Are we all just living inside a computer simulation, a video game programmed by someone “out there”? It sounds crazy, but some very smart people, including Elon Musk, philosopher Nick Bostrom, and physicist John Wheeler, believe it’s possible.
Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, is famous for his simulation argument. He says at least one of these three statements is likely true:
1) All civilizations like ours in the universe go extinct before developing the tech to create simulated realities.
2) If any civilization reaches that tech level, none of them bother to create simulated worlds (maybe they’re focused on other things beyond our imagination).
3) Advanced civilizations can create tons of simulated worlds. Like how we make countless video games in our world, this means there could be far more simulated worlds than real ones.
We can’t be sure which of these is true, Bostrom concludes. But all are possible, and the third might be the most likely.
If there are more simulated worlds than real ones, the odds that we’re living in a simulation are higher than us living in a real world.
It’s a mind-bender, right? To dig deeper into Bostrom’s argument, Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist and game designer, wrote a 2019 book called The Simulation Hypothesis.
“The idea that we might all be characters in a video game created by an advanced civilization is fascinating,” Virk says. “I reached out to Bostrom to get a clearer explanation of the concept.”
That led Virk to write a whole book exploring the idea that our world is a simulation. He also mapped out a tech timeline leading to a “Simulation Point,” where humans could create simulated worlds indistinguishable from our own, just like in The Matrix.
In an interview with Vox, here’s what Virk shared about the simulation hypothesis. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Rizwan Virk: The simulation hypothesis is a modern take on an old idea. It suggests that the physical world we live in, Earth and the entire universe, is actually a computer-generated simulation.
You can think of it like a super high-res video game with incredible realism, where we’re all characters. The best way to picture it in Western culture is through The Matrix.
Many people have seen the movie, or at least know its iconic imagery. The Matrix has become a cultural phenomenon beyond just film.
In the movie, Keanu Reeves plays Neo, who meets Morpheus, named after the Greek god of dreams. Morpheus offers Neo two pills: a red pill and a blue pill.
If Neo takes the red pill, he wakes up to realize his entire life, his job, the building he lives in, everything, is part of a complex video game. Taking the red pill means waking up to the real world outside the simulation.
That’s the basic version of the simulation hypothesis.
There are many mysteries in physics that the simulation hypothesis could explain, which traditional material theories cannot.
The truth is, there’s a lot about reality we don’t understand, and I think there’s a good chance we’re inside some kind of simulated universe. This reality could be a video game far more complex than any we’ve ever made. Think of how World of Warcraft or Fortnite are way more advanced than Pac-Man or Space Invaders.
Game developers spent decades figuring out how to model 3D physical objects and then used old computers to render them. That’s how we got the online games we have today.
I believe there’s a strong chance we’re living in a simulation, though we can’t be 100% sure. But there’s plenty of evidence supporting this idea.
One interesting aspect is quantum uncertainty, the idea that a particle can exist in multiple states at once, and you can’t know which until you observe it.
A famous example is Schrödinger’s cat. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger imagined a cat in a box with a radioactive substance that has a 50% chance to decay and release radiation within an hour.
If radiation is released, a Geiger counter triggers a hammer to break a vial of poison, killing the cat.
If no radiation is released in that hour, the cat stays alive.
Before opening the box, common sense says the cat is either alive or dead, it must be one or the other, we just don’t know which.
But quantum physics says the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until someone opens the box and observes it. Then one state becomes real and the other disappears.
The key idea is that the universe only renders the images you need to see.
All video game development is about optimizing limited resources. If you asked someone in the 1980s if we could render a game like World of Warcraft or VR, they’d say no, it would need the entire world’s computing power to display all those pixels in real time.
What we’ve achieved today is thanks to optimization techniques. The core of all optimization is “only render what’s being observed.”
Doom, a famous 1990s first-person shooter, was the first game to do this. It only rendered lights and objects visible from the camera’s viewpoint.
This optimization technique makes me imagine our real world might just be a virtual game.
Back to Schrödinger’s cat: we don’t know if it’s alive or dead because the universe won’t render images we’re not looking at. The system creating our universe is optimized. When you face forward, the universe stops rendering everything behind you.
You might say, “Okay, I’ll hold up a mirror.” But the universe knows you’ll look into the mirror and will render what’s reflected behind you.
Or you might say, “I’ll set up a wide-angle security camera to see the whole room.” The universe will render the room, but only the images on the screen you’re watching at that moment.
Anything you’re not looking at at any given time simply isn’t rendered, to optimize the system creating our world.
Let me introduce a famous physicist, John Wheeler. He was one of the last physicists to work with Einstein and other great 20th-century scientists. Wheeler said physics started by studying physical objects, breaking everything down into particles, the Newtonian model.
Then quantum physics showed us everything is actually a probability field, not physical objects. That was Wheeler’s second wave.
His third wave was realizing that at the core, everything is information, everything is based on bits. Wheeler coined the phrase “it from bit,” meaning what we see as physical objects are really the result of information bits.
Sadly, Wheeler didn’t live to see quantum computers become reality, but his idea goes beyond that.
So if the world we see isn’t truly physical but based on information, a simple explanation is that we’re inside a simulation created from information and computer science.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom from Oxford argues that if even one civilization reaches a tech level to create simulations as real as ours, they could make billions of simulated civilizations.
Each simulated civilization could have trillions of conscious beings. Creating virtual worlds is easy, all you need is enough computing power. Think about growing a real tree for 10 years versus copying and pasting a billion simulated trees inside a computer.
Bostrom’s statistical argument says there will be more simulated beings than biological ones, simply because simulations are so much faster and easier to create. So if we’re conscious beings, we’re more likely simulated than biological. It’s a philosophical argument.
Sean Illing: If we live in a computer program, that program probably includes physical laws that could be broken or paused by whoever programmed the simulation.
Computers follow rules, but the fact that physical laws always hold doesn’t rule out the possibility we’re in a simulation.
One related idea is undecidability, to find something out, you can’t just calculate it in an equation, you have to go through every step to see the final result.
This is part of chaos theory. For example, a butterfly flapping its wings in China might cause a storm elsewhere. To know for sure, you have to model every step from the flap to the storm.
So just because laws seem consistent doesn’t mean we’re not in a simulation. In fact, it might be more evidence that we are.
Sean Illing: If we live in a simulation as realistic as The Matrix, is there any clear difference between the simulation and the real world?
There’s a lot of debate about this. Some of us wouldn’t want to know and would prefer to take the “blue pill” like in The Matrix.
The biggest question might be: are we NPCs (non-player characters) or PCs (player characters) in this game? If we’re PCs, we’re playing characters in the Great Simulation. Many of us want to know this, to understand the rules and navigate better.
If we’re NPCs, the answer is more complicated and scary. What’s the purpose of the simulation if we’re all just simulated characters?
Imagine a simulated character inside a Star Trek holodeck room discovering there’s a world “outside” (beyond the ship) they can’t reach. What would you think about a world outside your own world that you can’t access?
I’ve outlined 10 stages a civilization must go through to reach the Simulation Point, where we can create hyper-realistic simulations like this world.
We’re at stage 5 now, focused on virtual and augmented reality. Stage 6 will be rendering images without needing VR glasses, like a 3D printer printing pixels you can see. It shows most physical objects can be broken down into information.
The hardest part, which few tech experts talk about, is the brain-computer interface. In The Matrix, humans have wires connected to their brain’s cortex, where information is transmitted. We’re only at early stages developing brain-computer interfaces, but progress is happening.
So my prediction is that within a few decades to 100 years, we’ll reach the Simulation Point.
Source: Vox
