Are We Living in a Simulation?

Moore’s law, when stated that the number of transistors doubles on a microchip every two years, what really meant was that speed and capability of computing power grow substantially every couple of years. This means that the computing power in just the next 50 years would be millions of times more powerful than what it is today and with that logic, are we living in a simulation? Like The Matrix.

Are digital worlds the genuine realities, or will their proliferation lead to a troublesome turning away from the physical world? As 90s kids, most of us have watched the games evolve from the photorealistic 3D renderings of reality (augmented reality) to seeing the completely dissolved reality into games (virtual reality). With such high-tech forces around, can’t this be true that realities are computer-simulated?

And we are really living inside a supercomputer?

Well, why not?

The renowned physicists to date find the existence and sustenance of the universe a mystery. All the proven theories, such as nothing can beat the speed of light, end up getting refuted at some point. So the only explanation for everything can be that we live in a simulation.

Let’s dive further into it to theoretically, factually, and futuristically analyze whether we live in a simulation. 

For that we need to look at three things in the following order: 

• (1) the introduction of this simulation theory to the masses, back when it was non-fearing, 
• (2) the stamp to the theory by experts advocating it, and 
• (3) evidence from the reality that we know of, to back the theory up.

Tracing Back to the Origin of Simulation Theory:

Three of the cinematic most mind-boggling and thought-provoking movies came out together in 1999, they were ‘The Thirteenth Floor’, ‘eXistenZ’, and, ‘The Matrix‘. Illustrating the possibilities beyond the reality that we know of, these movies planted a seed in minds of researchers and philosophers.

The seed reaped a strong point of view when in 2003, the prominent Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his paper titled “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”, concluded that we live in a simulation. Bostrom proposed a trilemma of simulation arguments wherein he states that at least one of the following statements is very likely to be true

1. the human species is unlikely to reach the technological advancements that are capable of producing simulated realities in a “posthuman” stage; 
2. it is unlikely that any posthuman civilization reaching the aforementioned technological maturity will run a significant number of simulated realities of their evolutionary history, thereby pushing the probable number of digital entities beyond the number that exists in ‘real’ in this Universe; 
3. any entities with our set of experiences are almost certainly living in a computer simulation
4. we are really living in a reality and posthumans have not developed yet
5. we do not have the technological advancement to ever know if we are living in a simulation

In short, it’s all extremely uncertain and nothing can be proven with 100% conviction. However, combining the assumptions and the rate of computing power by Moore’s law, we can estimate that our great great great great great great grandchildren might have the computing power needed to run simulations of the evolutionary history of humanity. Why wouldn’t they

Well, no one can find out now or even then…

“Many works of science fiction, as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists, predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is, run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations.” – Bostrom

Other than Nick Bostrom, MIT Developer, Rizwan Virk who is also Play Labs’s Executive Director, ran a hypothesis on us living in a simulation. In his book ‘The Simulation Hypothesis‘, Virk expanded on Bostrom’s ideas by introducing the “Simulation Point,” or the point of time at which we could realistically build a Matrix-like simulation in our reality.

“The basic idea is that everything we see around us, including the Earth and the universe, is part of a very sophisticated MMORPG (a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) and that we are players in this game. The hypothesis itself comes in different forms.” – Virk

The Legitimization of the Simulation Hypothesis By Influencers People Look Up To:

Folks like Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Serial entrepreneur, Elon Musk have both embraced the theory by always stating their views. While both cannot bring a strong argument, they have always welcomed a discussion around the topic.

Neil deGrasse Tyson expresses there are 50-50 odds that the simulation hypothesis is correct, chances could only be better but not worse for it to be true. Musk with similar sentiments talked about it too at the Code Conference in 2016, “Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality.”

That’s true, the current rate of tech progression might really be pushing us towards artificial reality to overpower the reality humans know today. To add to this heated discussion, David Chalmers, launched a book early in January this year, titled, “Reality+: virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy”. Chalmers is a Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, who is also a co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness.

In this book, he thoroughly investigates not just the nature of reality, but how we can conceptualize virtual reality, our living in a VR-powered reality, how we absolutely know there’s an external world, and much more. With Facebook/Mera metastasizing, our lives are already pretty virtual and soon the VR world will be completely indistinguishable from the real one. However, that world will seem to us as ‘real’ as the one we are living in, as per Chalmers. This goes back to Bostrom’s fifth statement that nobody knows and most likely nobody ever will. Just like a tree, while it is there in reality but a physicist would say it’s mostly empty at the subatomic level. Being in a simulation would be like being quantum mechanical here.

Well while the discussions, and arguments might be recent, since the time humans have been dreaming, they have been wondering what’s real and what’s not. “The origin of all metaphysics,” as Nietzsche called it: “Without the dream, one would have had no occasion to divide the world into two.”

There Could Be Examples of the Simulation All Around Us:

Real-world proofs can be definitely found, depending on who we ask. For many COVID-19 with its neverending predictions, at such a breathtaking scale, could be a segway to ponder, ‘do we live in a simulation?’

There are also times when we experience something and think to ourselves, “This can’t be real”, or experience something that has happened to us but maybe not in this reality. Many people who have caved into the notion that we live in a simulation started to see the glitches in the Matrix. The Mandela Effect? Spirits? Ghosts? Deja Vu? Could they be flaws in the simulation or that our realities our being simulated?

We can’t be sure, they can’t be sure, or are they?

That’s the fun of it all.

The quantum-mechanical indeterminacy, Heisenbergian uncertainty, underlying our reality.

In a renowned French novel “L’Anomalie” published during the pandemic, about, all of us, living in a simulation, writes, “Maybe life begins the moment we know we don’t have one,”. The gist matches the Chalmers book that we should not think about whether are we living in a simulation but live meaningfully in it whatsoever because it’s humanity that’s keeping the simulation going, keeping the simulators stay tuned in.

Maybe when we ignore the possibility of hope, give in to badness, and tread far away from humanity, it is then that someone, somewhere in some dimension, turns the simulation off.