To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Reality

From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. Is this the real life? Is this just bad to see? Caught in the land slide, the escape from reality. It's as if reality is so connected that when you look at one small part, you can see things about other parts. The entire hole is contained in the part. And in a sense, you can't divide reality up because we're cutting up a hologram. And we can't find where one particle is because it's always a reflection of all particles. Who escape from reality? The only realities we know are the ones of brain manufacturers. Brain receives millions of signals every minute and we organize them into holograms which we project outside ourselves and call reality. This is me. What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can see, what

you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. Guys, we're moving. Today, we're keeping it really real as we look at reality. We'll explore the simulated universe argument. Cultural critic Chuck Klosterman talks about how the unibomber manifesto relates to reality. And we'll examine the work of the man who's been described as one of the most singular and single -minded visionaries of 20th century literature, J .G. Ballard. But first, Jonathan Leatham's new novel is called Chronic City. The New York Times book review recently named it one of the 10 best books of 2009. Leatham has described Chronic City as a cross between the famous burrow -centric

New Yorker cartoon and the darkest episode of Seinfeld. Yeah, I was sort of thinking about the solipsistic quality of Manhattan. And of course, that famous New Yorker cover, you know, 10th Avenue, 12th Avenue, the river, and then distant blip of China on the horizon, captures it so nicely. And Seinfeld does, too, that infuriating self -involvement that's so charismatic for the people caught up in it and so blinkered and so useless. And, you know, one of the things I feel about this quality, as well as identifying with it in some ways. I am a New Yorker, and though I've gone away for long periods, I do kind of always reference this place. It seems to me the center of reality. But it's also a kind of non -place or a virtual reality. It's so enclosed and so strange that it sort of doesn't exist. And there's something poignant about that New Yorker cartoon because it also expresses naïveté to only know Manhattan is to know nothing about reality. You've written about it, but it isn't the Manhattan that most of us know. Even the Manhattan

that we can't know because we don't live there. This one is set, what, it's near future, right? Well, it's actually, I think, if you puzzle over the events in the book, like Marlon Brando's death and certain other small public events that creep into the awareness of the characters. It's actually 2004, but it's not our 2004. It's a sort of mangled, crazy version where some things have gone wrong that are unimaginable and the weather's out of whack and there's a giant tiger that's ravaging the city. But in a lot of other mundane senses, it's exactly Manhattan, you know, four or five years ago. And Fantasy Manhattan too. I mean, there is a part of all of us that wishes there could be a New York Times available in a war -free edition. Well, you know, that's only, I think, a very minor exaggeration of something that's kind of cognitively true for everyone. I mean, when I buy my morning paper, I don't read, nor at some level, do I even acknowledge the pages I don't want to think about. It's too much. So we all make a kind of war -free edition of the mind. And I just decided to push that idea

into a literal existence. So when I'm leasing through the paper and just glancing at the headlines and letting the ones that I don't want slip past me, that's the paper you're talking about. Well, I think it's true of a lot of parts of our reality that we don't realize how much editing we do. And it's one of, for me, one of the primary subjects of this book. And it's sort of like if your computer, you know, if you have your five bookmarks, let's say, and every day you go to these five websites and they tell you what you want to think and want to know that day. And you never, you know, roam into the rest of the internet. Does it exist? Is it still there? Would you know? And that's where the novelist lives. Subjective reality is, yeah, it's all I have to work with. Yeah, that's chronic city. It's a kind of blending of real and fantastic. You know, for me, it's a very difficult thing to paraphrase. But what I want this book to do, I hope it comes across, is describe the way so much of contemporary life, is cartoonish or resembles a virtual reality. And yet we're condemned to take it as

seriously as the most real things we've ever experienced. There's no alternative. There was an interview I read with you that said, you feel as though you found a form that merges realism and surrealism into something matter of fact. That's what you're talking about. Well, it's what I'm reaching for. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's not for me to say whether it comes off, but I really have always been seeking a form to express that suspicion that our daily experience is very grounded in the mundane. And at the same time, the dream life and the projections that result from things like money and power and ideology and especially amplified as they are by fantastic mediums like, well, radio or the internet or whatever else you might dabble in, that unreality pervades reality everywhere we look. And then the two colonize each other and converse with each other and you get to a mixed up place where you just have to accept that it's all, you know, you have to call it all the everyday

life. You have to accept its convergence. In the novel, doesn't Percuss Tooth at one point say we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation and not know it? Yeah. Yeah. You know, the characters in this book in order to make them useful to me on this subject, I had to make them in some ways very stupid about online stuff. I mean, Percuss still has a dial -up computer. So everything he's doing is very, very draggy and incomplete. You know, it just, it never really works for him. But at a certain point in the middle of the book, this panic overtakes him because he realizes deeply in the way that's typical of him as a character, he completely takes on and identifies with this possibility that everything he's experiencing is a virtual reality. And maybe even likes that idea. Well, yeah, no, it gives him some explanations for things that have been bothering him. In fact, I've read that you talk about trying to achieve a kind of artificial quality. Is that the same thing? Well, I think I know what you're talking about,

the quote you're referencing there. And you know, I've been very, I grew up as a painter. My dad is a visual artist. He makes paintings and sculptures and drawings. And I grew up doing the same thing. And when I first switched to writing stories and novels, I drew from the visual arts this idea that the reason to be an artist of any kind was to make stuff that didn't exist before, to create, you know, new things. It is a kind of virtual reality concept in a way. It's like, let's populate the earth with stuff that doesn't exist. You know, like buildings and trees are already there, but this particular book called Chronic City, I could make that and we would go from a state where there was no chronic city to now there is one. And so I'm interested in that idea and I do think art is, you know, it has a fundamental peculiarity to it. It's not very productive, you know, by the measurements that we usually apply to human activity. It doesn't really generate a lot of wealth. Certainly proportionate to the number of people attempting it. It generates almost a pathetically minuscule amount of wealth. It doesn't really feed or dress people. It

doesn't improve things. It doesn't educate as well as education does. It's just kind of there. It's just a thing. And I like that about it. I like its resistance to usefulness. And so I often, when I talk about what I'm doing, I often emphasize this idea that I'm just trying to make something that, you know, people could marvel at or be confused by or tickled by and that that would be good enough. That's a good enough reason to do it. But isn't the idea of art or writing that real or unreal, it helps you to make sense of the reality and unreality of the life you're actually living. You read a novel in order to have a better understanding of people's relationships. You look at a picture in order to better understand the reality behind what you're looking at in the real world. Well, that's a very nice kind of productive, Protestant work ethic excuse for art that you're offering me. But I actually think that it's not that. It's that it's to make you experience something, not to explain your

experience, but in order for you to have a new one. And maybe also to remember and, I don't know, I didn't possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it? Well, I'd sort of like to think it could. Well, we should probably have you read an excerpt from Chronic City for us. In this bit, I'll read here, the narrator, Chase Insteadman, is going to be taken out for a hamburger by his crazy new friend, Perkis Tooth. And this is the primary relationship in the book. It's very much at the beginning. And Perkis is an obsessive talker, and I think he'll carry you away, and that's all you need to know. Do you want to get something to eat, said Perkis? I haven't been out all day. He laced his high tops. Sure, I said. Out for Perkis Tooth, I'd now begun to learn, wasn't usually far. He liked to feed at a glossy hamburger

palace around the corner on Second Avenue, called Jackson Hole, a den of gleaming chrome and newer, faker versions of the linoleum table in his kitchen, lodged in chubby red vinyl booths. At four in the afternoon, we were pretty well alone there. The jukebox blaring hits to cover our bemused befogged talk. It had been a while since I'd smoked pot. Everything was dawning strange. Signals received through an atmosphere eddyed with hesitations. The whole universe drifting untethered, like Perkis Tooth's vagrant eyeball. The waitress seemed to know Perkis, but he didn't greet her or touch his menu. He asked for a cheeseburger deluxe in a Coca -Cola. Helpless, I did od his order. Perkis seemed to dwell in this place as he had at Criterion's offices. Indifferently, obliquely, as if he'd been born there yet still hadn't taken notice of the place. In the middle of our meal, Perkis halted some rant about Werner Herzog or Marlon Brando or Morrison Grum to announce what he'd made of me so

far. So you've gotten to this point by being cute, haven't you, Chase? His spidery fingers, elbow propped on the linoleum, kept the oozing, gory, Jackson Hole burger aloft to mask his expression, and can't delivered far enough from his lap to protect those dapper threads. One eye fixed me while the other crawled, now seeming a scalpel in operation on my own face. You haven't changed, he said, you're like a dreamy child, that's the secret of your appeal, but they love you. They watch you like you're still on television. Who I said? The rich people, said Perkis, the Manhattanites. You know who I mean. Yes, I said. You're supposed to be the saddest man in Manhattan, he told me, because of the astronaut who can't come home. So, no surprise, Perkis was another who knew me as Janis Trumbull's fiance. My heart's distress was daily newspaper fodder. Yes, I loved Janis Trumbull, the American trapped in orbit with the Russians, the astronaut who couldn't come home. This, beyond my childhood TV stardom,

was what anyone knew about me, though some, like Susan Eldred, were too polite to mention it. That's what everyone adores about you, continued Perkis. I guess so, I said. But I know your secret, he said. I was startled. Did I have a secret? If I did, it was one of the things I'd misplaced in the last few years. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten from there to here, made the decisions that led from my child's stardom to harmlessly dissipated Manhattan's celebrity, nor how it was that I deserved the brave astronauts love. I had trouble clearly recalling Janis, that was part of my sorrow. The day she launched for the space station, I must have undertaken to quit thinking of Janis, even while promising to keep a vigil for her here on Earth. I never dared tell anyone this fact. So, if I had a secret, it was that I had conspired to forget my secret. Perkis eyed me slightly. Perhaps it was his policy to make this

announcement that he knew their secret, to any new acquaintance, to see what they'd blurred out. Keep your eyes and ears open, he told me now. You're in a position to learn things. Jonathan Leatham, reading an excerpt from his critically acclaimed novel, Chronic City. What do you think of Jonathan Leatham's thoughts about reality? You can let us know by sending us email through our website at ttbook .org, where you will also find a link to our Facebook page. Coming up, Chuck Closterman on how the Unabombers Manifesto can help us understand reality. And we'll look at the visionary fiction of JG Ballard, as we continue our our own reality. I'm Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International. Chuck Closterman is the best -selling author of several books focusing on pop culture.

His new book is a collection of essays called Eating the Dinosaur. In the final essay titled Fail, Closterman writes about a paper called Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski, of course, is the Unabomber. And while he doesn't condone the murders that Kaczynski committed, Closterman does think the Unabomber Manifesto contains some interesting ideas, as he told Steve Paulson. Everyone wants to think that the only thing that he's writing about is, I'm almost like Luddite ideas, like I hate technology, technology is bad, technology ruins their life, and of course that is in there. But what he's really talking about is sort of a philosophical freedom that technology sort of puts a ceiling on. He talks about how people have a greater, like their desire to have technology outweigh their desire for freedom. And if you say that to a person kind of casually, they will immediately disagree with you. But what he really talks about is a kind of freedom most people don't even realize has the potential to

exist. And as somebody who is really involved with technology on a day -to -day basis because I'm involved in media, and I was rereading that document when I was living in Germany, and I didn't speak German. So I was almost living my entire life through the internet, because I really missed America, and I missed my girlfriend and my friends and stuff, so I was really living on the internet. As I would sort of think about the way he talked about the way technology changes our view of what freedom is, well, this seems worth examining again, you know, and worth examining in a way that's not going to put the emphasis on his crimes, but really his ideas. Well, and you even suggest that this essay could be remembered decades from now. In fact, you say you can easily imagine a distant dystopic future where it's considered the most prescient work of the 1990s. Oh, well, certainly, especially if we get into one of those machine's rule -us situations, like in the Terminator movies, if that

happens, this is definitely going to seem like the uniformer will be remembered. Yeah, if AI actually gets to a point where it does sort of enslave us, this will be like the manifesto of the underground revolution. So that's kind of the dystopia I often imagine. Well, I mean, what you're really getting at in this essay is what's real and what is mediated through, well, through various media, and how do we tell the difference? And you get at that by referring to another book, Jerry Mander's 1977 book for arguments for the elimination of television, and he had a very interesting thought experiment, which you reproduce as well, and can you explain that? His ideas, written at a time, really even predating cable television, are kind of amazing, particularly one about how you ask someone to say imagine the South during the Civil War. And if they do that in all likelihood, they are imagining a scene from

roots or a plantation from God with the wind or something. Like even what they imagine to be when asked to imagine something real, they use television sort of as their only means for visualizing it inside their own mind. Or if you ask someone to imagine a bank robbery, well, they've almost certainly not been in a situation where a bank robbery happened, but they know what it looks like. Or if you ask someone to imagine a basketball game, very few people in America at some point have not attended a basketball game live. Very few people have not at some point played a game of basketball, if only for five minutes at recess in fifth grade. But when you ask someone to imagine a basketball game, the way they perceive the court and what they see inevitably is a game they watched on television. Is that true with you? I mean, you write about how you played basketball for years. I played basketball for 13 years. And when someone asks me to imagine a basketball game, or when I first had that thought from that book, I did specifically

imagine a play from one of the Lakers' Celtics Championship series. The play where Gerald Henderson intercepts a pass from James Worthy. That, for whatever reason, has become my mind's understanding of what basketball looks like. That's the placeholder in my mind. So this idea that we can separate a televised image, or the internet, or even a photograph from reality, everyone kind of thinks that we have the means to do that. And intellectually, we can. But biologically, we probably cannot. I mean, technology has advanced so much faster than the way the human mind evolves. You know what I mean? For the first 24 ,000 years or whatever, if a man saw a tiger, it meant there was a tiger there. Your body is conditioned to understand that what we see is real. But for the last, say, 120 years, it's very normal to see something that's not there. And even though we intellectually know that the

sopranos are different from our family, or that someone's persona on Facebook is different than who they actually are, I don't know if our bodies have yet made that jump. And I think that's why, in a lot of ways, technology gives people this sort of strangely alienated sense of themselves and of the world. They know that they love TV, they know that they love the internet, and yet these things make them slightly unhappy in this abstract way. And I think this is why. Well, this also gets to life simulation games. Didn't you do an essay, I think, in one of your previous books, about the Sim games, and you played Sim Chuck. I mean, sort of the Sim game that's a version of yourself. Did you find that especially appealing? Well, I think that this question about reality must have always been present because I suppose in all my writing part of it is there. I found it sort of fascinating. I find thinking about such simulations,

often more enjoyable than actually experiencing the simulation. I think what I'm, what I'm realizing as I get older though, is my life is a simulation. Like, what we're doing now, I'm talking about myself and I'm talking about my ideas, but this isn't really who I am. This is the version of me I am when I'm on the radio. You know, you're asking me questions about myself and I'm giving answers, but I'm not really talking the way I talk. I can tell us I'm doing it now. In other words, when you're talking to a friend with, you know, nothing broadcast, you're going to sound different. You're going to say different, obviously you're going to say different things, but it's less of a sort of public persona. I don't even know if, I mean, it's probably different with every person I talk to. Because not only are we having the experience of talking, we're also had every other experience together, which we both have a two degree remember. So we're filtering our current conversation through that filter. So I wonder how often in life people are

really themselves, you know? I mean, it seems kind of like a fake stoner conversation or something like, are we ever really ourselves? Well, maybe we just have to get a little postmodern here and say that there's no real self. In fact, we have lots of different selves depending on what situation we're in. That's true, but there's got to be a real self as well. There has to. I mean, I think that we intuitively know that there is somebody that we are someone. That there are some thoughts that are actually our own. If you talk to somebody about politics, for example, you know, they're going to be very aware of the person they're talking to. And they know what views that they've heard on, you know, NPR or on Fox News or whatever. And that becomes a guide and they know which things are kind of acceptable to say because certain political views say something about the person themselves, you know. But somewhere inside their mind, there is how they actually feel. And I guess the question I often wonder

is, can that even be accessed? We'd like to think it's a choice that we choose to have one persona in public. And there's another person we actually are. There's one passage in your essay that's particularly powerful. You write, we are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity and we have unknowingly constructed, assimilated world. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now. Do you really believe that? Oh, absolutely. I will say that perhaps the way I write that over states my degree of concern over that. But in real terms, absolutely, this is the least human we've ever been. What do you mean by less human than? The degree to which our lives are unnatural. I mean, you know, like, okay, a dog. For the most part, most dogs in America now like maybe live inside or spend some time inside. And they have someone feed them. They get their water from a source where someone just puts a dish down. In a way that dog is less of a dog than maybe 5

,000 years ago he would have been, you know. His inherent dogness in a way has been domesticated. But still, for the most part, he lives the way a dog was sort of... I hate to use this phrase, but it was meant to live, right, you know. As a human, as people, we're farther and farther away from that with every generation. You know, I'm the seventh kid in my family. My oldest sister's 18 years older than me. I was born in 1972. It's pretty clear when I talk with my sister that I was probably affected by technology 10 times as much as she was. There's no question about it. Things like TV, things like music, how I could get to music, my understanding of what's important in my values. Certainly, 10 times as much were impacted by technology as her. But now I have nieces and nephews who are, you know, 18 years younger than me. And when I talk to them, it's clear they've been affected by

technology 100 times as much as I have. So this exponential process seems to be happening. And I think it's probably been happening for way before I was born. It's the backbone of the 20th and maybe even the 19th century. And it's going to become the whole probably skeletal structure of the 21st century. I mean, we're getting farther away from the experience of being alive. So much so that I sort of, I capitalize that phrase whenever I write it. Because I'm not even sure I know what that experience is. I think even my understanding of the experience of being alive is now probably immediate construction. I do. You know, I think you know, I made that reference to Christopher McCandless, the guy from Into the Wild, you know. I love that book, but not because I'm like, this guy, he totally is right. You know, it's not even that I admire him that much. I just think it's so intriguing that he has this idea of what being a free person is. And it totally seemed like it came from literature and from film he had seen. Like, you know, someone

might say, well, it's camping is camping closer to the experience of being alive. I don't know if it is. I think camping has become sort of this way. People sort of are able to construct the experience of what they think it used to be like to be a human. Chuck Closterman is the author of Eating the Dinosaur. He spoke with Steve Paulson. It seems to me that this sort of world we live in needs a certain amount of oil to make the wheels go round. In the 60s, sex provided that role. Now, in our landscape, sex is no longer a new frontier. You get the impression almost that sex has died out. Or, you know, it doesn't take place anymore. Certainly, I mean, in the landscape, the media landscape that we inhabit, this enormous novel we're living inside, thrives on sensation. It needs sensation to sustain itself. We're rather in the position of a sort of

drowsing animal, drugged by some powerful narcotic agent, who needs electric shocks to keep it awake. And the electric shocks are provided by violence today, by violent imagery of one sort or another, whether it's plane crashes or train crashes, hijacks or just car crashes from our locals, city streets. That's the voice of James Graham Ballard, or J .G. Ballard, as he's better known. Ballard died in April 2009 at the age of 78. Ballard is considered a science fiction writer, but he described his fiction as picturing the psychology of the future. The complete stories of J .G. Ballard were recently published here in the U .S. The Vale has published four Ballard books through his independent publishing house Research Publications. Vale talked to Steve Paulson about the prophetic powers of J .G. Ballard. How did he predict

the future besides the most infamous way? He was the first to predict that Ronald Reagan would become president of the United States way back. Of course, being in England, but also being an American TV watcher, he saw that before I knew it, at least that becoming governor of California was often the next step to becoming president. That's something I didn't quite see until he pointed out. So besides predicting Reagan as president way before it happened, he also was the first to eliminate to me how basically we now live in an almost 100 % media immersive universe. There's almost no separation between people we read about in the media and our own lives. I don't think there are many people saying this when he started really in the late 60s giving us thoughts like this. And I think that's the major sea change in our lives is how we are so connected to, you might

say, electronic and other media. One of the things that's clear as I was looking through your collection of Ballard quotations is that he was extremely interested in different versions of reality. I guess you could say, clearly the whole idea of reality was very important to him. And I'm wondering if he had a sort of well worked out view of this. Well I think most writers and thinkers have continuously evolving views up until the time they die. I mean the trouble with being in America is that we had absolutely no exposure to the subversive movement known as surrealism. I certainly didn't have any education when I grew up on its tenets and history and achievements and all that. And fortunately Ballard was exposed to surrealist paintings of the teenager. And he was very influenced by people like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. On a visual

standpoint but also Freud was a huge influence just to give him the notion of everyone having an unconscious or subconscious and valuing dreams and the importance of dreams to your creativity. It's just an effortless source that you can plunder I guess if you're a writer or filmmaker anything. And so he knew the value of surrealism and he is a surrealist without being called that as a label. He certainly wouldn't join any movement or one of my favorite quotes that he said was every time I walked down the street I tried to reinvent it in my mind. I mean I think that's just a fantastic outlook on every time you leave your house. You know just imagine I don't know all the buildings painted red would be super simple but anyone could do this. You know just reinvent in a surrealist way everywhere you go. He also was alert to the value of the chance encounter to the role of desire. You know your desires influence your perceptions and your knowledge.

He was just full of ideas where you could live I think a far richer life and be true to yourself. He always said stay true to your obsessions. You know if you don't do that that way lies disaster and I completely go along with that of course as long as you can keep those obsessions. You know you don't want to carry them to the extreme of harming others. You have a great quote he said given that reality is now a fiction it's not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. Which kind of sums up what you're saying I suppose. I think he's absolutely right. I mean it's kind of a cliché to say that reality is far stranger than any fiction but frankly it seems to be so. I mean I try to insulate myself from news programs and newspapers and all that as much as possible because I think well you know on the same hour that I'm reading the Sunday New York Times I could

read a huge section of a JG Ballard book. And which will stay with me longer. I'll probably forget most of the New York Times that the Ballard book will remain for years. And yet the New York Times is one of the reflectors of reality that a lot of people hold up. But of course the problem with all news media is that you never ever get the full story I think ever. Sure. So how do Ballard's thoughts about reality and virtual reality play out in his fiction? Before they had virtual reality I ate a weird mask you put on and weird gloves you put on and then you try to interact with something that's not there. You know all these 3D visions. I assume that's what you mean by virtual reality. There's another definition of virtual reality which is as soon as you are plugged into your laptop and on Facebook or whatever you're in virtual reality. It's just kind of a different kind. In a story that came out a long time ago I think in the 70s

called the 60 Minute Zoom he talks about a relationship in which a man's married to his wife and they've never met. But they just sort of see each other and communicate sort of over Skype. It's up Skype wasn't invented then in which you know you're watching a video of the person talking in real time and you're talking back and et cetera and that's like the whole relationship. I think he was playing with a lot of these notions but very imaginatively and seemingly tangibly because the weird thing about if you read a book and you don't have your iPod on or a stereo going you're just in the book. The book can seem really real and the advantage of reading a book or reading a narrative. A short story is that it's your imagination creating it really. You're imagining the room, the faces of the people, et cetera. And so your imagination gets called into play which by the way is something that the

baller kept reminding us. The imagination was not invented for nothing. You've got to use it. Your job isn't just to take data and pictures in. You've got to use your imagination and create and transform. It's always reminding us of that. And so with virtual reality and with reality I mean he was giving us alternative scenarios of so -called reality to make us think that's what a writer does. Now JG Ballard is usually described as a science fiction writer. Do you think that's the proper label for him? Well let's put it this way. He actually pretty early on was able to make a living. He paid the rent and put food on the table by writing. And so you kind of have to harness your imagination towards the commercial media medium where you can write a short story for an American science fiction magazine and get paid a lot of money by contemporary standards which is

exactly what he did. And he started writing these science fiction stories and then he started writing books and he sort of got the science fiction part over with super early. He wrote four novels speculating on how the world might end. It might become super dry and arid. That's called the burning world or the drought or the earth might be completely covered with water. That's called the drowned world or the world might succumb to some horrible winds that go everywhere. That's called the wind from nowhere. That's his first novel actually. And then the next one was the crystal world which everything in the world for some reason starts to crystallize and look like a maximum painting or certain maximum paintings. And then after that his breakthrough was oh I'm going to write more or less about inner space, not outer space. I'm not writing about rockets going off and that kind

of hardware and aliens and other planets. My frontier is going to be inner space, psychological space, all the inner changes to people and their fantasies and their behaviors and their aspirations. As we enter this far more media immersive environment which is what we're in now. VVail is the publisher of four JG Ballard books including JG Ballard quotes and JG Ballard conversations. You can find a link to Vail's website on our website ttbook .org. Here now is an excerpt from a dramatization of one of JG Ballard short stories having a wonderful time. It's from CBC Radio's science fiction anthology series Vanishing Point. March 25th Hotel Imperial, dear Judith, an extraordinary thing happened today. I saw Richard for the first time since he left. I was out on the beach for my morning jog when there he was sitting by himself under an umbrella. Richard,

is that you? He looked very tanned and healthy but much slimmer. He calmly told me a preposterous story about the entire canary being developed by the governments of Western Europe in collusion with the Spanish authorities. It's a kind of permanent holiday camp for their unemployables. Was it what? It's their answer to industrial stagnation. All the EEC governments are footing the bill and it's not just factory workers but most of the management people too. There's a beach being built for the French on the other side of the island and another for the Germans. But Richard, that's absurd. It would cost a fortune. The canaries are only one of many sites around the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean. Once they're there, the holiday makers will never be allowed to return home. How can you know this? It's the common market's final solution to the unemployment crisis.

They've decided that once we're here, there's no chance of a starting a revolution at home. I'm starting a resistance movement. You what? I tried to argue with him but he walked away casually along the beach. The trouble is that he's found nothing with which to occupy his mind. I wish he'd join our theater group. The birthday parties come along nicely. He'd make a wonderful standing. Diana. What do you think of Ballard's views on reality? You can send a email through our website at ttbook .org. You'll also find a link to our Facebook page there. Coming up, we'll explore the simulated universe arguments as we conclude our our own reality. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRI Public Radio International.

I'm Jim Fleming. I'm Jim Fleming. I'm Jim Fleming. I'm Jim Fleming. I'm Jim Fleming. I'm Jim Fleming. The United States Public Radio International University in Christchurch, New Zealand is also published various journal and magazine articles. Including one called the simulated universe. This article appears in a recent issue of philosophy now magazine. Brunsellby talked to Anne Strange champs about the simulated universe argument. The simulated universe argument was put forward by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher, and he put for the argument in 2003 in an article called, are you living in a computer simulation? Basically, his article concludes that there's a high probability that we actually do

live in a computer simulated universe. And it gets there through three or four quite basic assumptions. The first is that it's possible for a computer to simulate anything that behaves like a computer. You know, that's a fact, it's true. And when you think about the universe, it's basically a rule following system. You've got the laws of physics that act on particles, subatomic particles, atoms, all that sort of thing, and govern their behaviour. So in principle, given enough knowledge about the universe, if I knew all of the laws of physics and knew all of the positions of every subatomic particle in the universe, I could create a computer program that would simulate that behaviour, right down to the neurons in my brain. So according to this theory, the matrix is real and we're living in it. Yeah, well, the matrix is a little different because we're actually kind of betting information in the person's brain. This is a little bit far -reaching. The whole universe is a simulation. It's not that I'm lying in

a chamber being fed information by some evil scientist. This universe is actually running inside of a computer. So in that sense, it's more like the Sims are a second life? Yeah, kind of, except from the outside, you wouldn't be able to look in and actually see me if you were on the outside of this simulated universe looking in. All you would actually see is basically huge data structures, lots of numbers, and algorithms acting on the numbers. In fact, it would probably not be possible to determine which group of numbers represents me, in which group of numbers represent you. There's just too many of them. But you wouldn't know that the universe is actually being simulated inside this thing. Once you started it, you might not be able to tell where it would go. So there's no point in actually getting in there and having a look at it running experiments on the people who inhabit that universe. That is quite interesting, though, because when you think about it, it's actually possible to simulate a universe. And if that's possible, Nick Boasterib says, well, we

probably will do that one day. And if we do do it, that shows that it is possible, and the inhabitants of our simulated universe would probably grow the technology to develop their own simulated universe. And the inhabitants of that simulated universe would do the same thing, and so on and so forth. And then what you end up with is this almost infinitely long chain of parent -child universes and only one real universe. So for Nick Boasterib, just running the math on that, there's probably more likelihood that we exist in one of the billions of simulations rather than the real universe. So following the chain backwards, who would be running this simulation? Well, we would never know. There's no way we could know. It might be a species like us who, for whatever reason, decided that they would want to run a simulated universe. Maybe they'd sort of have moral reasons for wanting to do so. They might want to recreate people who have lived before resurrect them. Who knows? I'm not actually sure why anyone would want to run a simulated universe if you can't

actually look inside and see what's going on. One of the first people to propose this simulated universe theory is physicist Frank Teppler. What was his argument in favor of the simulated universe? I don't think Teppler thought that we actually existed, you know, currently in a simulated universe. He'd been theorizing about the stuff since the 80s and his most famous formulation was in his 1994 book, The Physics of Immortality. What he thinks is that we will actually one day develop the technology in order to build a simulated universe. And if not us, maybe some other species in this universe will do that. Basically, the reason we would do that is to correct a moral injustice of people living their lives, experiencing pain and suffering and then dying. So what Teppler believes is that our very distant descendants will have a moral obligation to create a simulated universe and recreate all of us so that we can live sort of an eternal life, you know, sort of maybe like a heaven -like existence. So we'll just keep replicating ourselves, world without end, forever and ever? Yeah, yeah, it's

quite interesting. He describes that. I mean, when you think about it, you need a huge, huge amount of computing power to do that sort of thing. And one of the problems I have with Teppler's argument is like, how could they, a species that lives in 10 billion times replicate me? They don't know anything about me. So Teppler says, well, that's not a problem because they'll have sufficient computing power to replicate every possible universe. So in one of these possible universes, there will be a me. So this is an ingenious theory. What do you think of it? Do you think we're living in a simulated universe? Well, there's no way to know. I mean, I understand the logic behind what Nick Boastrim tells us and I can see it as a possibility but I've got a few issues with some of the assumptions they may come in. One of the problems I have with it is he vast amount of computing power required to do this. To simulate a whole universe, wouldn't you need a computer the size of the universe to do that? He talks about computers the size of small worlds. Frank Teppler talks about

a mega computer that's actually built at the end of the universe as the universe heads towards the so -called big crunch or he calls it a mega point. And at that time he sort of does this trick with math that shows that the oscillations of the universe will create an infinite amount of energy to power a computer. And even though the universe has got a finite length of time available, the simulation would actually have an infinite amount of time available because of some tricky dust with a math. But it all seems trickery to me. I'm also a little bit worried about Teppler's motives. I think he's got an ulterior motive. He talks about the creators of this as being godlike and that sort of thing. And I think, oh, you know, that's getting a little bit sneaky there. That makes me think of Bill Gates. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, perhaps the future replicant of Bill Gates will finally have a massed enough computing power to create the entire Microsoft world. Yeah, just the way he wants it. Well, I mean, that's a problem. Imagine if the simulation was running on Windows Vista. How reliable would it be? Well, let's say

for a moment that Professor Teppler and the other theorists of the simulated universe are correct and that we are living in a giant sin. Is there any way we could possibly know that? Well, I think to find out you'd need to look for glitches in the simulation. Or easter eggs, maybe an easter egg left behind by the creator of the simulation. It wouldn't be in an obvious place like in the movie 13th Florida, you've ever seen that. It came out in the late 90s and they'd go on this long drive out towards the mountains and they encounter the shimmering green wall which is the edge of the known universe. It wouldn't be obvious like that. But it could be something really subtle like maybe a message embedded in math. I remember reading a book by Carl Sagan, a novel called Contact. And one of the punchlines in that book involved the calculation of the digits of pi to several hundred billion decimal places or something and they found a secret code embedded in the digits of pi. Now that seemed quite fascinating to me who could put a code

in pi. The only way you could get a code in pi would be to invent pi. But that's a sort of like a law of math. So the only person who could embed a code in pi would be the creator of math or the creator of the universe, which is quite a nice thought, really. So I think that's where we'd have to look. I don't suppose anybody's found any codes embedded in math? No, not so far as I know. But interesting actually, if there was an imperfection or perhaps something you could interpret as an imperfection discovered back in the early 2000s by Paul Davis, or Paul Davies, sorry, and John Webb, while they discovered through observations of distant quasars, was something that looked like a shift in the speed of light. And if you know anything about physics, you know that the speed of light doesn't change. So that is possible to perhaps interpret that as a glitch in the simulation. Could there be any other explanation for the shift in the speed of light? Yeah, I think so. The shift in the speed of light was only one way to actually interpret the data. What they

actually found was a change in the fine structure constant, which is basically a constant, which is comprised of the speed of light, the charge on the electron, and Planck's constant. Now, it's still a significant discovery because constants aren't meant to change. But there's no way of telling which aspect of that constant did change. And some physicists think, well, maybe it's something to do with the universal change in the structure of the vacuum. So it might just be something that's bound to happen in the universe anyway. There's so much we don't know. But it's still interesting, because constants don't change. So maybe who knows? Maybe it was a glitch. And I suppose we may not ever be able to prove that we do live in a simulated universe. But equally, we can't really prove that we don't. Yeah, that's true. There's no way of knowing either way. And from a scientific perspective, I guess that's one of the problems with it. It's unfulsifiable. And science doesn't like theories or hypotheses

that are unfulsifiable. But it's still fun to look at. And maybe the fact that you can't prove it one way or another is what makes it so engaging for us to sort of sort of look through it and try to discover some way that we can actually overcome that problem and find some sort of proof evidence. So same with Descartes' evil demon. There's no way of actually proving that we aren't just a disembodied soul being fed information by an evil demon. There's no way of knowing. It's like the ultimate skeptical argument. It's lots of fun. Well, thanks for giving us something to think about in the dark of the night. By pleasure. And think about this. The runners of the simulation. There's most likely some sort of university institution. Let's hope they don't have a cut in funding. Brent Silby's the author of the simulated universe. It appears in philosophy now magazine. Silby spoke within strange champs. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Jim Fleming. You can stream to the best of our knowledge on our

website at ttbook .org where you will also find a link to the weekly podcast. You can buy a copy of the program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for program number 110 -B. Reality. To the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio. This hour was produced by Doug Gordon, with help from N. Strange Hems, Mary Lou Finnegan, Charles Monroe Cain, Anthony Safali, and Veronica Rickert. Our executive producer is Steve Paulson. Our technical director is Carillo Wynn. P -R -I Public Radio International.