Ockham's Razor

Five Years Later...

“Zac!” I yelled as I burst through the door. “Zac! I’ve figured it out! This is huge!”

“That’s what she said,” Zac quipped as he emerged from the study and sat on my bed, where I was already pacing around the room.

I rolled my eyes. “Ugh. You’re such a man-child. I’m sure you’ll make some woman very happy one day with what I can only assume is an adequately sized package.”

Zac frowned. “What happened to your hair?”

“What?”

“Your hair is soaking wet. Did you just go for a swim?”

Did I? I think I did.

I touched my hair. It was, indeed, wet.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

“Err… yeah,” I replied.

“Thanks for the invite.”

“Well, water helps me think! I need to be alone to think. Anyway…” My mind was racing at the speed of light. I was trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts at a fraction of that velocity.

“You know how I’ve spent the past few years trying to reverse-engineer the universe by running experiments on my consciousness?”

“Yeah,” Zac replied. He glanced up at the wall where my ‘memory board’ was hanging. It represented one such experiment — an exercise in conditioning my consciousness to view future events as being in the past. “Of course I know. You’re obsessed, in a good way. It’s one of your more endearing qualities, when you aren’t being a complete dork.”

I smiled. “Obsession is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. Anyway, I think I’ve figured out the riddle. You ready?”

Zac nodded, and I continued. “I’ve already told you a million times that reality appears to be a physical experience of your own consciousness. That part has become fairly obvious to me through various personal experiments, research, and observations. Of course, that doesn’t prove anything. But the subjective experiments help formulate the right questions for when you’re sifting through empirical data, trying to find the signal in the noise.

Now, a few years ago, I came to suspect that reality was functioning on holographic principles. However, I still always thought of it as an esoteric concept. Like, the universe is a non-dualistic dream in the mind of a superconsciousness, and we’re all experiencing ourselves as separate holographic fragments of that entity.”

I was on a roll now. The thoughts were starting to connect in my mind. “But here’s the thing: It’s not a theistic ‘God.’ It’s not ‘spirit.’ It’s not some mystical ‘universal force.’ It’s a fucking algorithm, Zac! A beautiful, holographic, recursive algorithm! A giant neural network. Just pure math.”

“Right…” Zac trailed off. I could see he had that I’m-being-a-supportive-friend-but-I’m-not-quite-sure-what-she-is-talking-about look on his face.

“Okay,” I continued. “Let me try to explain this. We have to start with the approach — ‘Nullius in verba’, which means ‘Take nobody’s word for it.’ It’s the motto of the UK’s Royal Society. It represents the determination of their scientists to withstand the domination of authority and verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment. This is how you find the objective truth of things: you take nobody’s word for it. You question and challenge everything. You verify all statements with evidence. You assume nothing.

So let’s start from scratch here. When you forget everything you think you know about reality and just reason up from first principles using empirical evidence and logic, the riddle’s answer turns out to be very simple but very counterintuitive. So tell me — what is the only statement that you know with 100 percent certainty is true?”

“I am awesome,” Zac answered, without skipping a beat.

“That’s debatable. No. The only thing I know with 100 percent certainty is René Descartes’ famous philosophical statement, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In other words, ‘I am conscious, therefore I exist.’ I don’t know anything beyond that, though. For all I know, I am currently in a computer game, or a dream, or-”

“Or The Matrix?”

“Yeah,” I grinned. “We could be in The Matrix right now, and we’d have no idea.”

Zac lowered his voice and did his best Morpheus impression. “Have you ever been in a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?”

“Why, yes,” I grinned again. “We’re in one right now.”

“Wait. How do you know?!”

“It’s just simple deductive logic,” I shrugged. “I know with 100% certainty that my consciousness exists. But I also know I’m interacting with a three-dimensional world that appears to be outside of myself. Therefore, I can split my reality into two distinct components: the observer (my consciousness) and the observed (the three-dimensional reality I am observing).”

I got up off my bed and wandered over to the whiteboard in my room, which was full of notes. I erased the whole thing and drew a new diagram.

“So,” I continued, “at this point, I know that one of these statements must be true: either the observer and the observed are the same thing (i.e. the observer = the observed = x. Or they’re not the same thing (i.e. the observer = x, the observed = y).

We can phrase this is a simple binary question: are the observer and the observed the same thing? The answer is either true or false. There are no other possibilities.”

“These two possibilities represent two distinct paradigms. If the answer is true, then we live in a non-dual paradigm. If the answer is false, we live in a materialist paradigm.”

“Now,” I continued pacing around the room, “our scientific establishment assumes we live in a materialist paradigm. I mean, it seems kinda obvious that there is a material world ‘out there’, right?”

“Yeah…”

“But it also seemed kinda obvious that space and time were separate variables until Einstein proved they were different sides to the same coin i.e. they were the same thing. Throughout history, a lot of things that seemed intuitive turned out to be wrong. And materialism may be intuitive, but if you actually stop to question it, you realize it rests on the axiomatic assumption that y exists.”

“And y is a material reality, separate to my own consciousness?”

“Exactly,” I said. “And look, we could be living in a materialist paradigm. It’s an option. But it’s not the only option. We could also be living in a non-dual paradigm, and we wouldn’t intuitively be able to tell the difference. Mystics have been talking about non-duality for millennia, so this idea is nothing new.”

“Yeah, but what is non-duality?”

“You know — like a dream. When you wake up from a dream, you realize that everything that appeared outside of you, was you. Space was an illusion. Time was an illusion. Your consciousness constructed the entire thing. But a better example is a computer game full of artificial intelligence bots. Here, hold on.”

I removed my laptop from my bag and opened it up, furiously searching for a video I’d seen earlier on Youtube. “Watch this,” I said as I swiveled the laptop around to face him.

“Think about it, Zac. Where is the consciousness of those AI bots? Where is their awareness and ability to adapt to their environment?”

“Err… in the codebase?” he answered.

“Exactly! In the codebase. Their ‘consciousness’ is just an algorithm that exists in a codebase. And now, where is everything outside of the AI bots — the floor, the sky, the blocks, the ramps? Where is their external reality located?”

“In the codebase?” he answered again.

“Boom! Exactly. In the codebase. It’s like the AI bots are in a dream world where, at the deeper level of reality, everything outside of them, is them. The observer is the observed. It’s all just information — ones and zeros. So do you see where I’m going with this?”

“I do not.” He looked at me, perplexed.

“If we ask the question, ‘are the observer and the observed the same thing?’ and we know the answer is either true or false, then we just need to parse all the empirical evidence through that binary question to see which conclusion it supports.”

“What empirical evidence are we talking about here?” Zac asked.

“Empirical just means observable. Scientific, y’know? Nothing subjective. So let’s start with Ockham’s razor, which states that entities should not be multiplied without necessity. Basically, the simplest explanation is the preferred one. The obvious winner there is the assumption that the observerand the observed are the same thing.”

“Why is that obvious?”

“Well, if the observer and the observed are the same thing, then we can say: the observer = the observed = x. Then we can stop there. We don’t need to prove it, or explain it, or derive it because our first principle already does. It’s an axiom. It just is.”

“The first principle being, ‘I think, therefore I am?’” Zac clarified.

“Yes. Exactly! If you know ‘I think, therefore I am’ is 100 percent true, then you also know for sure that x — consciousness — fundamentally exists. But for some reason, the scientific community has invented a completely unnecessary variable that we have no evidence for: the observed = y. Like I said — this may be intuitive, but it actually makes zero logical sense and serves no purpose.”

“Kind of like your existence?”

“No, Zac,” I sighed. “It’s like claiming there is a bearded man named Zeus in the sky. For anyone claiming Zeus exists, the burden of proof is on them to provide compelling evidence — otherwise, our default position is ‘there is no Zeus.’

This is simply a matter of mathematics. The probability that Zeus exists, when there is no evidence that Zeus exists, is negligible in comparison to the probability that Zeus doesn’t exist. Furthermore, assuming the existence of Zeus does not explain anything that can’t already be explained without assuming Zeus exists. Therefore, Zeus is redundant. In the absence of any evidence that would affect the balance of those probabilities, it is highly irrational to believe in the existence of Zeus.

The same logic applies to the existence of an external reality, separate from my own consciousness — what we’re calling y. For anyone claiming y exists, the burden of proof is on them to provide compelling evidence — otherwise, our default position is ‘there is no y.’

Like in my Zeus analogy, assuming the existence of y does not explain anything that can’t already be explained without assuming y exists. Therefore, from a purely mathematical point of view, the probability that a material reality exists ‘out there’ as an independent variable to consciousness, is basically zero.

I mean, if scientists can postulate the existence of y while calling themselves ‘rational thinkers’, then it would be logically consistent for me to postulate the existence of a flying spaghetti monster while calling myself a ‘rational thinker’. Scientists can’t apply the strict rules of logic where it suits them, but ignore logic where it doesn’t. That’s not how logic works...”

“Oh, shit.” Zac’s eyes widened as the realization dawned on him.

“So that’s where it gets interesting,” I continued. “Our default position should be ‘there is no y’ because that’s the scientific method: being skeptical of claims that are not supported by evidence. However, as I’ve just pointed out, the scientific community seems to have conveniently forgotten to apply this marvelous method to their own assumptions. While they were busy telling everyone else how stupid and gullible they are for believing in a theistic God on faith, they were being stupid and gullible for believing in y on faith. They’re acting like a bunch of hypocritical politicians without even realizing it: one standard for me, and a completely different standard for everyone else. Let’s just pause for a moment to bask in the sweet, sweet irony of this situation.”

I held up both hands in the air to conduct. Zac and I closed our eyes and took a deep, synchronized breath in, then slowly out again.

“Delicious,” Zac crooned.

“Intoxicating,” I agreed. “Because here’s the thing: if the observer = x, and the observed = y, then everything starts to get unnecessarily complex. You have to explain how x derives from y, and how y got there in the first place from nothing, and what the relationship is between x and y, and it’s all just a bit of a complicated mess.”

“Kind of like your life?”

“No, Zac! An AI bot doesn’t need to assume there is a reality separate to themselves to explain their experience, so why should we? Adding in a reality separate to consciousness just complicates things. What value does it add? Nothing. It’s superfluous — just like a flying spaghetti monster in the sky, or Bertrand Russell’s famous celestial teapot orbiting Mars, or that terrible fedora you bought when we were in China a few years ago. Completely unnecessary.”

“Hey!” Zac retorted. “You said that fedora looked good!”

“Well, I’d also just binge-watched about six seasons of White Collar and had a bit of a crush on Neal Caffrey. We all make mistakes.”

Zac raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah? Rather like that Halloween a few years ago in New York where I heard a kathump in the middle of the night and found you passed out on our bathroom floor in your slutty sailor’s outfit with a bottle of gin. You didn’t quite make the perilous journey to the shower.”

“That did not happen, Zac.”

“That totally happened. I have memorabilia of the event stored in the blackmail folder on my computer. Your personal file is actually quite substantial. Wanna see?” He began reaching for his phone.

“Zac! I’m trying to explain the fucking universe to you. Focus!”

His hand slowly retreated back towards his body, and I continued.