What if I said that you don’t exist, and there’s no way to really find out?
Since the inception, humanity has battled with the question of their absolute existence; is the answer finally here?
“Reality only exists in the human mind and nowhere else.”
- George Orwell
Nineteen years and still one of the most epic scenes to be ever filmed in the history of Hollywood belongs to the era changing franchise — The Matrix, but that’s not the only thing that etched this movie in our memories. It was also responsible for popularising an idea that sparked a decade of debates on the topic of simulated reality. The idea that we might all just be living in an illusion, not metaphorically but literally, baffled a lot of people.
It’s hard to accept the fact that there is a considerable chance that we all might be just a figment of someone’s imagination or lines of code in a long-running simulation by beings that are incomprehensible to us. This puzzling concept of reality isn’t that new, to begin with. For millenniums, philosophers and religious thinkers of society have been dealing with similar ideas.
Before we head into the reason behind all the conflicting debates on the topic, we should see where this idea originates from. Many philosophical and religious texts deal with the existence of different versions of reality, which opened up the whole debate on this topic. One of the most prominent thoughts comes from the 3rd-century text, Zhuangzi, where Master Zhuang describes his dream known as “The Butterfly Dream.”
Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.
Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.
This story generated many arguments on the authenticity of this reality. Similar ideas can also be found in various texts, like the concept of Maya (Illusion) in Indian philosophy, which was used as the basis in many other religious scriptures. This also became the foundation stone for different religious sects which tried to understand reality with spirituality. This concept of illusion raises in us a deep question that is anything around us real?
Keeping that idea in mind, many scholars put on their thinking caps and started describing the universe in mathematical equations, it started with Pythagoras. Now, if the whole universe can be defined in equations, what’s there to stop us from simulating them and creating a different reality, if all we require is a computer big enough to run those simulations? Maybe, Hitchhiker’s guide wasn’t lying, after all, Forty-two might still be the answer to the whole universe.
It would be too bold to assume that we haven’t even given it a shot. In fact, many basic programs were created to put the idea in perspective. One of the best examples was the game invented by John Conway, a British mathematician in 1970. The zero-player game — The Game of Life, was just basic cellular automation, not exactly a game that would be played for fun because the only role one would have is to set the initial parameters and then it would just run itself. It generates the patterns based on initial parameters, and while some of these die after few generations, some keep going on forever.
If with just a few variables we can create a never-ending simulation of different patterns of dots on the screen, imagine if we scale this up to the size of the universe and instead of dots we consider atoms. This would result in a simulated reality, but it should not be confused with virtual reality. For example, when you are playing ’Call of Duty’ or any other first player game, you are the character in that world, but you are aware of the fact that it isn’t real, the one you are living in is, but in a simulated reality, you can’t distinguish between these two. Even if we find any evidence of us being simulated, that evidence itself might be simulated. There should be some way on how to address this situation when we can’t even trust the thoughts that we think, to be real.
I mean, making simulations of what you’re going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you’ve gone wrong and what you can do about it.
- Christopher Alexander
Before we head on further, we have to understand that human consciousness isn’t something that is outside of physical laws, it’s due to the complex structure of the human brain and isn’t governed by some supernatural forces. Thus, it is possible to generate an artificial consciousness by stimulating the underlying laws and structure.
The first philosopher to give a structure to the whole simulation argument was Nick Bostrom. In his paper published in 2003, he argued that at least one of his propositions is true. He dealt with three possibilities, first of which states that humans would be extinct before they reach the point where they would merge with technology initiating an era of post-human civilisation. The argument for this possibility is the improbability of human civilisation to pass through the Great Filters — Nuclear war, Climate change, Meteorite crash etc. The second possibility is a rather interesting one. It assumes that a post-human civilisation is more likely to be disinterested in running an ancestral simulation in the first place. The reason being ethical prohibition, legal bindings or the unlikelihood of post-human beings having human-like desires and ambitions. Refusion of both these possibilities leaves us with the third hypothesis.
This one says that we will reach a time when we will be able to create a simulated world having simulated beings with consciousness. Keeping in mind that fifty years ago we just had two dots playing on a desktop and now we have 3D games that millions of people play simultaneously, we can claim that with technological advancements we will reach a stage where we simulate different realities. If that is possible, there is a good reason to believe that the nature of our own reality itself is hierarchical. This establishes the postulate even further that we ourselves are residing in a simulated reality at this very instance. If a simulated universe is not terminated at the post-human stage where they don’t have the ability to simulate further then it creates a nested reality and it continues up to an infinite number of realities, which also forms the basis of multiverse theory. The base reality would be an absurd concept in that case.
There is no chance that we humans can ever know with full certainty that are we in simulation or not (Heisenberg was right about many things), but it’s in human nature to try. Elon Musk and many other people in Silicon Valley are trying their best to find some glitches in our reality, which might prove that there exist other beings that are running us on their computer screens.
But, in 2017, two physicists, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi put these ideas to rest to some extent. While working on Quantum Monte Carlo technique, which uses random sampling of the many-body quantum problems by simulating them, they found that the complexity of simulation increases exponentially with the increase in the number of particles, instead of linearly. Thus, they found out that storing the memory of a few couple hundred electrons would require computing power that physically would require more atoms than the whole number of atoms in our entire universe.
But, assuming those same laws work outside this universe would be arrogant on our part, for if we are in a simulation, it is obvious that the civilisation that created us, is in a universe that is much advanced than ours, and the existence of different laws outside our universe falls under the category of Schrodinger’s Cat paradox, it’s either true or not.
The problem posed by the requirement of a huge computing power can be overlooked by approaching the simulation problem from a different aspect, instead of simulating the whole universe, our perception of reality can be simulated too.
The human experience is horribly limiting from an objective vantage point. We can never grasp the true nature of reality — not unfiltered anyways. There will always be an unsettling possibility — the universe we very humanely perceive is a mirage. Our quest and curiosity ridiculed by superior beings running us. Here is an interesting crux — for our known universe to be a simulation you only need to simulate human consciousness — the firing neurons and networking in our thought machine, our brain. But there’s a catch — to simulate consciousness of the entire human race since its conception will require more computational operations than there are atoms in the observable universe, but to simulate a single mind and perceiving the whole reality from that one’s perspective won’t be that much trouble. That would put rest to the argument given by Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi. So, it is possible to create a reality with available computing power, we just need to simulate one human mind to perceive the whole reality. All of these speculative thinking is acknowledging the fact that any superior intelligence will be interested enough to run a simulation in the first place.
A more daunting approach to reality is the purely objective one — a reality independent of human perception, an overarching reality that encompasses our interpretation of it. The elegance of string theory emphasises its possibility even further. Such a bird’s eye view of reality is impossible to the human condition and its implications are fearsome. We as a species have evolved to fear the possibility of the unknown. The grandeur of realism is too vast for us to accept and we find solace in knowing that there is a natural paradox that constrains us from doing so.
Will there ever come a time where we won’t have to fear the upcoming, where we can just run the simulations to every alternate future and hope that it doesn’t turn out to be what it did with Dr Strange? Or are we already in one of those simulations run by some pre-human species to see how the universe evolves? Or are we just a fun science project for someone who works beyond our laws of physics? In truth, we won’t ever be able to find answers to these questions, but we can only wonder. In the end, the only question that remains is, are we ready to accept the fact that we are not real?
So what’s it going to be? Red or blue pill?
