https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RK2w-He8IXs&t=1108s&pp=ygUTbWF0emtlIHF1YW50dW0gZG91Z9IHCQlHDAGHKiGM7w%3D%3D
The Universe Is a Simulator, and the Mind Is Its Quantum Engine
Some people say the universe is a big simulation. Most of them mean it as a metaphor, or a thought experiment, or the setup for a science fiction plot. I mean it literally, and I have meant it literally for most of my professional life. But the claim needs to be stated carefully, because the usual phrasing gets it backwards. A simulator, in the ordinary sense, is software that mimics something else. The simulation running our universe is not mimicking the universe. It is giving us the universe. There is an underlying information structure, and everything we call physical reality is what that structure looks like from the inside.
I came to this view honestly, through engineering rather than mysticism, though the mysticism came first and the engineering caught up later. In the 1980s and 1990s I wrote simulation software fast enough and useful enough that we sold it to another company for real money. I know what a simulator has to contain. I know the difference between a simulation that cuts corners and one that actually reproduces the dynamics of the thing it models. So when I ask what a simulator more primitive than quantum computing would need in order to run quantum computing as one of its behaviors, I am asking an engineering question, not a philosophical one. That question was essentially my PhD, twenty-five years ago. I have been ahead of my time for a long time, and I have made my peace with it.
The thread started in high school. In 1968, when I was a sophomore, almost nobody was programming. I was. I collected languages the way other kids collected baseball cards. When I got to college there was no computer science degree yet, so I did what everyone did who wanted to compute: I became an electrical engineer. I hold three degrees in electrical engineering, a bachelor's, a master's, and a PhD, and my whole career has been professional engineering, much of it building simulation and computer-aided design tools for semiconductors. Simulators again. Always simulators.
Then a book changed the trajectory. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, published in the 1970s, described phenomena that no classical model of information could accommodate. I did not accept it uncritically, but I took the question seriously: if any of this is real, then there is a different model of information than the one classical computer physicists work with. What would its laws be? That question sat in me for two decades.
In the 1990s I hosted a workshop on physics and computing. A hundred people showed up, largely because I had invited Rolf Landau from IBM as keynote, and everyone figured that if he was coming, they should be there too. Landau's message was simple and radical: information is physical. He had said it in the 1960s, when nobody understood what it meant. His work seeded reversible computing and low-power computing, and today his model has been vindicated. John Wheeler said the same thing from the physics side: it from bit. Everything comes from bits. Those two men are my heroes, and alongside them I place Robert Monroe, whose journeys out of the body raised the question I could never let go of: if the universe is informational, what is the representation of mind that lets it do things like that?
Shor's algorithm arrived in 1994 and settled the direction of my life. Peter Shor came to my conference and presented his work, and the implication was unmistakable: quantum computers are exponentially more powerful than any classical computer. If the mind is a quantum computer, then the mind can do things no classical brain model can explain. So I went and learned quantum computing. In 1997 or 1998 I started a PhD while working full time, and roughly three years later I had it, from the University of Texas at Dallas.
I did my doctoral work using a different mathematical language than most of the field: geometric algebra, also called Clifford algebra. The reason was structural. In that framework I showed that you can represent bits as vectors. Bits stop being mere software and become part of physics, which is exactly what they must be if they are to serve as the go-between between the objective world of physics and the subjective world of consciousness. For my dissertation I demonstrated quantum computing, qubits and ebits, with bits as the primitive. As far as I know, nobody had done that before, and few have done it since. Plenty of people work with Clifford algebra now, but almost all of them apply it to the standard model of physics, because it handles high-dimensional objects beautifully. My use was different. I was using it to build the layer underneath.
Here is where the picture gets strange, and where I think it gets true. Geometric algebra lets you write down a six-dimensional orthonormal space, or a hundred, or a thousand. But what does a six-dimensional space mean to anyone? Consciousness is not a six-dimensional object. It is a state space on the order of a million dimensions, and it is more primitive than quantum computing. That is what mind is made of. In my talks I have pictures of it. The best description is a cloud rather than a field, because in that domain space and time do not yet exist. Quantum computing sits above that cloud. The physical world sits above quantum computing. Space and time sit above the physical world. And bits, in that hyperdimensional cloud, are the fundamental layer of the whole stack.
I have been developing this model for twenty-five years. Very few people are aware of it, even though I talk about it constantly and present it constantly, because it is too different from what everyone else is doing. But the field is beginning to catch on. Researchers are discovering that Clifford algebras are good, that six-, eight-, and ten-dimensional spaces are tractable in them, and that there are
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