...The physics in the film is sound and well-explained, or at least I haven’t been able to spot anything wrong, only a few things that I would have said differently. For example, “[Materialism and idealism as defined previously] are mutually exclusive and are in fact opposites, both cannot be true. Either mind gives rise to matter, or matter gives rise to mind” sounds too black/white to me, and I can think of shades of grey in between. It’s interesting to see how analogies with computer games can help thinking about the limit speed of light, quantum entanglement, high energy thermodynamics, and quantum indeterminacy (it doesn’t make much sense to compute something that nobody is looking at).
Among the many scientists featured in the film,
Max Tegmark,
James Gates (the physicist who found error-correcting codes in physical laws, a result that suggests the reality-as-a-sim idea), and two interesting scientists I wasn’t familiar with:
Brian Whitworth (see his in-progress book
Quantum Realism) and
Thomas Campbell (see his wittily titled book “
My Big Toe“).
“Was everything here created by God?,” wonders Campbell in the film.”Well, if God is the larger consciousness system, yes.” “So who is the programmer?,” reads a question in Whitworth’s
Quantum Realism FAQ. ” Answer. I don’t know. I guess everything is. Every choice we make changes the program.”
Researching Whitworth and Campbell I find (surprise surprise) that they are often accused of “pseudoscience” – a typically dismissal used against those who put too much imagination in their science to the point that (God forbid) it sounds like religion. In the interview, Forbes explains why many scientists hide behind skepticism, and his explanation makes a lot of sense...