Is life just a video game?

Are we living in a simulation? Is life a big complicated video game? Is anything we perceive, real? Those are some big philosophical questions that are a topic for a healthy debate for a past couple of centuries.

The world’s first programmable computer, the Zeus Z1 was able to perform two flops or floating-point operations per second, modern computer can do this more than 27 trillion times faster and this has been achieved within a span of less than 80 years. In 1970’s we had games like pong, which was basically two rectangles and a dot and now just 50 years later we have photorealistic 3d simulations with million people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. (50–80 years are nothing on the evolutionary scale)

From Pong(1972) to GTA5(2013)

“If we assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality .” Elon Musk @ Code Conference 2016

Many works of science fiction as well as forecasts by top technologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available for the future. 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. If we want to believe that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations, by simple logic we have to believe that there is a high probability that we currently live in a simulation.

If we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That’s the basic idea. Arguably, we should hope that it’s true because if it isn’t then the only other possibility will be that the human species will go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.

So, now lets make some analogies between our gaming world and our supposed reality. Lets again talk about GTA 5. When we start playing the game we find ourselves at some spot in the virtual city “Los Santos”where you see a very familiar picture. You are surrounded by cars that are hurrying to and fro into the distance and crowds of people walking on the sidewalks. In general, it’s very similar to what we see in our “reality”. And in the game, wherever you go, this general picture of a city always accompanies you. You think that life is happening all around the city even if you are not present their to observe it, but that is simply not true. You must not forget that everything you see is just an illusion built just for you.

Let’s consider two streets A and B (in GTA5), when you are on street A, absolutely nothing happens on street B. That is, while you are enjoying the virtual city life on street A, street B drowns in silence. To optimize the games in order to reduce the load on computer hardware, all video games work on this principle. The observer influences the game world by the very fact of his/her observation.

Think about if a tree is falling in a dense forest, will it even make a sound if no one is there to observe it? How will we know?

“The observer influences the game world by the very fact of his/her observation.”

Some Proofs of the Theory

Proof 1: Remember the famous experiment in physics, the double-slit experiment by Thomas Young. The experiment is simple enough: Cut two slits in a sheet of metal and send light through them, first as a constant wave, then in individual particles. What happens, though, is anything but simple. It was a real coup in physics and led my scientists into studying the field of quantum mechanics.

For individual particles we simply observe two strips on the screen but for waves we observe an interference pattern.

For particles (top) and waves (bottom)

The weirdest thing happens when we try this experiment on electrons. We had a notion of electron being a particle but this experiment changed everything. When electrons were shot at the target one by one, we expected two strips of impact on the screen, but result was the opposite, it showed an interference pattern. Physicists had no idea why this happened, so they tried to closely observe the electrons as to figure out from which slit it would pass. Another strange thing happened, the electron stopped behaving like a wave and began acting like particles i.e. they left a trace on the screen of two distinct strips with no interference.

This was completely mind-blowing. The fact of our observation (or measurement) simply changed the behavior of electrons, as if it knows that it is being watched or observed. It looks very similar to the work of a game engine that the observer is somehow influencing the world around it.

The experiment was performed in 1803 and there were many interpretations to make sense of what was happening. One of the famous interpretations is “the Copenhagen interpretation (1927)” by Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. They suggested that elementary particles are both wave and particles and it was the measuring device that made the difference. But that doesn’t discount the hypothesis of a simulated matrix world. Another interpretation is the “Many-Worlds Interpretation (1956)”. In this interpretation, every time a “random” event takes place, the universe splits between the various options available. Each separate version of the universe contains a different outcome of that event. Instead of one continuous timeline, the universe under the many worlds interpretation looks more like a series of branches splitting off of a tree limb.

Many worlds Interpretation (based on Schrodinger’s Cat Idea)

Proof 2: Existence of a speed limit in the Universe i.e the speed of light. Einstein first gave the idea that nothing can go faster than photons in a vacuum, the speed of light is a limit and a constant. The faster an object moves the more time slows down for that object. Here, the relationship between speed and time comes into the picture.

This phenomenon can be easily explained using the matrix hypothesis. It would assume that the speed of light is just a product of information processing and time slows down with an increase in speed. We all have observed during playing games, if our computer slows down, so does our gameplay. This is very similar to what happens in our “reality” when time slows with increasing speed or near to massive objects which points to the possible virtuality of our universe. We can say that close to light speed, the processing cycles of the simulation hang for the sake of saving resources.

Time slows down near massive objects like black holes [Interstellar, 2014]

To describe the world of elementary particles and their interactions physicists use quantum mechanics and for the macro world, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is used. But if these two worlds coexist in nature, then a theory must exist that would allow for both and this is exactly what hypothesis of simulation does. It perfectly explains this. The mysteries of the big bang, the curvature of space, the tunnel effect, dark energy, and dark matter all can be explained on the basis of this assumption. New hints that we live in a virtual world are discovered every year. At this rate, it’s not long when this theory could become as official in the field of science as theory of evolution today.

So, what impact this theory could have in our life. This illusion of free will helps us to live our lives in anyway we see fit but what if every decision you ever made was preprogrammed into the simulation that we could exist in. Every decision you make branches you off to a parallel universe, a parallel simulation. Every choice you ever made lead to this exact moment, at home, reading this very article.

Well, we don’t know anything for sure. There is a limit to what a human brain can accomplish. We have though made some very important discoveries that allow us to ask these questions, most importantly, mathematics. Maths seems universal. There are numbers and patterns in things from the size of atoms to the size of galaxies. Discoveries that we humans have made in only a past couple thousand years have allowed us to ask crazy questions like ‘Are we living in a simulation?’.

If we were to put every one of the billions of simulations into a hat, jumbled them around, and picked one out, what are the chances that we will grab the original one, the one who made all the simulations in the first place. What are the chances that the earth we are living on even exists? Perhaps an advanced alien species came upon our dead planet after billions of years and found out traces of our DNA, traces of our existence, and then made a simulation out of it to learn the history of the barren planet they had just stumbled upon. We can never know for sure. All we can do is observe and hope that our game of life is one that we can win.

Sources

1. Nick Bostrom. “ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?” Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol. 53, №211, pp. 243‐255. (First version: 2001)
2. Elon Musk @ Code Conference 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KK_kzrJPS8
3. “Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50”. Scientific American.
4. “What If the Earth Does Not Exist?”. Ridddle.