 Hi, I'm Clay Irwin and I'm the Director of Quantum Gravity Research. We're in Los Angeles. We're a group of mathematicians and physicists and we're working on a theory of everything. It's a quantum gravity theory. So we want to unify the theory of space and time, which is general relativity, with the theory of everything else, which is quantum mechanics. And with the first principles, theory of everything, which seeks to go down deep to the very most fundamental ontological questions. That is, ontology is the study of what is real and what is not real. We are starting with the question at the beginning, which is, is reality random or is reality like a deterministic algorithm playing itself out? The old Newtonian clockwork universe was a model that said if you knew the starting condition of the universe and you could compute every interaction, you could predict what the universe would be like at every step as it plays itself out. So these are two basic philosophies that are still being argued about today. The argument started with Einstein and others arguing with the fathers of quantum mechanics. So Einstein wanted to return us after quantum mechanics came out to the old idea of a sensible universe where everything happens in a causal way, like dominoes. And the fathers of quantum mechanics wanted to say that everything is inherently non-deterministic, non-predictable because at the core of reality there is this fundamental stuff of randomness. And so today a lot of physicists are still on one side or the other of this divide. So that's this great ontological fundamental question, is reality random or is it deterministic? And interestingly enough free will and the very notion of consciousness comes into play here because if everything is a pre-written script, an algorithm deterministically playing itself out, well then in a sense you don't really have free will, you just think you do. But if reality is deeply non-deterministic, well then there may be an opportunity in there for you to really think that you do have free will. So we are soon to publish a paper called the Code Theoretic Axiom, The Third Ontology. And so it offers a third choice to argue about. And that is the idea that reality is not a deterministic algorithm playing itself out and it is also not a purely random system. That instead it is a language in action and the thing about languages is you can never predict with certainty what is going to happen with the language. For example, if I say the dog ran blank, you know that I cannot say the dog ran cat because if you understand the rules of the language you would know that that's not legal. So you could with certainty say that I will not break that rule, but you cannot with certainty predict that I am going to say fast. I might say quickly. So human languages, computer languages, bird languages, they generally have symbols which are arbitrary. So we invent the letter K in English to represent the phonetic sound of K. Now there is a special set of symbols and a special type of language which is not so arbitrary. Let us start with the idea of what a language is. A language is simply a set of symbols and rules on how you can arrange the symbols and most importantly freedom called syntax that allows you to not be forced by the rules to have an exact predetermined way that you can order things. Now let's decompose the word symbol. What is a symbol? A symbol is an object and by the way an object in set theory is simply a thing which you can think of such as an economy, humor, a brick, a letter, a number. So an object is anything which can be thought of. So a symbol is one object that represents another object. That is a symbol. And a language is a set of symbols that have rules on how you can order them plus freedom within the rules so that you can creatively express information. So there is this special type of language made of a special type of symbol and these are called self-referential symbols. For example in physics we have this symbol which is a triangle which represents the idea of change. The delta symbol represents this notion that there is a difference or a change between things. And that's very arbitrary because that same symbol if we'd like to agree upon it could represent a dog. But it's very interesting when we invent a language where the triangle, let's say the equilateral triangle, represents itself the equilateral triangle. That still allows it to be a symbol. So there comes this idea that if reality is made of language, symbolism, code, the most logical type of symbols since we live in a geometric reality may be geometric symbols. But it's not so attractive to just think of reality as some man-made arbitrary set of rules on how you can arrange the geometric symbols. So there happens to be a non-arbitrary code. It's a mosaic tiling type of code called a quasi-crystal. And a quasi-crystal is created by taking a crystal in a higher dimension. A checkerboard for example is a crystal, a cubic lattice is a crystal. So you can have these crystals in higher dimensions. And when you project a crystal from some dimension by an irrational angle down to a lower dimension, you lay down in that lower dimension, such as 3D, a set of geometric symbols, a finite set of geometric shapes that have rules on how you can arrange them, and within those rules have syntactical freedom, such that you can express things with that geometric language such as wave forms and volumes. So right off the bat, this becomes at least an interesting idea for a first principle's based language that one could imagine might be useful for simulating or understanding or describing reality. And that's interesting because such a language, a code-based reality, would be neither deterministic nor random. So that's what the code-theoretic axiom is. It's the third ontology. So one thing that maybe a lot of people don't understand is that there's actually no physical evidence for randomness in nature. But there is physical evidence and argument that is very rigorous that reality is not a deterministic algorithm playing itself out. There are creative theorists who are still trying to make decent arguments to bring us back to the possibility that reality is a deterministic algorithm, but it's not very popular and the general consensus scientifically is that reality is non-deterministic. So that leaves two choices. The code-theoretic axiom is why it is non-deterministic because language is inherently non-deterministic or the conjecture of randomness, that there's some absolute pure randomness as the stuff of reality. There's a very popular new idea happening now in the world of academic physics which is that reality itself may be information-theoretic, in the words of John Wheeler, the man who coined the phrase black hole. And what this means is, again, it's a philosophical and ontological idea which is either there's this idea that there's this absolute stuff of energy and we know how energy behaves and we know how it converts and how it becomes matter and we understand a lot about energy. So one can take a philosophical position that energy is this inexplainable stuff other than how it behaves. It's just, it's not information, but information describes it. That's one position that can be taken. The second choice is that one can say, no, no, it's not just that information describes energy and physics. It's that reality itself is literally made of information. That's interesting because that is suggesting that reality is this abstract stuff. Now the interesting thing is that those who say that energy is something other than information will be described by information. They really have no suggestion as to what this energy is made of. They want to start there and say that that is the axiomatic ground and axiom is something that you cannot prove. It's just your philosophical starting point in a mathematical proof or a physical theory. And others want to say, well, no, we know how to describe information. We know what it is and we want to say that that energy is information. That's simpler. That's what the mathematics tells us. That is the Occam's razor approach. It's more elegant. It's more straightforward. It's less enigmatic. It has more explanatory power. So here at Quantum Gravity Research, we take this more simple approach, this more straightforward approach that many people are taking nowadays, which is that reality is made of information. So what is information? Well, information can be described as meaning. I'm going to have to explain what that means. But it can be described as meaning conveyed by symbolism. So if you have some physical system in a dimensional space, like the volume and the behavior of a hydrogen atom, a lot of that is geometric information. There's the wave form in the electromagnetic spectrum. There's the wave form of the probability plot from quantum mechanics, which is an elliptical form. And then there's the volume of it. Everything about physics is geometric in one way or another. So then we can conjecture that the meaning of this information is the physical structure itself. In other words, what is the meaning of a square? Well, one can say, well, the meaning of a square has to do with the fact that if it's a unit length square with edges one that its body diagonal is the square root of two and it has 90 degree angles. And we can use a square itself as an abstract symbol to represent a square. And because you can use geometric symbols to begin constructing a higher dimensional reality, for example, you can use squares to construct cubes. And that's a higher dimensional thing than a square. So our approach is to suppose that perhaps reality itself is this dynamical mosaic-like code, this three-dimensional quasi-crystal that describes wave form and particle information and describes change and time-related ideas and spatial-related ideas. A simulation is really the idea of taking a code and using that symbolism, that informational symbolism to model or describe something else. And if you use geometric symbols in a geometric language to simulate a geometric object, then, in a sense, you have this idea where the hardware, the software, and the simulation output are all one and the same, as my friend and scientific colleague here, Ray Ascheheim, says. So hopefully you have already realized that there is an interesting problem here. If meaning in language and symbolism always relates to a chooser selecting the symbols, whether that be a bird language or a computer code, then you might be wondering, well, how can reality at the smallest scale be a language who would recognize the meaning of the symbols, who would choose the syntactical freedom in the language? And so that's an interesting problem. Nobel laureate Frank Wilczak said, the relevant literature, and he was talking about the meaning of quantum theory, is famously contentious and obscure. I believe it will remain so until someone constructs within the formalism of quantum mechanics an observer. That is a model entity whose states correspond to a recognizable character of conscious awareness. And Andre Lind, co-pioneer of inflationary Big Bang Theory said, will it not turn out with the further development of science that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness will be inseparably linked, and that ultimate progress in the one will be impossible without progress in the other. One of the last titans of physics, John Wheeler, said, the physical world has at bottom, a very deep bottom in most instances, an immaterial source and explanation. That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes or no questions. All things physical are information theoretic in origin. And this is a participatory universe. So we're conjecturing here. This is about plausible ideas. And even when a plausible idea seems fantastical, like the idea of the Big Bang or a very popular idea being discussed now, even in academic level physics, that reality is actually a simulation in some computer in another universe, these ideas need to be seriously questioned, critically thought about, and not thrown out the window just because they seem outrageous, as the Big Bang itself seemed absolutely outrageous at one point. So let us then discuss how in the world there can possibly be a language as the substrate of reality without some notion of a chooser in the language and an actualizer of the meaning of these geometric symbols, because there needs to be something to interpret or actualize meaning in order to say that information exists. Now, if we like, we can just say, well, we'd like to start with the axiom that God exists. But that's not what science is about. Science is about going deeper and constantly questioning where that comes from and going all the way down to the bottom. So God may or may not exist, but if he does, I want to know how does he exist. So we don't need to make it religious. We can say, all right, well, abstractly, maybe there's this kind of universal collective consciousness. It's not like a human consciousness. Maybe it's more like the Force in Star Wars. Maybe it's more like Qi in Chinese medicine. We don't know what it's like, but we need something that is everywhere and that may be the substrate of everything and that is capable of actualizing this geometric information that we conjecture and making the syntactical choices in this mosaic tiling language in 3D that we are working with here at Quantum Gravity Research. So what do we know about the universe? How does it behave? Well, everybody can agree that emergence is the name of the game. Quarks and electrons self-organize into 81 stable atoms. Those 81 atoms self-organize into countless chemical compounds, including the proteins necessary for life, DNA. Single-celled organisms emerge eventually in the biosphere and then groups of single-celled organisms each specializing in a different function like workers in a big city team up to form larger structures such as animals. Eventually, some animal comes along that is so exquisitely good at choosing and assessing meaning and being creative that we label that animal as being conscious such as a human being. So now this mysterious notion of consciousness is admitted to be real and clearly emerges from the laws of physics is allowed by the laws of physics. Then we can ask, well, is this the end of the road? Is human consciousness the epitome of self-organization in this universe? Or does it go beyond? And just as single-celled organisms team up in the human body to allow high-level human consciousness to emerge and float upon an ocean of their existence, is it possible that large numbers of human consciousnesses can self-organize and allow for an even greater consciousness to emerge? And for that matter, since a typical human has 150 pounds of mass energy that is self-organized into their consciousness of their mind-body system, what is the upper limit of the percentage of mass energy in the universe that can self-organize to form conscious systems and systems of conscious systems that are conscious as well? Well, as far as we know, there is no upper limit other than 100%. So technically, with physics as we know it, all matter energy in the universe can theoretically self-organize into a conscious system, a network of conscious systems that is conscious. That's our best shot at thinking through the scientific plausibility of how some mysterious collective consciousness substrate in the universe could emerge. And there's an axiom that is physically and mathematically plausible and popular, and it simply says that given enough time, whatever is possible will eventually occur. And the interesting thing about Einstein's theory of special and general relativity is that as Einstein says, there is no difference between the past and the future. It is a stubbornly persistent illusion. And so in relativity theory, there is this object called spacetime. And so in spacetime, there is yesterday and there is today and there is tomorrow. And the three exist as coordinates in one geometric object, spacetime. In quantum mechanics, there is this remarkable idea that reality is essentially non-local. That means that an object here is connected with an object here. As though you have a piece of paper and two black dots on the paper which are clearly separated by some length on your paper, well, if you were to fold the paper, you could connect the black dots. So there's a duality where, yes, there is this curve at the fold that may be six inches long that separates the black dots, and yet at the same time, there is this connection where two black dots are one. They're sharing the same space. And so quantum mechanics is going through a revolution now where there are some very exciting new ideas. For example, three years ago, Juan Maldesena, one of the fathers of the holographic principle, and Leonard Susskind, one of the fathers of string theory, put out a paper that the wormholes that non-locally connect two regions of space and time that are predicted by general relativity are actually one in the same as the quantum entangled pairs that non-locally connect particles in quantum mechanics. In 2014, a team in Israel demonstrated experimentally that two particles can be quantum entangled over time such that if you change a particle here in today, it changes a particle here in tomorrow or here in yesterday, instantly. And we still, as humans, do not have a full picture of what this place, this reality, is. That is, we have this theory of general relativity which makes predictions. So we know there's at least something very true about it. And we have this other theory of quantum mechanics which makes predictions, and we know it has some truth to it. The problem is these two theories have these axiomatic grounds that violently disagree with one another where one boldly states that the other is incorrect in very important ways. And we still don't know what that unifying theory of everything is. There are attempts at such theories, such as string theory, loop quantum gravity, and many others, but there is no theory yet that has ever made a successful prediction. And for a theory to be respectable, it needs to make predictions and it needs to more elegantly explain existing phenomena that other theories explain less elegantly. So we still don't have such a theory. And so you could say that's the holy grail of physics because if we were to discover such a theory of everything that would make predictions, well, it would be the holy grail of physics because everything, chemistry, biology, even psychology, medicine, everything is emergent and builds up from that foundational theory of everything. Perhaps the discovery of a theory of everything here in the 21st century could usher in Star Trek-like technologies that could help humanity early. And so that's what we work on. We are one of the many groups trying to crack this code, this holy grail to discover what the theory of everything is, and we take this code-theoretic approach and we use quasi-crystal mathematics. So why do we use the E8 crystal to build our three-dimensional quasi-crystals? Well, the largest thing that humans have ever built is the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. In fact, it's not just the largest thing, it's also the most expensive thing. No one country could afford it, so many countries pooled their money together and they bought this giant thing with taxpayer money. So why would humans have approved spending so much money on one thing? And by the way, what is it really? Well, what it is is it's a microscope. It's a microscope that allows us to peer down in the direction of the pixel of reality, which is called the Planck length. So as we build larger particle accelerators and we can collide particles together at higher energies, we get a closer look at the fundamental interactions that occur at the very small scales. And we get data, we get scattering angles on how the particles scatter from one another. And if you take all of this data that we've gotten from particle accelerators, it builds up to a conversion table where quarks can become electrons, electrons can become photons, photons can become neutrinos, and so on. And that is called the standard model of particle physics. And in some ways, it's not exactly a theory, it's more of a table, an empirical table of the conversions between fundamental things. And strangely, the way that you can understand or describe the interconversions of every fundamental particle to every other is with higher-dimensional shapes and their lattices, right? So just as a square is the basic shape that forms the checkerboard and the checkerboard is a lattice, the higher-dimensional shapes that form higher-dimensional lattices or crystals are, in some cases, the way that these particle conversions all map to one another. So if one were seeking to understand, well, what is this unifying theory of everything, they would pay attention to the relationships of the vertices of one of these higher-dimensional lattices. So one of the higher-dimensional lattices is E8, and there are very impressive models and physical papers that have been published that show how E8 and its subspaces maps all these particles to one another. It's very strange, because it appears that we live in a three-dimensional reality, and yet the relationships of particles called gauge-symmetry relationships correspond to these hypercrystals. So what we do is we take this hypercrystal called E8. So you can think of E8, well, if you were to take oranges and ask yourself, well, what is the most efficient way that I can stack oranges in the supermarket so that the most oranges take up the least amount of space, the densest packing. You would pack them in the typical way that you see cannonballs stacked or oranges stacked, and every place where you see an orange kiss, another orange, you could make a point. And then you could throw away the oranges and then draw lines between the closest neighboring points, and you'd have a crystal called the FCC lattice. So you can do that same thing in higher dimensions. If you had an eight-dimensional supermarket with eight-dimensional oranges, you could ask yourself, well, what is the densest way to pack eight-dimensional oranges? And then you could take the place where those oranges kiss and throw away the oranges, draw lines, and then you would have the E8 lattice, and inside that you have the E7 and the E6 lattice, et cetera. And these are these lattices that have been shown to correspond to the gauge-symmetry unification of all particles and forces in the standard model of particle physics. So what we do is we take this eight-dimensional crystal, a slice of it, and we project it down to a lower dimension in the same way that you could project a wireframe cube using the sun to a shadow on the cement. And when we project this eight-dimensional lattice to three dimensions, we get a quasi-crystal. We get a language, a code made of geometric characters in three dimensions that have rules. It has ordering rules. If you want to make a dynamical animation on it, you have to follow the rules. And the patterns that the animation makes are both wave-like and particle-like. And the whole thing is spatial. So the thing about projections is that with a little simple math, you can take a projection and you can decode what the higher-dimensional thing is. For example, you are looking at me on your monitor and your monitor is flat in 2D. But you are an instant decoding machine. Your mind extrudes out what you see in 2D to build a three-dimensional model in your mind. So when you watch a movie, you are experiencing the information of a three-dimensional situation. You perceive characters having depth on their faces. You perceive the nose being at a different place in three-dimensional space from the ear. Similarly, when you take a projection, such as a shadow, you can understand or interpret its three-dimensional reality. And so, with a little bit more rigorous mathematics, we can take the quasi-crystal, which is a three-dimensional shadow of an eight-dimensional thing, and we can decode or recover the eight-dimensional information. Let's simplify. In the quasi-crystal projected from E8, we can recover the gauge symmetry unification physics of all particles and forces in the standard model of particle physics. We can have our cake and eat it, too. We can have a model of a 3D physically realistic particle theory in the dimensions that we observe. We don't observe curled up, hidden dimensions, as is supposed in string theory. We observe three spatial dimensions. That's the Occam's razor approach. Don't invent complicated ideas unless you have to. Go as simple as possible, but not too simple, as Einstein said. So if we can do this in three dimensions, we can have an explanation for why particles and forces in this system enjoy their gauge symmetry relationships and their ability to convert one into the other according to the higher-dimensional lattice in 8D. So with all those crazy conjectures and definitions of things like symbols and language in place, let's ask a couple questions. Maybe we'll call them deductions. So the first one, deduction number one, is does consciousness exist in the universe? The majority of physicists today believe that they are conscious and have free will. We can't prove it, though, scientifically. We can barely define what consciousness even is. But we'll go ahead and deduce that, yes, probably consciousness exists in the universe, at least in us. Deduction number two, are we it? Are we the end of the road? Are we the limit? Are we the epitome of consciousness? Does physics place an upper limit of 1 to 3 to 400 pounds of matter in the form of a human as far as the amount of matter energy can self-organize into a conscious system? Or is the upper limit all the energy and matter in the universe? Physics actually points to the latter. Physics would say there is no limit. Theoretically, any percentage of matter energy in the universe can theoretically self-organize into a conscious system. Nobody can agree on how to define consciousness, and yet we can still make comparisons. We can say probably humans are more conscious than viruses. So we can then ask, can a system be more conscious than a human? And we can say probably, if we're rational, there is no upper limit on how conscious a system can be. So it leaves this very interesting, expansive possibility for the percentage of the universe that can self-organize into conscious systems as we have, and no limit on how conscious it can become. Deductive question number three. Since the way that human consciousness has emerged is by the self-organization of simpler living systems, such as cells, where each cell lives its life, reproducing, has its own DNA, runs from noxious chemical sources, chases nutrients, makes little primitive decisions as it measures its environment. There's no reason that the same principle of self-organization cannot occur with even more complex conscious systems teaming up in networks to create even more conscious systems. In other words, perhaps the 7.3 billion humans on the earth could theoretically link up in some way to form an even more conscious system than the individual humans in the network, like a neural network formed by each individual living cell in our mind-body system, like the computers throughout the world in the movie The Matrix that networked together to form a higher-level computer that ran The Matrix. So humans are about to go out. That's what we do. We can be in a comfortable oasis in some ecosystem, and we're not satisfied. We go out into scary and inhospitable places. And in the late 1960s, we went out. We left the biosphere. We went to the next celestial body, which is the moon. And one of NASA's primary goals now is to have humans arrive at the first planet in our solar system, Mars. And so given sufficient technology, which is probably going to take a quantum leap forward if humans ever discover the first principle's theory of everything, humans definitely will move out as far as they can go, and they will keep going. And they will double in number. Now, doubling algorithms are interesting. They always halt due to resource limitation. If you were to have two pennies and you were to write two in your iPhone calculator and then hit the times two button and just double them. Two, four, eight. If you were to do that 80 times, just hit the times two button 80 times, which you could probably do in 30 seconds, you would have a number that is larger than all the atoms in every dust cloud, in every solar system and galaxy in the entire universe. And so that's interesting. So then if that's true, then how come the microbes on the surface of an apple, as they begin to double when the apple decomposes, well, if they really double and it can become all the atoms in the universe, that quantity and just 80 doublings, well, why doesn't that happen in nature? Well, it's because of resource limitation. The resources of the apple itself halt the doubling algorithm of the bacteria very early. Not very many doublings can occur without resource limitation halting the algorithm. So humans, when they leave the apple of the earth and there simply is no more resource limitation other than the entire resources of all the energy in the universe, they will be able to go out and continue doubling. And after a shockingly small number of doublings, humans have the potential with their high consciousness and their tendency to network with one another to double to the point where massive percentages of the mass energy in the universe can be hijacked or transformed into these self-organized systems of mass energy that are conscious. And if they have some non-local physics and technology that allows those consciousnesses to network instantly, then the entire universe can potentially become a neural network, if you will, of conscious systems that is itself conscious in some sense. So it is not completely outlandish to follow the trail of logic and say that if humans don't destroy themselves with nuclear war or for some other reason prevent themselves from leaving the biosphere, and if humans discover some unification physics that allows surprisingly bizarre Star Trek-type technologies as they go out and move to other coordinates in space-time, and if such technologies could allow connectivity, a significant exchange of information, then indeed it is quite formally a neural network. And what that is, what that's like at its limit, it's science fiction-like and yet plausible and somehow logical at the same time. I'm not saying it's inevitable or that it's the truth. I'm saying it is logically consistent and there is nothing in physics that we know that absolutely prohibits this. And there is the tendency of nature to continue self-organizing. It just keeps going to higher levels of complexity. For example, right now today, because we have not had an asteroid strike of a meaningful size on Earth for a long time, we have a very large number of species on the planet. The whole thing is an interactive network where all species are interdependent and connected to one another. The sum total of the behavior of all the species actually self-regulates the salinity levels in the ocean and the chemistry of the atmosphere. And so the whole thing is technically an organism. The biosphere of Earth plus its weather systems, its plate tectonics, the entire system. And if you leave it alone and don't hit it with an asteroid or nuclear holocausts, it tends to self-organize to higher and higher levels where new species fill the niches left between existing species and the quantity of species increases. So the way physics behaves is via emergent ever more complex systems that self-organize. And so if ever in the universe one highly intelligent and creative species could move out beyond the resource halting limitation of a doubling algorithm, it would move out and it would continue to advance in its sophistication of consciousness and the sophistication of its connectivity. So neural networks are powerful when they have high connectivity and they're not very powerful when they have low connectivity. Deductive question number four. This one is a little wild. Is there anything in the laws of physics that strongly prohibits consciousness from self-organizing with bosons? Now bosons are particles such as photons and the electromagnetic spectrum is a spectrum of boson particles. So this is an interesting idea. Can consciousness be engineered or emerge somehow in bosons or is it something relegated strictly to fermions? Fermions are the particles of matter such as electrons. Well, that answer is no. There is no law of physics that prevents self-organization of photons. In fact, recently there have been breakthroughs in organizing photons, making photons actually stop and then organizing them in groups. And so this is simply something to be aware of. That is, there is no law of physics that strictly prohibits self-organization of systems that one might choose to label as conscious in the electromagnetic spectrum of space. And that is a wild idea as well because photons can move at the speed of light and when you move at the speed of light you experience, according to special relativity, no time. And what does that even mean to experience no time? What is a consciousness that experiences no time? Deductive question number five, the last deduction, is it possible for consciousness to move out from Earth faster than the speed of light? You see, the universe is expanding, according to the most popular model, at a rate that is faster than the speed of light. So to imagine consciousness moving out from Earth or from other planets and then networking from a neural network of conscious systems to the point where all matter or energy in the universe is self-organized into a network of conscious systems that is itself conscious, one would have to have some explanation for this conjecture as to how conscious systems could move faster than the expansion rate of the universe. And that is an open question until someone comes up with a predictive, believable theory of everything. It's expected that such a theory of everything will be deeply non-local and the idea of non-locality is such that you don't think in the classic way, that is you don't necessarily have to imagine that a particle here, a million light-years away from a particle here, must necessarily have a signal that moves at some speed in order to be connected to influence one another. It's known by experiment, in fact, that if you quantum entangle two particles and you flip this one here such that its spin is in the opposite position, that you instantaneously flip its entangled partner no matter how far away in time or space that it is. So it's not a matter of moving faster than the speed of light. It is an idea that happens in no time. In other words, take a quarter and look at the head side of the quarter and then rotate the head side of the quarter and ask yourself how much time does it take to have that rotate the tail side of the quarter? And of course that would be a false question because the rotation instantly rotates both sides. There is no time involved in the influence of one over the other. And again, one of the hottest ideas that's being appreciated now in physics circles is the realization that the wormholes connecting vastly separated objects across space and time are the same as the connections between quantum entangled groups of particles separated by space and time. And this view says that space and time are really secondary, emergent, illusionary in some sense. And this network of non-local connections, entanglements, wormholes becoming the same object as quantum entangled groups. And that that network, which we don't yet fully understand, allows space and time to be emergent. That is, space and time are not fundamental in that view. The connections are fundamental and the connections are fundamentally non-local. That is, they're connected across space and time such that signals are not necessary to connect things separated by space and time. Now, if humans could discover this supposed theory of everything, perhaps they could harness new technologies that exploit that knowledge to allow ourselves, our consciousness, maybe in light form, in the form of photons or in the form of matter that's remolecularized at different coordinates to expand in a teleportation manner in order to populate the universe with this doubling algorithm that will occur inevitably if humans keep going, keep developing knowledge of physics and technologies and moving out beyond the moon, beyond Mars. And related to this set of fantastical ideas is a principle that we have in nature. Emergence is the principle. And the idea of emergence is that the emergent thing is not in any way the sum of its parts. You cannot understand human consciousness, mathematics, music from the parts. You cannot just add the complexity of the atoms or the molecules and understand it. The emergent quality, which is physically real and interactive and influences the rest of the universe of an emergent system, is not the sum of its parts. A great analogy, again, is the bacteria on the apple. A typical apple has some few million bacteria on its surface and it is an absolutely insignificant force, this bacteria. It cannot compete with the intermolecular forces that hold the apple together with gravity. It cannot compete with the standard forces, but if you allow a doubling algorithm to occur and you allow that bacteria to double and double and double only 10, 12 times, this force, this influence, this collective behavior of the bacteria eclipses the other forces that define the destiny of the apple and define the apple itself. And they completely take over the other forces to control the destiny of the apple. They decompose the apple down to the molecular level, returning its elements back to the soil. And similarly, if consciousness can double and expand and network and there are no resource limitations other than all the energy and matter in the universe, consciousness as a stuff, this enigmatic, impossible to explain stuff that terraforms wilderness into the skyline of New York and changes the atmosphere and that's just the tip of the iceberg. This stuff that absolutely influences in increasing ways the physical universe can become exponentially more powerful to the point where it becomes one of the defining characteristics of the universe and the destiny of the universe. So again, these are ideas that are fantastical and sound more like they should be in a science fiction book and yet at the same time they're absolutely reasonable, plausible and do not violate anything that we know about today in physics and in fact are somewhat more related to some of the newer realizations about physics such as the realization that the wormholes of space-time theory may very well be the quantum entanglement of non-local quantum theory. Now the last idea is the idea of non-computability. So let's give an example. How many ways do you think 16 of your friends can be organized? You can get 16 people who you know into your kitchen and you can start organizing them into groups, Linda and John. Then you can reorder Linda and John to John and Linda and you write that down, that's two ways. Then you can organize Linda, John and Susan, right? So you can do these organizations, there's only 16 people. So how many ways can you arrange until you run out of ways your 16 friends? 22 trillion ways, trillion with a T. If I added a 17th friend it would explode that number to a shockingly larger number. So factorial mathematics and exponential mathematics is absolutely non-intuitive. Now if you had a hundred friends or a thousand friends the ways that you could order them, the combinatorics would exceed the computational ability of a theoretical computer that one could build from all the mass energy in the universe and then give that computer an amount of time to calculate that solution or that number, say one trillion times the current age of the universe and it still could not compute that. Quantum mechanics is about the combinatorics of interacting particles. So each particle has a wave function and the wave functions relate to one another according to values called quantum damping and quantum resonance and these can be computed with say two electrons but once you get to a few more electrons it becomes non-computable and when you think about the quantum interactions of all quantum wave functions so every group of particles has its own quantum wave function so there's a quantum wave function for one electron in a body and then there's another quantum wave function for a system of three electrons there's a quantum wave function even for the universe and all quantum wave functions physically interact in quantum mechanics to influence all other quantum wave functions it's a network of quantum wave function interactions and that is arguably the most fundamental thing of reality it's the interaction, the relationship of things via their quantum wave function combinatorics and so if that is the most fundamental thing of reality and it is fundamentally non-computable well that's an interesting philosophy it means we live in a universe that is fundamentally non-computable you can compute the separate objects but you cannot compute the emergent combinatorics of the objects and it's those emergent combinatorics that is the deepest thing with our deepest theory our deepest theory may very well be quantum mechanics currently and so that is a theory of interactions interactions that are in principle in a finite universe non-computable so the very stuff, the very most elemental stuff of reality is this non-computable result and so consciousness itself is likely non-computable because again if sixteen friends have 22 trillion ways that you can order them imagine the atoms in a single neuron within your brain there are countless billions of atoms in one neuron and they all are interacting quantum mechanically and that interaction describes the emergent behavior of the electromagnetic connections and all of the emergent physics of chemistry that come after the quantum interactions so it's mysterious that this non-computable stuff is likely the most fundamental stuff and that it cannot be computed it's interesting that consciousness itself is non-computable although there are people today, serious people, trying to simulate consciousness which doesn't really make a lot of sense because if consciousness is a system of particles and the particles are fundamentally the quantum interactions of the wave functions of every combination of particles it cannot be computed so it may be a naive attempt but perhaps they'll come up with something interesting now let us play along and suppose that if the code-theoretic axiom is true and the theory is based on a code we can ask a question we can say is it an efficient code or is it just some arbitrarily inefficient code that's not maximally efficient so to give us clues on that answer we can look to really fundamental things about physics and nature and one of the most fundamental things is the principle of least action from classic physics the principle of least action essentially says that for nature to do something she chooses to do it in the most efficient way possible now the principle of least action led to Emmy Noether's second theorem which is a theorem about symmetries symmetries such as the inverse relationship and special relativity where when you move a particle of mass at a higher velocity its time slows down and when you move it slower its time speeds up and there are symmetries all over nature and so Noether's second theorem is the foundation of the standard model of particle physics which we discussed previously where all the particles and forces in nature can convert into each other in the standard model everything except for gravity and space and time theory but that standard model of particle physics is fundamentally about efficiency it's about Emmy Noether's theorem and how that is really an outgrowth of the principle of least action and that's really about efficiency and when one thinks code theoretically one is always worried about how you can more efficiently express meaning in a code a Silicon Valley programmer can get paid a lot of money if she's ingenious enough to figure out more efficient compression algorithms or coding schemes that allow the same meaning to be expressed in a hardware and software system with less symbolism, less code because code is expensive every time you operate a portion of a code in a computer you have to use electricity to open and close logic gates and electricity costs money so they pay people to figure out how to make codes more efficient a poem is the use of English as a code to express a lot of meaning with a small amount of words so yes, the answer would be probably nature would somehow use an exceedingly efficient code if it is code theoretic if it is based on the code theoretic axiom then it probably uses an exceedingly efficient code in fact, it's safer to say instead of just exceedingly efficient safer to say that nature probably uses the most efficient code possible for the purpose and the purpose is obvious the code is simulating this reality, this physics quantum mechanics, chemistry this three spatial dimensions this change in this three spatial dimensions the physical reality so what is the most efficient code possible to simulate or express the meaning of this changing dynamical geometric reality and so the paper that we're discussing has an addendum which is called the principle of efficient language so the paper is about an axiom which is the code theoretic axiom stating that reality is code theoretic it's based on language, code and it's not inherently based on this substance of randomness and it's not a deterministic clockwork universe playing itself out in a deterministic way and the code must because of evidence that we have from observing nature it must be very efficient and if it's very efficient it's more logical that it would be maximally efficient as opposed to just stopping short and so we plan to publish a proof of what the most efficient binary code is so let's go to codes in a language or a code if you had an alphabet with a billion letters it would probably not be a very efficient language it's a billion letters and let's say there's a similarly large amount of rules it's just way overly complicated it takes a lot of resources to run a complicated code so the name of the game with codes like Morris code made of two letters, two characters a character can be a duration and time as in Morris code there's a length of time or it can be like binary code that runs our digital world where it's just really on or off open or closed, zero or one so the quintessential limit of efficiency is generally a code that for whatever its purpose has the least number of symbols, letters, characters and generally the most general codes that can express other codes are binary codes so one can ask well if this universe supposedly is made of code how do we even start to think about what the most efficient code would be well with quasi crystals we can realize that each let's say three dimensional quasi crystal is a network of two dimensional quasi crystals some of you may be familiar with the Penrose tiling that's a two dimensional quasi crystal and each two dimensional quasi crystal is a network of one dimensional quasi crystals and with our quasi crystal derived from E8 because it relates to particle physics our one dimensional quasi crystals are called Fibonacci chains their sequences, their codes made of a long length and a short length where the ratio of the long length to the short length is the same as the ratio of the long length to both lengths together and that's called the golden ratio and it naturally comes from simply projecting the E8 lattice according to an angle which gives us the most connectivity in the three dimensional graph this three dimensional mosaic tiling called a quasi crystal and so our quasi crystal is really in three dimensions a network of one dimensional binary codes called Fibonacci chains and the very interesting thing about these codes is that when you make a binary action to turn a point in that code on or off you automatically change a large number of other points on that one dimensional line so let's say that there's a space of points and there are no connections yet, no lines and we would call this the Fibonacci chain possibility space and until you draw lines you haven't really defined a quasi crystal yet let us say and so then I can draw lines at a larger scale than the first scale of distances and you can think of how you draw the lines as turning points on the possibility space on this line, on or off and once you select one point to be on or off you automatically force a very large number of other points on the line to instantaneously be on or off you see quasi crystals are inherently non-local fundamentally so what does that have to do with efficiency? well the ultimate resource in a code whether it's a computer or a human using a language it's the engine that has to choose the characters in the code and obey the rules and the syntax so you really want to reduce your choices so in a computer you want to reduce your fundamental in a computer you want to reduce your fundamental actions of opening and closing logic gates which really correlates to your usage of zeros and ones your usage of symbols in the computer code and so in a sense you can probably recognize it's about choice with codes because it's not forced it's a matter of choosing the syntactical freedom as you operate the code to express some meaning in whatever this code is trying to express and so with quasi crystals you get to have a single binary choice this conserved quantity that you should be interested in which is the action, the choice and by that one choice that one binary decision to have the point on or off you get a bonus set of decisions that are automatically made without having to use any of your precious conserved resources which is your choice so if that's true and we're greedy for efficiency then the name of the game is well how many separate one-dimensional quasi crystals can we cross with that one point in order to get as much bang for our buck like in a crossword puzzle you can spell cat and rat with only five letters because the A in the middle of the two words switch hits to serve a position in the code for the word cat and the word rat in DNA the position of a protein molecule serves as a position expressing meaning in one string of one-dimensional code and another string there are strings running diagonally in DNA that are winding around the double helix and then there are strings of code running vertically and so nature in DNA at least is taking advantage of getting a lot of bang for the buck with a single character in the four-letter code of DNA and in quasi crystals it's even more efficient so the question is well while keeping the whole thing a network where everything is non-locally connected how many one-dimensional quasi crystals can be combined in a network in any dimension to have the most efficient binary code possible in any dimension and without getting too technical to try to explain why I can tell you that there are only two possible choices one is it would be the four-dimensional quasi crystal derived by projecting the E8 lattice to four dimensions where at every point at the center of one of the four-dimensional icosahedra that are called 600 cells there is a junction of 120 different Fibonacci chains that converge at that point if you were to turn that point on or off you change 120 different Fibonacci chains or it could be in 3D our group has discovered an object called the quasi crystalline spin network which relates to E8 but it's in three dimensions and it has an additional sign value which is chirality so left or right and because the left or right it only has a junction of 60 Fibonacci chains that converge at a point and so at first one might say well 60 is less than 120 in the four-dimensional case so why would this one in 3D be more powerful and the reason is because this one in 3D has a bonus sign value which is right or left and when that operates combinatorially in 360 you have a larger set of possibilities that is you can express a great deal of information because of that additional sign value that seems not apparent or available in the four-dimensional case so I think I went a little bit technical on that and to reel it in and simplify we are intending to build realistic unification physics on a three-dimensional mosaic tiling language called the quasi crystalline spin network which is a quasi crystal made of regular tetrahedra that is fundamentally derived from E8 and because it is derived from E8 we can recover realistic gauge symmetry unification physics for the standard model which explains everything except for gravity and the way we will explain gravity is through a novel approach that is based on the de Broglie electron clock model but is a discretized version of that which we can explain in another video Is that it? Yeah I think so Do you remember the other day when I asked you how long it would take you to walk through the paper verbally what you said? No What did I say? It said 15 minutes Oh I could, I mean I could, I could but you told me I could go on and on I did I used those words Yeah you said you had to chop this up into four videos or something