FROM SCIENCE FICTION WRITER AND SPACE PHYSICIST DAVID BRIN: Does the emperor exist, when he dreams that he is a butterfly? Does the butterfly dream of being an emperor? Since long before Chuang Tzu posed this ancient Chinese conundrum, some version of it has bedeviled bright youths in every generation—especially college sophomores. It seems the same specialized organs in our brains that allow us to make pragmatic plans and perform thought experiments, or gedankenexperiments, also unleash a human imagination so eager and creative that we can—briefly or permanently—lose track of what is real.
For example, although it might be called a form of lying, most societies have highly valued storytelling. In my role as a novelist, I join this tradition by stringing together lengthy chains of coded squiggles—in the Roman alphabet—that highly skilled readers later deconvolute and transform into stirring mental images, rollicking action, empathy with imagined characters, and even (possibly) an insight or two. Motion pictures shortcut and amplify this process with a firehose stream of visual images, cues and crutches that cater to the same human genius—a knack for picturing things, people and events that never (objectively) existed.
If "magic" is the creation of subjective realities in the minds of other peoples, then we moderns have learned how to perform magical incantations on a vast, industrial scale.
And now comes an era when we live immersed in computer-generated "virtual" realities, rendered through lavish games where ersatz selves get to do countless things that our mundane, fleshy selves cannot. Is it any wonder that some people have been talking about a near future when this process may reach its ultimate conclusion? When the denizens of Reality will not be able to verify, by any clear-cut means, that they aren't living in—or even existing because of—a simulation?
Picture some future time when thinking beings may occupy simulated software realms within some vast cybernetic space—either in "holodeck" style physical manifestations or in purely cybernetic downloads. Realms that emulate the palpable "pinch-me test" of reality, with fine attention to every detail. We don’t yet know how far simulation can be extended, or whether there are inherent limits. Some very smart people believe there aren’t any, in which case there’s no guarantee that you, reading this paragraph right now, aren’t already living in such a simulation.
In such a software-emulated world, Rene Descartes' brain-body dualism might easily be true! And if it ain’t true now, it could plausibly become true, tomorrow. And if it could come true tomorrow, again how do you know that you aren't right now living as a character of a simulation of the early 21st century that is being implemented in some machine or demigod imagination, hundreds or thousands of years farther ahead along the river of time? In much the same way that you might implement a version of Captain Ahab, by thinking for a while about Moby Dick?
To illustrate, let me offer a scene from one of my own short stories, a somewhat intense and difficult tale, because it is set in a future far in advance of ours. A tomorrow wherein the main character—a designer of simulated worlds—has been asked about his relationship with the artificial beings that live in them:

In every grand simulation there is a gradient of detail. Despite having access to vast computing power, it is mathematically impossible to re-create the entire world, in all its texture, within the confines of any calculating engine. That will not happen until we all reach the Omega Point.
Fortunately, there are shortcuts. Even today, most true humans go through life as if they were background characters in some film, with predictable ambitions and reaction sets. The vast majority of my characters can therefore be simplified, while a few are modelled in great detail.
Most complex of all is the point-of-view character—or “pov”—the individual simulacrum through whose eyes and thoughts the feigned world will be subjectively observed. This persona must be rich in fine-grained memory and high fidelity sensation. It must perceive and feel itself to be a real player in the labyrinthine tides of causality, as if part of a very real world. Even as simple an act as reading or writing a sentence must be surrounded by perceptory nap and weave ... an itch, a stray memory from childhood, the distant sound of a barking dog, or something leftover from lunch that is found caught between the teeth. One must include all the little things, even a touch of normal human paranoia—such as the feeling we all sometimes get (even in this post-singularity age) that “someone is watching.”
I’m proud of my povs, especially the historical recreations that have proved so popular—Joan on her pyre, Akiba in his last torment, Galileo contemplating the pendulum. I won awards for Ghenghiz and Napoleon, leading armies, and for Haldeman savagely indicting the habit of war. Millions in Heaven have paid well to lurk as silent observers, experiencing the passion of little Ananda Gupta as she crawled, half-blind and with agonized lungs, out of the maelstrom of poisoned Bhopal.
Is it any wonder why I oppose reification? Their very richness makes my povs prime candidates for “liberation.”
Once they are free, what could I possibly say to them?

This notion of simulated realities is getting a lot of attention lately, both in philosophical scientific literature and in serious science fiction. There are endless ramifications, more than we could go into here. But to me, one implied conundrum stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Here is the prime theological question. The one whose answer affects all others. And yet, one that is almost never asked:

Is there moral or logical justification for a creator to wield capricious power of life and death over his creations ... and is there any fundamental moral reason why those creations should have to obey?

Humanity long ago replied with a resounding “no!”... at least when talking about parents and their offspring. (There have been a few exceptions, such as the principle of pater familias in Roman law, which permitted a father to kill even adult offspring, if they offended him.) In most cultures, the created—our kids—eventually get full authority and a right to make their own way. In some societies, they are even welcome to argue with their creators along the way.
And yet, without noticing any irony, we have implicitly answered the same question “yes” when it came to God! The Creator, it seemed, was owed unquestioning servitude, just because this creator made us.
It is the ghost at the banquet, the underlying assumption of all religions, taken for granted for far too long. Is it puzzling that—after more than four millennia of theological wrangling, and the investment of millions of hours of thought to religious matters—this question only comes up now? Now that we are picking up creation's tools, like bright apprentices? Tools of physics and biology, and also tools that let us simulate the creation of whole worlds.
It provokes some odd thoughts. For example, heaven and hell may not be such bizarre notions, after all! Consider our demigodlike descendants, with power at their fingertips to compute and emulate any reality. They will be able to “call up“ simulated versions of people from times past, especially 20th century folk, what with all the data available about us, including skin cells in all our old letters and scrap books. What will they do with that power? Perhaps, those who helped build the utopia of tomorrow will be remembered, immortalized, in software simulations by our descendants. Those who hindered progress, who obstructed or simply did nothing, will at best not be invited back. At worst, they might be assigned unpleasant roles in software scenarios. Might the old notion of "purgatory" have some resurrected relevance, after all? I leave possible extrapolations of this idea to the reader.
As I said, this topic has a million permutations. Here's another:
Can we see any evidence that we live in a simulation already? I see a few clues. For example, quantum mechanics. Specifically, the division of reality into "quanta" that are fundamentally indivisible, like the submicroscopic Planck length, below which no questions may be asked. Isn't this exactly the sort of truncation that a computer model would use, in order to prevent being taxed with infinite demands on processing power—which would happen if the model could look into ever-smaller domains like the fractal Mandelbrot set? Likewise, at the high end, both the speed-of-light speed limit and the intrinsically contained dimensions of a big-bang universe may be artifacts introduced in order not to have to deal with the software loads of modeling a cosmos that is infinitely observable.
Still, some of the "clues" are far more visceral and impulsive. Take the coincidence of names that keeps cropping up, almost as if the "author" of our cosmic simulation were having a little joke. Like the almost unlimited amount of fun you can have with Barack Obama's name. Or the fact that World War II featured a battle in which Adolf the Wolf attacked the Church on the Hill, who begged help from the Field of Roses, which asked its Marshall to send an Iron-hewer to fight in the Old World and a Man of Arthur to fight across the greatest lake (the Pacific) ... does the Designer really think we don't notice stuff like this? Or maybe this designer just doesn't care.

David Brin appears with Nick Bostrom, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, and Sir Martin Rees, in "Could Our Universe Be a Fake?" the 10th episode in the Closer to Truth: Cosmos, Consciousness, God TV series, hosted and created by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series airs Thursdays on the PBS HD network and many other PBS stations. Every Friday, participants will share their views on the previous day's episode.

Thousands are heading to Ratanpur, Nepal, to see 18-year-old Ram Bahadur Bamjan, who they believe is the reincarnation of Buddha. Earlier this week, Bamjan came out of the jungle where his followers say he has been meditating without food or water since 2005. After he spent six months in the jungle, scientists who heard about the boy hoped to study the teenager—without disturbing his meditation—to find out whether he had really survived that long without eating or drinking. While most people can live without eating for several weeks because the body has fat and protein stored up, the average person can go only a few days without water. There's no word on what, if anything, the scientists were able to discover about Bamjan's supposedly special powers.
Many Buddhist priests and scholars, however, have doubts over whether Bamjan is truly the Buddha reincarnated, even though Buddhism teaches that every soul is reincarnated after death in another body. "Being Buddha means the last birth and the highest level that can be achieved. There can be no reincarnation of Buddha, even though Buddhists believe in life after death," Rakesh, a Buddhist scholar in Katmandu, told the Associated Press.
"Meditating without food does not prove that he is the reincarnation of Buddha," added Min Bahadur Shakya of a Buddhist research center in Katmandu. "There is much study needed to be done."
As of now, Bamjan hasn't spoken on this topic in any of his speeches (it's reported that he has talked about peace and ending discrimination), but he's expected to address his followers again on Tuesday. —Heather Wax

FROM ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER KIMBERLY ROOTS: When a raid on a Weymouth, Massachusetts, warehouse turns up a truckload of innocuous stuffed pandas instead of a bad guy named Joseph Smith, the FBI realizes that someone on the inside must’ve tipped Smith off. But before Mitchell Loeb, an experienced agent and friend of Phillip Broyles, can figure out who’s the mole, he begins convulsing in Broyles' office. At the hospital, doctors crack his chest open and can’t believe what’s inside: A venus-fly-trap-looking living organism—complete with teeth—is putting the squeeze on Loeb’s heart.
When Olivia and the Bishops arrive at the hospital a few hours later, Broyles informs them that Loeb was on a mission in Frankfurt a few weeks before. (This proves important later.) Peter, Walter, and Olivia don gowns and take a gander at Loeb for all of 10 seconds before Walter decides that he can help the patient, but only if he’s moved to the Harvard lab. The heart monster, Walter adds, is likely an organic, hybridized result of genetic manipulation—in other words, a giant, man-made parasite. While the Bishops get to work at the lab, Loeb’s wife, Samantha, tearfully begs Olivia for information. Olivia imparts absolutely no comfort whatsoever when she monotones that they’re doing their best.
After Walter analyzes a piece of the parasite’s tissue, he notices that a certain code is repeated throughout its DNA sequence and theorizes that it’s the creator’s calling card. Using a cipher, Astrid, the FBI agent assigned to assist him, works up a few possible translations of the code. Olivia recognizes one of them, ZFT, as a series of letters present in John’s secret files about "the pattern." When she shares this with Broyles, he drops yet another bomb: "The pattern" is made up of privately funded cells, and ZFT is the name of one of them. They traffic in scientific progress, and he’s beginning to think that incidents like the plane of goo and the weaponization of Emily Kramer are the cells’ way of testing this bad, bad stuff.
Eventually, Olivia realizes that Robert Jones—someone connected to ZFT who’s being held in a Frankfurt jail—is also connected to the Joseph Smith that Loeb was investigating. She travels to Germany, connects with a former flame, Lucas, and interrogates Jones with the promise that he can ask Smith one question via phone in exchange for giving them the antidote to Loeb’s parasite. Problem is, the FBI has found Smith and shot him in the head … so Walter and Peter hook him up to some electrodes and shock his brain so it momentarily thinks it’s alive. Jones cryptically asks, “Where does the gentleman live?” Smith—via Peter, wearing a metal helmet—coughs up the answer: “Little Hill.” Jones provides the antidote recipe, Walter mixes it, and Loeb is saved.
Broyles later tells Olivia that the FBI mole who tipped off Smith had higher security clearance than John did … leaving the possibility for more turncoat reveals in the future. Olivia and Peter watch from a distance as Loeb and Samantha have a tearful reunion by his hospital bed. But as they walk away, Samantha leans in and says, “They’re gone.” “So, did it work, what we did?” he asks. “Yes, it lead them back to Mr. Jones.” Loeb looks intrigued at his “wife’s” answer. “Did he ask the question? Did we get the answer?” he asks. She merely leans close and whispers what he wants to hear: “Little Hill.”
THE BOTTOM LINE: With the organism inside Loeb, the episode touches on life "created by man not god!" as Walter writes in his lab notes. He calls this organism the "offspring of unconscious evolution and conscious design, marvelous yet dreadful—the very model of a Hegelian synthesis." Also, Fringe once more reduces consciousness and the brain’s relay of information to a series of electrical impulses. It would be interesting to see the show, through Walter’s work, try to recreate emotion and belief with similar methods.

Karl Giberson (editor-at-large for Science & Religion Today) will talk about his book Saving Darwin with Michael Shermer at The Harvard Club in New York on Monday. Raised as a fundamentalist, Giberson firmly believed in creationism through his college years, but working on his doctorate in physics, he began to doubt that science had gotten everything as thoroughly wrong as the creationists suggest. At the event, which is part of the Templeton Book Forum, Giberson will share his views on the evolution-creation controversy and why—and how—it's possible to believe in both God and modern evolutionary science at the same time. Stay tuned for his recap of the discussion next week.

The majority of young people—93 percent—believe there is a spiritual dimension to life, according to a recently released report from the Search Institute's Center for Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. They're most likely to understand this spiritual dimension as believing there is a purpose to life, believing in God, or being true to one's inner self. The report, "With Their Own Voices," is the result of a major international study that surveyed 7,000 youth ages 12 to 25 to get an in-depth look at how they think about and experience spirituality. (Click on image for larger view.)


About one-third of youth see themselves as "very" or "pretty" spiritual, the study found, though it varies widely from country to country (a high of 52 percent in the United States to a low of 23 percent in Australia), and many see spirituality as different from religion—though the majority view both positively. About 23 percent say they are spiritual but not religious, while 34 percent say they are both.


More than half—55 percent—said their spirituality had increased during the past two to three years, while 46 percent said so did their doubts and questions about spiritual and religious matters. Three-quarters of young people said being in nature, listening to music, and helping others in the community made it easier to find meaning, peace, and joy, while 44 percent said experiencing challenges in life made it hard to be spiritual. To nourish their spiritual development, young people say they commonly read books; pray or meditate alone; help others; or show love, compassion, and humility. —Heather Wax

"It would have to be imperfect design or incompetent design or inept design, but not intelligent design," Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine and an ordained Dominican priest, said last night during his Distinguished Lecture Series talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The human jaw, the human birth canal and the forelimbs are not perfect. The jaw has to have teeth pulled, the molars and the rest of the teeth straightened to fit. The birth canal doesn’t fit the head of the baby. And what engineer would design limbs for running, swimming, swinging with the same materials performed in the same way? He would be fired.”
ID doesn't jibe with the idea of a benevolent creator God, he said, and it's not science because we can't test the theory and there isn't any evidence.
Natural selection, on the other hand, is "Darwin’s gift to science, his gift to religion,” he said. “It made it possible to explain the dysfunction, the cruelty, the sadism of the way of life rather than the idea of a creator. It’s more the result of natural processes.”

The Superorganism, the new book by E.O. Wilson and Bert Holldobler, is out today. In the sequel to their Pulitzer Prize-winning 1990 book The Ants, the biologists take another look at social insects—ants, bees, wasps, termites—and argue that evolution works on groups, not just the genes of individuals.
The "superorganism" is a colony of individuals that is formed and held together by the division of labor, complex communication, and altruistic cooperation—and, according to The Boston Globe, Wilson believes that this altruism occurs not because the animals share genes (and they want to improve the odds that these shared genes will be passed on to the next generation), but because of ecological circumstances that make altruism a useful social behavior for the group's survival. In other words, Wilson no longer believes that the widely accepted theory of "kin selection" explains the roots of altruism in nature.
"It's comforting to believe our deep concern for kin must be fundamental to our existence," Wilson tells the newspaper. "And it might turn out to be the case. But maybe we should look at non-kin bonding more closely, such as a brave soldier who throws himself on a grenade to save a squad." —Heather Wax