Reality or Simulated Universe?
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At a conference in 2016 celebrity entrepreneur Elon Musk stated he believed that we live in a simulated universe. He is not the first to suggest the simulation hypothesis - the origins of the theory date back to the 17th Century with French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes. In this post I will explore the subject further.
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality...
What is reality?
According to Google, reality is defined as such:
1 - the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them
2 - a thing that is actually experienced or seen
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I would also suggest that reality is subjective to who experiences it. Reality to us is based on what we observe through our senses, or relayed to us from others: much like Morpheus explained in the 1999 movie The Matrix, reality is based on what we see, feel, taste, smell and hear, all of which send electrical signals to our brains. If someone, or something, were able to tap into those signals - like the advanced machines in The Matrix could - and provide the correct input, the presented reality would be indistinguishable to the observer.
Virtual Reality
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I have been fascinated by the possibilities of the technology ever since I donned an all too heavy headset back in the early 1990s, with low resolution displays depicting simple vector graphics. The field of virtual reality has exploded in recent years as home computers have become ever more powerful enough to run the systems required. Graphics cards are getting close to the stage where they will be able to pump out photorealistic graphics at a fast enough rate needed for VR systems.
The pace of technological advancements is so exponential that I foresee a time in the next decade or so when VR experiences will be so 'real' to visitors of these virtual worlds that the systems will have health warnings: imagine photoreal three dimensional graphics pumped into your eyes, directional sound flooding your ears, touch sensors overwhelming your senses as you run from a convincing 12 foot tall T-Rex.
Artificial Intelligence
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AI, or machine learning, is another field that has seen many advancements in recent years. Initially used in research labs as a tool to crunch numbers in medical or astronomical research, for example, its capabilities are veering from very narrow and specific tasks such as playing chess, to more simulate reasoning, creativity and learning. Whenever you speak to your phone, computer or Alexa unit, it is AI that interprets your voice, translates it and acts upon your instructions. It is not hard to foresee a time when machine intelligence would become indistinguishable from human intelligence, as computing power increases and neural network machines are developed. In fact, Ray Kurzweil - Google’s Director of Engineering - predicts that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence within our lifetimes.
Mathematical Universe
In his book, Our Mathematical Universe, M.I.T. professor Max Tegmark argued that much of what we understand about the universe is based on mathematics and geometric patterns, as observed in nature, physics and chemistry.
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Everything from magnetism, electricity and subatomic particles to the motion of planets and moons, follow the 'laws of physics' which are based on mathematics and patterns. It appears that the deeper we look, the more patterns we see.
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Simulations In Games
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From Simcity to The Sims and more recent titles like Cities Skylines and Surviving Mars, many gamers are already familiar with the idea of simulating life of some description - be it building cities and Mars bases, or satisfying the emotional needs of Sims. With each generation of hardware providing more computational power for simulations, these types of games will become ever more capable of imitating life with increasing complexity.
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Putting It All Together
As technology races ahead it is not inconceivable to imagine virtual worlds populated not only by active participants, but also by characters powered with artificial intelligence, indistinguishable from actual people. If it some day becomes possible to interface directly with the human mind, how would we tell the virtual from the real?
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What about our own intelligence? Would that be able to be mapped and simulated, then inserted into a virtual world? Would we even know we are not real, and just dreamers in a dream?
Who Or What Built It?
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If we do indeed exist in a simulated universe, who or what built it? God? Aliens? Perhaps even our 'future' selves? Let me explain that one as I am not suggesting time travel: imagine that somewhere on Earth there is a tribe so far undiscovered by the 'modern world'. How would they perceive an iPhone when introduced to one? Or even something we see as mundane, like a car? One could imagine they would think them magical and beyond all understanding, as they have no preconceived notions upon which to base an opinion. Perhaps then, we are that tribe, living in a simulation based centuries in the past from our simulation's creator/s.
Over to you
Do you think there is a chance that reality isn't what we think it is? Do you believe we live in a simulation? If so, what is 'out there'? Where does religion fit into this? Let's get a discussion going in the comments below.
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Ah yes, this reminds me of "the brain in the vat" philosophical question posed in my 101 class.
Imagine you were unknowingly captured by s mad scientist, your brain was removed, then kept in a vat. The scientist hooked you up to a machine that stimulated your senses, fooling you into believing everything was A-OK.
All our senses are electrical and chemical impulses derived from external stimuli, so hypothetically your brain could be tricked into believing it was on a body. If the simulation was indistinguishable from reality, could you tell what is real or not?
The meat on the bones here is, can you prove that you are not currently trapped as a brain in a vat? Our brain and bodies interpret the external world in a very personal way. What I see as blue is not the same blue that you see, even though we can both accurately identify many shades of blue.
I've often wondered how the world would look or feel in someone else's body. Would the world suddenly look like a van Gogh or Picasso painting, maybe Escher? Would pain, excitement, or love feel the same in someone else's body?
Vanilla sky is another good movie on this topic. As Penelope Cruz said, "We will be together in the next life, when we are both cats."
That's my favourite movie.
Open your eyes 😉
@Gmuxx, very interesting topic. Working in the data analytics and machine learning field I read a lot on predictive algorithms and predicative learning. When I hear people, like Elon Musk, saying that we live in a simulated universe I cringe a little.
Life and reality are not products of a simulated universe. As we see in VR, a form of reality could be simulated, to a certain extent, but for us to be living in a simulated universe it would be far to complex to consider rendering.
There is a paper in Scientific Advances that talks about quantized gravitational responses which boils down to the lack of particles in the universe needed to simulate particles in the simulated universe. Read the paper for more information - it's very interesting but pretty deep physics.
Back to the first part of the comment. Our brains are huge advanced predictive machines. Studies have shown that we actually predict outcomes milliseconds into the future. This allows our brains the ability to react and anticipate the physicality of the world around us. Simplistically we can see it in action when a baseball player catches a hard line drive; the player's brain predicts the trajectory of the ball and its placement at a specific time and our physical body reacts.
To further the argument that we do not live in a simulated universe the massive circular predictions that would have to take place would simply overburden the simulation. As our brain calculates our predictive actions the simulation would have to out-predict us or we would see glitches constantly as we make unpredictable (by the simulation) actions. You would constantly be walking into walls or doors, falling down stairs, spilling your coffee and having undecipherable conversations.
As a philosophical discussion it certainly has some of the same flavors that one would come across when discussing religion and the deniability (or if you are in the other camp the certainty) of a supreme being having created us and the world around us.
Great topic Gmuxx.
One of the most interesting topic to discuss about. So much to think, to say, to believe or not believe, to understand, to analyze and more.
Movies sometimes get us into those feelings of questioning almost everything, even our reality. The Major on the anime movie Ghost in the shell by Masamune Shirow pass through several scenes where she doubts about her own reality and what is real and what is not, knowing that there is so much more that we believe we know but actually we do not.
I had been around this topic a few times in the pass, just wandering in my mind between thoughts and personal feelings and sometimes talking with friends on long nights. Like I said, there is so much to talk about this, but I can resume with a thought I had...
Maybe we are just like ants, that cannot see or understand beyond their physical capacity. Their reality is what it is for us just a little world their built on a ant farm at home. And they will die only knowing the little for us they know. Maybe we are like an ant farm for an unknown creator or creators, one that play with us or just he is or they are studying us as an investigations for some unintelligible reason for us. Is totally possible that life as we know is just a simulation in a virtual world if we just think about the fact that we never going to be able to discover it, because is beyond our hands (or eyes). Still, thoughts fly through my mind until the point that I give up and take a cup coffee looking to the sky and feeling so little in this universe as an ant.
Excellent article @gmuxx, I really enjoyed it. Hope to read more from you. Greetings and good vibes!
I remember reading somewhere decades ago a theory that still intrigues my mind through to today I cannot quote it word for word but it put forward hypothesis that our universe could be part of one cell of a speck of dust or dirt in the finger nail if some larger entity and if it just happened to decide to clean its nails sometimes our universe as we know it could be blown into oblivion
So since first reading this in my teens I have always wondered are we just one small part of the larger scale of reality and life
Your Interesting post got me thinking on this again
Thanks
Now that's an interesting thought. The particle we observe as the Higgs Boson could be a representation--through our perceived reality--of the any-second collapse of the universe, i.e the cleaning of a fingernail in this instance. Rather anxiety-inducing to acknowledge and entertain such a concept.
It is a bit of a dark thought but what do we really know
We recommended this post here.