I recently came across the concept of Simulation Theory, which has been developed by several famous philosophers and computer scientists like Descartes, Moravec, Bostrom, and others. And while I could have read their paper and deciphered pages upon pages of flowery language, I decided instead to watch a video by Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining the theory, which has led me to believe that we do in fact live in a simulation.
Before diving into the theory, here are some remarks about human behavior. There’s nothing humans can relate to more than the human experience, and we’re subconsciously on the hunt for traces of our experience in our surroundings (we’re a little self-centered like that). We find pleasure in seeing human-like faces in inanimate objects and we laugh when our dog’s bark resembles a word in the English language. This is why we enjoy simulation video games, like Minecraft, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty, and Animal Crossing. The player doesn’t just play as the main character, but they are the main character. And with growing advancements in virtual reality technology, players can roam in a simulated environment that seems tangible.
As our computing power continues to advance, our simulations will become more realistic. But imagine a highly sophisticated simulation that can replicate life forms with such detailed accuracy that it becomes indistinguishable from our lives on Earth. It can replicate everything from the microorganisms that roam this Earth, to the intricate chemical processes of the human body. Essentially, this simulation is in some way similar to a “movie,” but the humans in this “movie” won’t have any means of knowing their lives are being simulated and also have the perception of free will.
To program this scarily accurate simulation, we wouldn’t need to create an entire world; we’d need just enough of the world that the humans saw around them. For example, if the simulation programmers noticed that astronauts were en route to landing on Mars, they’d simply insert the “Mars module” into the simulation as the astronauts arrived closer to Mars in an effort to save computing space. This shortcut increases the feasibility of creating a realistic life-like simulation.
Much like ours, this simulated world will start from scratch with the Big Bang, and after billions and billions of years, they’d finally develop computing power and begin running their own simulations. From this, it’s highly plausible that they will want to create a simulation of life forms, just as we did. So now, this simulated world also creates a simulation of the Earth, creating a simulation within a simulation. And then maybe that simulated world will progress far enough to create their own simulation. So as time progresses, we see a seemingly infinite and highly recursive pattern of life materialize; the first civilization creates the first simulation, which leads to the first simulation creating the second simulation, which leads to the second simulation creating the third simulation, and so on. In time, the first civilization will have started a long chain of infinite simulations. So this begs the question, are we the first civilization or a simulation?
Now let’s talk statistics. What’s the probability (given that the computing power to create such a simulation can exist) that we are the first civilization to ever create this realistic simulation? Well, let’s say we have 1 civilization and 999,999 simulations, then we’d have a 1/1,000,000 or a 0.000001 chance of being the first civilization, which indeed is very slim. And as the number of simulations increases, our probability of being the first civilization only decreases. So it’s highly, highly, highly, improbable that we are the first civilization to create a simulation.
But while this is true, think about what every simulation has in common: they each have the computational power to simulate themselves. But what do we not currently have? The computational power to simulate ourselves. In 999,999 simulations, we cannot be the first 999,998 because we don’t have the computational power to simulate ourselves. And so now we reduce 1,000,000 options to two: we are either the last simulation in the chain of simulations that is still working to simulate itself, or we are the first civilization that is still working towards creating a simulation. And from that, we can conclude that we have a 50% chance of being the first civilization and a 50% chance of being the last simulation.
Of course, this argument has many possible extensions. Maybe our society is being used as a historical study of, let’s say, the 50000th simulation, which would make us a mere historical extension and can increase our chances of being in a simulation. Our simulation could be a possible historical movie or documentary type of simulation. But, statistically, the chances of us being a historical offshoot of an advanced simulation is low, because it’s unlikely that people are interested in studying historical offshoots. Again, think of movies: we create more movies about the current century than other historical centuries, and the same thing applies to simulations; more simulations of the current state of the world would be created rather than historical offshoots.
So to sum up, there’s a 50% chance that we’re living in a simulation, which is higher than I initially would’ve believed. But the more I read on the subject, the more I’m inclined to believe that we live in the last simulation. Our world is faulty and full of impending constraints and delimiters, and I’m starting to believe that the reasoning for these constraints is the low computing power of the world that is simulating us. Maybe low computing power would answer why we can’t see beyond the horizon, why we’re only able to dig so far into the Earth, why we’ve only been able to explore such a small part of the ocean, or why we haven’t been able to get to different galaxies; we reach constraints like vision limitation, Earth temperature, sea pressure, and lightspeed because maybe there’s not enough computational power to increase the strength of these functionalities.
So at the end of the day, appreciate this remarkable (potential) power of computation, and patiently wait for the day that we too will be able to simulate real life. But until then, let’s welcome our simulation forefathers, who are currently watching us, to our own renditions of The Truman Show where we’re the stars. And to the people in the simulation above me currently watching me write this column, “In case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and goodnight.”
Technically Speaking is an Opinion culture column used to discuss topics relating to technology, such as pop culture, trends, social media, or other relevant subject matter.
Be First to Comment