From time to time over the last several months, an email has shown up in my inbox stating we are living in a simulation or asking what I thought about the idea. That idea has been around for a long time, much longer than the Matrix or cyberpunk sci-fi has been around, much longer that computers have existed. But given the popularity of video games and computer modeling nowadays, it has taken on a more credible wrapping.
The more recent flurry of interest arose mostly from an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom, who proposed the following trilemma in a paper in the Philosophical Quarterly back in 2003:
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
If 1 or 2 turn out to be the case, we are not living in a simulation. But if 3 is true then there would be billions, maybe trillions, or trillions of trillions, of high quality simulations carried out in the far future. And therefore, statistically, we are far more likely to be inhabitants of one of those quasi-realities than we would be as creatures in the “real” or “base universe. Come below, my fellow sims!
It may sound cray, it is a little crazy. But no less than Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has seriously toyed with this idea:
"If you assume any rate of improvement at all then games will become indistinguishable from reality," Musk said. "Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now, let's just imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale." Given that we're on that trajectory and that these games are increasingly playable on any device, Musk said, the odds that we are living our lives in base reality — that is, "real" reality — is one in billions.
Maybe, maybe not. Remember that one simple definition of science is whether or not a proposal is testable. That could be a problem for laying this idea to rest. If we’re in a simulation, one that’s so perfect we cannot readily distinguish it from a real world, then it’s not scientific proposal. So the question is, can we test it, at least in principle?
Ideas of testing depend, to some degree, on the motives and methods of the creators of the sim.
One has to wonder, when did the sim start? At the Big Bang, or the formation of Earth, or the evolution of anatomically modern humans? Or did it kick in only a few generations ago, or just last week complete with false memories or years gone by in all its current subjects?
If for example there is an entertainment or research angle to it, and all who are conscious in the alleged sim represent a post-human in the far future who has been inserted in the matrix, when we wake up, we’ll know. Does that happen at death? It’s nice to fantasize ...
If most of you zombies out there are like NPCs in video games, without conscious and only mimicking a real person, there might be a way that would show up under close psychological or physiological examination of some sort.
If we are in a computer sim, then the resources generating it may be enormous, but they would still be finite. Some physicists speculate that in the near future, we will be able to derive properties like the strong nuclear force from computer simulations of quantum chromodynamics. This take high performance computing for just a few particles — a whole universe would be next to impossible for any conceivable future species, even one with hitherto unheard of maximized simulation capacity.
I can’t claim to fully understand this. But a simplistic attempt would be something like, perhaps, if we could randomly pick particles, we might then find a telling discrepancy between observed and simulated particle interactions that would point to data compression; i.e., catch the the sim red-handed cutting numerical computing corners to save processing time and memory space. A formal abstract of this idea can be found here (.pdf).
The simulation hypothesis almost sounds like religion, at least as far as the after-life part, dressed up in modern garb. I say almost only because, unlike most religious beliefs, there is no requirement to believe in it for it to work. There’s nothing to lose, or gain, by rejecting or accepting it.
But for what it’s worth, I’ve tried shouting out “Computer, end simulation!” a number of times. Alas, to no avail, the universe did not shut down. No holo-deck lattice reappeared. So if you have any better ideas, I’d love to hear them.