“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room." So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”. Now, just as Neo discovered that the "life" he'd been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves. In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory known as the simulation hypothesis. This, in a nutshell, posits that the entire universe and our objective reality are just super-advanced virtual reality illusions. Elon Musk is among the well-known fans of the theory, which – as Dr Vopson notes in his paper – has been “gaining traction in scientific circles as well as in the entertainment industry”. The university lecturer also pointed out that recent developments in a branch of science known as information physics “appear to support this possibility”. Information physics suggests that physical reality is fundamentally made up of bits of information. However, Dr Vopson has gone further and is working to prove that information has a physical mass and is a fundamental building block of the universe. He even claims that information could be the mysterious dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe. In previous research, the physicist proposed that all elementary particles (the smallest known building blocks in the universe), store information about themselves, much like DNA in humans. Then, in 2022, he discovered a new law of physics, christened the second law of infodynamics, which states that entropy – the degree of randomness or disorder – within an isolated information system either remains constant or decreases over time. In other words, the system becomes less and less chaotic, implying that there is some kind of mechanism governing it rather than random chance. “I knew then that this revelation had far-reaching implications across various scientific disciplines,” Dr Vopson said in a statement released by the University of Portsmouth. “What I wanted to do next is put the law to the test and see if it could further support the simulation hypothesis by moving it on from the philosophical realm to mainstream science.” Is the Universe a Simulation? | Melvin Vopson www.youtube.com Dr Vopson employed the law in a range of different fields, including genetics, cosmology and even symmetry. Here, he found that the abundance of symmetry in the Universe (think snowflakes and facial structures) could be explained by the second law of infodynamics. "Symmetry principles play an important role with respect to the laws of nature, but until now there has been little explanation as to why that could be,” he said. “My findings demonstrate that high symmetry corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, potentially explaining nature's inclination towards it." Again, put simply, nature prefers things to be as well-ordered as possible. He continued: “This approach, where excess information is removed, resembles the process of a computer deleting or compressing waste code to save storage space and optimise power consumption.” As a result, this “supports the idea that we’re living in a simulation.” Dr Vopson is serious about this idea and, last year, even launched a crowdfunding campaign to test it. At the time, he announced that he had designed an experiment to determine whether we are all just characters in an advanced virtual world. “There is a growing community out there looking seriously at the possibility that information is more fundamental to everything than we think,” he said in a statement released back in December. “If information is a key component of everything in the universe, it would make sense that a vast computer somewhere is in control. “Assuming the universe is indeed a simulation, then it must contain a lot of information bits hidden everywhere around us. I’ve devised an experiment that proposes a way of extracting this information to prove it’s there.” His proposed experiment is based on his conclusion that information is physical and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves. He posited that the information in an elementary particle could be detected and measured by using particle-antiparticle collision. “We can measure the information content of a particle by erasing it. If we delete the information from the particles, we can then look at what’s left,” he said in the December statement. “This experiment is highly achievable with our existing tools, and I’m hoping the crowdfunding site will help us achieve it.” And whilst the crowdfunder closed well before reaching its proposed £185,000 target, Dr Vopson still hopes to carry out the ambitious test. Following his most recent paper, he suggested the experiment had the power to confirm the “fifth state of matter in the universe” and “change physics as we know it.” Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

OpenAI has built a new bot that will crawl over the internet, gathering information to educate artificial intelligence systems. Operators of websites will be forced to actively opt out, and block the bot, if they want to stop it taking data from their site. Artificial intelligence systems such as OpenAI's ChatGPT rely on vast amounts of data to train their models and learn how to give the correct outputs. So far, much of that data has been taken freely from the web. That has prompted numerous complaints from authors and other web users. Many have criticised OpenAI and others for taking personal information and copyrighted content to train their models, with that writing potentially informing or even being replicated in the system's answers. Artificial intelligence companies have also faced criticism from others who claim that such crawlers are stretching their web infrastructure. Elon Musk, for instance, has said that the load from such bots has forced Twitter to place limits on how many posts users could see on the site. OpenAI's existing ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 were trained on data taken from the internet that was taken up to late 2021. There is no way for owners of that data or the websites it was gathered from to remove it from OpenAI's models. Now OpenAI says that the new system, named 'GPTBot', will be crawling over data and writing on the web to gather more information to train future models. It told website administrators that they should include instructions to the bot to stop it from crawling a website, if they did not want that information to be gathered. Administrators are able to include such information in a file called "robots.txt", which gives instructions to other crawlers such as those used by Google for its search results. OpenAI says the bot "may potentially be used to improve future models". It also says that it is built to "remove sources" that require a paywall, gather personally identifiable information or have text that violates its rules. It suggested that letting the bot access sites "can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and safety". Read More Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees ‘steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent’ Google Assistant will be ‘supercharged’ with AI like ChatGPT and Bard PayPal launches dollar-backed cryptocurrency

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