Kids these days are so head over heels into video games, do you ever think what if we are pawns in a video games ourselves, some alien species with the controller?
Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist and video game designer, published a 2019 book, The Simulation Hypothesis, that traces the path from today’s technology to what he calls the “Simulation Point,” the moment at which we could realistically build a Matrix-like simulation.
I know nothing about computer science, but this idea that we’re all characters in an advanced civilization’s video game is, well, kind of awesome.
Pretend I know absolutely nothing about the “simulation hypothesis.” What is the simulation hypothesis?
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The simulation hypothesis is the modern equivalent of an idea that’s been around for a while, and it is the idea that the physical world that we live in, including the Earth and the rest of the physical universe, is actually part of a computer simulation.
You can think of it like a high resolution or high-fidelity video game in which we are all characters, and the best way to understand it within Western culture is the movie The Matrix, it’s become a cultural phenomenon now beyond the film industry.
In that movie, Keanu Reeves plays the character Neo, who meets a guy names Morpheus, who is aptly named after the Greek god of dreams, and Morpheus gives him a choice of taking a red pill or a blue pill. And if he takes the red pill, he wakes up and realizes that his entire life, including his job, the building he lived in, and everything else, was part of this elaborate video game, and he wakes up in a world outside of the game, which he did. That is the basic version of the simulation hypothesis.
Are we living in a simulated universe right now?
There are lots of mysteries in physics that are better explained by the simulation hypothesis than by what would be a material hypothesis.
The truth is that there’s much we simply don’t understand about our reality, and I think it’s more likely than not that we are in some kind of a simulated universe. Now, it’s a much more sophisticated video game than the games we produce, just like today World of Warcraft and Fortnite are way more sophisticated than Pac-Man or Space Invaders. They took a couple of decades of figuring out how to model physical objects using 3D models and then how to render them with limited computing power, which eventually led to this spate of shared online video games.
I think there’s a very good chance we are, in fact, living in a simulation, though we can’t say that with 100 percent confidence. But there is plenty of evidence that points in that direction.
Think of how sometimes when you walk into a room with a purpose but the moment you enter, you forget the reason you walked in for? Who knows some work might have come up so the gamer playing you had to leave? So, you go blank for a few seconds, but when the gamer comes back, you are back on track as well.
Think of how every time you fell down. Who knows that isn’t because the controller from the gamer’s hand maybe because he was balancing his plate of food in his hand while playing?
What if the old people are being played by the gamers with low frame rate and bad internet connectivity?
When I say there are aspects of our world that would make more sense if they were part of a simulation, I mean there are a few different aspects, one of which is quantum indeterminacy, which is the idea that a particle is in one of multiple states and you don’t know that unless you observe the particle.
Probably a better way to understand it is the now-infamous example of Schrödinger’s cat, which is a cat that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger theorized would be in a box with some radioactive material and there was a 50 percent chance the cat is dead and a 50 percent chance the cat is alive. Now, common sense would tell us that the cat is already either alive or it’s dead. We just don’t know because we haven’t looked in the box. We open the box and it’ll be revealed to us whether the cat is alive or dead. But quantum physics tells us that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until somebody opens up the box to observe it. The cardinal rule is the universe renders only that which needs to be observed.
Isn’t the hypothesis that we’re living in a flesh-and-blood physical world the simpler explanation?
A very famous physicist, John Wheeler, was one of the last physicists who worked with Albert Einstein and many of the great physicists of the 20th century. He said that physics was initially thought to be about the study of physical objects, that everything was reducible to particles. This is what’s often called the Newtonian model.
But then we discovered quantum physics and we realized that everything was a field of probabilities and it wasn’t actually physical objects. That was the second wave in Wheeler’s career.
The third wave in his career was the discovery that at the core level, everything is information, everything is based on bits. So Wheeler came up with a famous phrase called “it from bit,” which is the idea that anything we see as physical is really the result of bits of information. He didn’t live to see quantum computers come into reality, but it’s looking more like that.
So I would say that if the world isn’t really physical, if it’s based on information, then a simpler explanation might in fact be that we are in a simulation that is generated based on computer science and information.
How close are we to having the technological capacity to build an artificial world that’s as realistic and plausible as The Matrix?
There are 10 stages of technology development that a civilization would have to go through to create a hyper realistic simulation. We’re at about stage five, which is around virtual reality and augmented reality. Stage six is about learning to render these things without us having to put on glasses, and the fact that 3D printers now can print 3D pixels of objects shows us that most objects can be broken down as information.
But the really difficult part — and this is something not a lot of technologists have talked about — is in The Matrix, the reason they thought they were fully immersed was they had this cord going into the cerebral cortex, and that’s where the signal was beamed. This brain-computer interface is the area that we haven’t yet made that much progress in, but we are making progress in it. It’s in the early stages.
So my guess is within a few decades to 100 years from now, we will reach the simulation point.
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