science, we catch glimpses of the vast structure of creation.
37:03There is so much we cannot see.
37:07Why is the truth so hard to find?
37:12Perhaps it's because the universe we live in is just a small part of a larger reality.
37:22And we are all just living in a world of dreams.
37:26Have you ever had a recursive dream?
37:41A dream within a dream within a dream?
37:49Jan Westerhoff has.
37:51And for all he knows, he might still be dreaming.
37:57Or you might be dreaming this.
38:01How do you know whether waking up this morning was actually a real awakening?
38:05Perhaps you just woke up into another dream.
38:09The reason why you should worry about this is that there is actually a significant chance that you are dreaming right now.
38:15Let's do the numbers.
38:17According to Jan, most people spend 8 hours of sleep and 16 hours awake every day.
38:23About 20% of sleep is spent in the REM state, when you dream.
38:3020% of 8 is 1.6, which means...
38:33We know that at this very moment you have a 1 in 10 chance of dreaming right now, which is actually quite a significant probability.
38:46Jan doesn't actually believe he lives in a dream world, but as a philosopher at the University of Durham in England,
38:53his job is to question how and why things are the way they are.
39:01And despite what the numbers say, logic tells you, you are probably not asleep.
39:08If this was a dream world, why would it be bound by the laws of causality?
39:13Why don't fire-breathing dragons go rampaging through London and destroy the city?
39:22Well, they don't. What you saw was just an illusion.
39:26Reality follows a strict set of rules, even though it gets a little blurry at the quantum level.
39:30What might explain that?
39:33Well, perhaps we are living in a simulation made by higher-order reality.
39:39In other words, reality may not be a dream, but it could be a computer simulation.
39:46Imagine a time, perhaps centuries from now, when our descendants have the power to model fully functional human brains in computers.
39:55These simulated minds could be placed in computer-simulated worlds,
39:59perhaps even recreations of the past.
40:03They would never know they weren't real.
40:06What if this has already happened?
40:09How do we know that the present here, if we are in here, is actually original,
40:16rather than some sort of re-run where some weird event in the past had been changed,
40:22just to see what kind of ramifications it had?
40:24How do we know that?
40:25How do we know that?
40:26How do we know that?
40:28How do we know that?
40:30Believe it or not, there is a chance we are all part of a giant simulation.
40:37Imagine, for example, that I buy a Dalit print.
40:40I get really excited about this, because I just love melting clocks.
40:45Now, the problem here is that, according to experts, about 90% of all Dalit prints on the market are fake.
40:51So, the chance that I've got a fake here is 0.9.
40:55What are the odds that our world is a fake?
41:00Some say as high as 1 in 20.
41:04But Jan says the percentage isn't important.
41:08If there is any chance at all that you are simulated, then you can't dismiss the possibility that you are simulated.
41:16But here is the thing, even if this is all a dream, does it really matter?
41:23Even if this is just a dream cake and I paid for it with dream money, it still tastes great.
41:30So, presupposing this all continues, does it really matter whether it is a dream or a simulation?
41:35I can still plan my life, causes will have effects, and actions will have consequences.
41:50Is reality real?
41:53It certainly seems real to us.
41:56But we now know the reality we perceive is just a small slice of what really is.
42:02And perhaps in the long run, that doesn't matter.
42:07What matters most to us is the reality we know.
42:12As the philosopher king Marcus Aurelius wrote 2,000 years ago,
42:17the universe is change.
42:21Our life is what our thoughts make it.
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