All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!
Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.
This is a past event that happened on October 16, 2022 at 1:30pm.
Our panel will discuss the suggestion that we have been living in a sort of metaverse all along. This claim starts with the notion that the Universe evolves as one giant algorithmic computation, and that information is the basic substance. A variation on this line of thought asks the question: could we be living in a simulation à la the Matrix.
Participants:
Emily Adlam
Postdoctoral Associate, Rotman Institute for Philosophy of Science, University of Western Ontario
Emily Adlam is a postdoctoral associate at the Rotman Institute for Philosophy of Science at the University of Western Ontario. She recevied her PhD in relativistic quantum information from the University of Cambridge. Prior to that she completed the Perimeter Scholar’s International programme in theoretical physics, and she did her undergraduate degree in physics and... read more! »David Chalmers
Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science, New York University
Co-Director, Center for Mind, Brain, & Consciousness, New York University
Elias Dakwar
Associate Professor, Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University
Elias Dakwar, MD is an Associate Professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and a board-certified addiction and general psychiatrist. He has been researching novel treatments for addictions for over a decade, with the support of several grants from the National Institutes of Health. A special focus of his research has been evaluating... read more! »Christopher Fuchs
Professor, Physics, College of Science & Mathematics at UMass Boston
Christopher Fuchs is a Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Boston who specializes in quantum information theory and quantum foundations. He is an author or co-author of over 160 scholarly pieces, one of which, “Unconditional Quantum Teleportation” with H. J. Kimble’s experimental group, was voted a “Top-Ten Breakthrough of 1998” by the editors of Science. He is a... read more! »Sylvester James Gates
Clark Leadership Chair in Science, Distinguished University Professor & Regents Professor, University of Maryland
Sylvester James “Jim” Gates, Jr. is a theoretical physicist. He is a University of Maryland University System Regents Professor, the John S. Toll Professor of Physics, and a College Park Professor Emeritus. He currently holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science and serves as a Professor of Physics with the Physics Department as well as... read more! »