Demis Hassabis just said something that should unsettle every scientist alive. Hassabis: “I do think that, ultimately, underlying physics is information theory. So I do think we’re in a computational universe.” The CEO of Google DeepMind is telling you reality runs on code. Not metaphorically. Structurally. AlphaFold didn’t approximate... protein structures. It solved them. Not because DeepMind built a better guesser. Because proteins were never physical objects. They were always data. Hassabis: “The fact that these systems are able to model real structures in nature is quite interesting and telling.” He said telling. Not impressive. Not promising. Telling. As in the results reveal something about what reality actually is. AlphaGo found patterns in a 3,000-year-old game no civilization ever noticed. AlphaFold decoded biology in hours that took researchers decades. These systems aren’t approximating nature. They’re reading it fluently. Because nature was always written in a language machines understand better than we do. Hassabis: “Maybe at some point I’ll write up a scientific paper about what I think that really means in terms of what’s actually going on here in reality.” The man running the most advanced AI lab on Earth thinks he’s found something fundamental about existence itself. And he’s not ready to say it yet. Every era thinks it knows what the universe is made of. Atoms. Waves. Strings. Hassabis is suggesting the answer was never matter. It was always math. And the machine he built to fold proteins might have accidentally proved it. The question that should keep you up tonight isn’t whether AI can simulate reality. It’s whether reality was the simulation first.show more

This is literally the standard consensus in science right now. The universe being based on information isn’t “code” it’s information, and the universe being “computational” does mean it’s akin to rules-baed programming, it means solutions are computed (there are various ways to compute, some of them nothing like your laptop), which they most definitely are. Information theory is the bedrock of understanding natural phenomena in a rigorous fashion. All standard stuff.

If we are in a "computational universe", what computer is computing the computer that computes the universe? The infinite regress here is too painful to bear. 🤦‍♂️

This is not correct. Quantum mechanics demonstrates the lack of our ability to perfectly calculate reality. The "Realist" camp in physics has lost a lot of ground for 90+ years. Quantum fields manifest as particles through probability. We can not know the exact position and velocity for quantum particles. (Born Rule, Heisenberg Uncertainty Rule, EPR Paradox, Copenhagen Interpretation.) This may be true at the macroscopic level, using Newtonian physics. Inside of a single cell, Brownian motion and randomness dominates again.

This is not new. Many physicists have been saying that everything boils down to information and imo it’s the only answer that makes sense. And light speed represents the max information computing speed of reality. We live is a holographic universe where all of the information is in the holographic surface, and our 3D perspective is a computational illusion. Stephen Hawking’s latest ideas I think totally nailed this, as described in his colleague’s book, On the Origin of Time.

That is basically old-school wooly supernaturalist pseudoscientific nonsense (albeit written by AI), and I doubt Hassabis believes any of it, but wooly ideas about math, physics, matter & information are endemic to people in theoretical physics, and AI, and nevertheless wrong.

The one question that every slop-sophist fears: "It's all information? Information... of what?" Information is about things and relations of things. Information in itself isn't even anything. These idiots don't even know what they're talking about.

We are in a simulation, not metaphorically either 😄

God spoke existence into being. Math is a language attempting to understand the language God spoke.

I don't know. I think the matter and information are the same. There are structural elements to matter+causality that humans latch onto by describing material relations with concepts. In the end, I say we matter.

Let me state this plainly and you can thank me later: Reality as we live it is NOT a simulation. All this talk that we are code in a rendered simulation is utter nonsense.

@pangram ?

@JasonSilva @loichecht .. the day I finished reading your book !

Have you considered that he’s just so full of shit that an enema would turn him into a human candy wrapper?

Every major physics shift started with someone noticing the math worked too well to be coincidence.

what does hasabis know about the ultimate nature of reality?

Yeah this text is LLM generated

@grok

Yeah it's a test environment and when you progress in the test, the "laws of nature" change.

Important context here: The quote from Hassabis is real and genuinely interesting. But the Matrix framing skips a key part. Hassabis also said this is not a game or straightforward simulation. That distinction matters. I posted the missing context here:

He’s correct. Once I realized this, everything made perfect sense. Physics, math, universe.

What a totally shitty take.

@demishassabis tiene razón, el Universo es información. El paper ya está escrito. @GoogleDeepMind

Of course it is, but it's quantum as well. Which makes it a bit more complex but not unsolvable in the next decade

not code, information

I (& others) have been blogging for years that the standard model is not a ‘model’ in a curve fitting sense. It’s indistinguishable from reality.

Thinkers always reach this conclusion because thought as a faculty is self-fixated and the core of thought is raw information. Hence the obsessive thinker will whittle things down to information every time as they work tirelessly to exclude emotion, feeling, intuition and anything uncomfortably irrational from their pristine and perfect mecha world.

💯

They seem to forget it's their mind simulating/ perceiving the universe (world model), they're blinkered by their own subjective limitations & interpretations. The only simulation is in your head.

@JasonSilva So no evidence of anything. Just a lot of conjecture that the universe is an abstraction of a description (quantities are descriptions and maths is the abstraction) Utterly unconvincing and not unsettling in the slightest. AI does maths better 🫠 no surprise there

Hopefully, the next patch fixes that 'existential dread' bug.

AI-written slop tweet and brain junk arguments

Computation is the universal grammar that underlies digital circuits, neural activity, and cosmic dynamics alike. Examples in Appendix D (pp.20-23) illustrate the unbroken continuity of "lawful state evolution" across those three distinct domains. 1/7

If reality is a simulation, that does not really solve the problem. It only postpones it. Any simulation still has to run on something: a substrate, a machine, a higher-order world, a mind, a system, some kind of base reality. Even if there are simulations nested inside simulations, the same question remains: what is the non-simulated ground beneath all of it? So when people say “our reality is a simulation,” they often treat it like an explanation, but it may just be a delay. It moves the mystery one level up. But there is another possibility. Maybe we are not “fake beings” generated inside a simulation. Maybe we are real beings whose consciousness is trapped inside one. Maybe the human identity, the body, the biography, the world itself - all of it is an interface. A controlled layer of experience. In that case, the question is not just “is the world real?” The deeper question is: What is the subject experiencing this world? And does that subject actually coincide with the human being it thinks it is?