Are You Real?
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Are we living in a computer simulation? Are we in real?
On its face the question seems crazy but there are a lot of smart people who posit that this is not only possible, but likely.
According to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum’s theory, one of three possibilities is valid:
- All human-like civilizations in the universe become extinct before they develop the technological capabilities to create simulated realities or
- If any civilizations do reach this phase of technological capability, none of them will bother to run simulations or
- Any advanced civilizations would be capable of creating multiple simulations, meaning there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.
While we don’t know which of the three are true they are all possible and thus valid.
“My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” — J.B.S. Haldane
In short, we don’t know what we don’t know.
To insects we humans are so powerful and complex that if they had the ability to comprehend us at all we would appear godlike to them. We share the same environment but exist on different planes. We are aware of them but they have no awareness of us.
Even much more advanced forms of life such as dolphins and chimps have a hard time figuring out what we are trying to tell them.
Try explaining tennis to the smartest dolphin on Earth and they still wouldn’t understand you.
Ants discover that sometimes food falls on the ground and they can feast, but they have no concept of where the food comes from or that they could be crushed at any moment.
It is logical to assume that advanced beings wouldn’t bother to announce themselves or appear in a form that we would recognize just as we don’t announce our presence to insects.
In this regard we may in fact be surrounded by alien intelligence at this moment without realizing it.
Then it follows that an alien civilization so advanced that it could simulate whole galaxies wouldn’t bother to explain their motives to us because we couldn’t understand them or even realize they were among us.
The idea that we may be living in a simulated reality is not new as it has been popularized in films such as The Matrix and books for years. What is new is the number of scientists that believe this in fact, may be true.
Computer scientist and video game designer Rizwan Virk, explores Bostrum’s theory even further in his book The Simulation Hypothesis.
According to Virk there are a plethora of mysteries that can be better explained with the simulation hypothesis than through our standard ways of thinking. Virk believes it’s actually more likely than not that we are living in a simulated reality run by advanced beings.
Virk’s day job as founder of MIT’s PlayLabs program involves designing and playing computer simulations. He has often found himself engrossed in a game, alone in a room with a VR headset and experiencing something so real that he forgets that it is in fact, a game.
His mind would wander: How can we be sure that we aren’t being controlled by beings exponentially more advanced than us, embedded in a world of their creation?
Look at our own progression with simulated realities. We’ve gone from Pong to Pac-Man to Lone Echo in the span of a few decades. What would an alien super-intelligence with a 5 million year head start be capable of creating?
Is it then out of the question to imagine beings from a type 4 civilization that create and run quantumly more sophisticated simulations for reasons that we can’t hope to comprehend and are running them now on a galactic scale?
We have taken the first small steps to creating our own virtual realities but as enthralling as they are they don’t involve artificial minds, at least not yet.
However, according to Rich Terrile, a computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, we may not be far away. He thinks we’ll have the ability to create simulated sentient beings soon. “We are within a generation of being those gods who create those universes.”
Are we in fact real or could we be living in a simulation so complex that it would be beyond our comprehension to differentiate? In that sense would we even be able to compare our perceived reality with a simulation and know the difference?
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” — Arthur C. Clark
Given the size of the known Universe it is more likely that we are not alone and therefore possible that an advanced civilization would be capable of running simulations on a galactic scale.
But whatever the truth is, the reality we have is real enough for us and so complex that we would never be able to tell the difference until we have the computing power to test the hypothesis.
To discover that all we know and have known has all been manufactured would be mind-blowing to say the least. How would that news even be shared?
In that regard, perhaps there are answers that are best kept hidden.
