The universe is not a simulation.
The argument that the universe is a simulation is based on flawed reasoning.
The argument that the universe is a simulation is based on flawed reasoning and bad science.
They all believe it. Elon Musk says it’s almost certain. Scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and philosophers such as Nick Bostrom argue that our universe is likely a simulation, running on sophisticated computing hardware in a “real” universe, the plaything of the Godlike beings who created us. While researchers at Oxford have experimentally shown that the universe cannot be simulated using classical algorithms, it remains to be seen whether more advanced, quantum computing methods could. But philosophically, these arguments are based on a flawed belief in the reality of Bayesian probability, which falsely imposes our own mental constructs on reality to prove things about nature.
If you’ve read my articles on how space and time might be illusions or why objective reality might be an illusion or even why you don’t have to believe in the multiverse, you might have noticed a theme developing. All experience is part of an elaborate illusion, but I have never argued that nothing is real. Rather, the universe is an infinite kaleidoscope of perspectives. The illusion is when we believe in one of those perspectives because it soothes our philosophical yearnings.
Indeed, the idea that the world is an illusion has been a part of many religions and philosophies for thousands of years and each has its prescription for escaping The Matrix. Buddhists still maintain that reality is an illusion that can be escaped through enlightenment. The Gnostics, an early Platonist Christian sect, believed that reality was, if not an illusion, then a mistake, a bad substitute for the true reality and escape could be had through Gnosis, the experience of secret knowledge. Plato himself argued in his Allegory of the Cave that reality was not only an illusion but a shadow of an illusion and described a method for escaping it through — what else? — philosophy, i.e., you could think your way out. Descartes’ famous “I think; therefore, I am” supposed that all perceived reality might be false and only our existence was indisputable. So it is nothing new:
The simulation theory is just Bayesian probability and Plato in a trench coat.
So what is this theory?
Neil deGrasse Tyson, famed astrophysicist and science popularizer, has promoted the idea that the universe is a simulation based on Bayesian (probability) arguments. The theory goes that if we humans in the “real” universe evolved into a post-human state, our Godlike post-human descendants would eventually have the power and the desire to simulate their ancestors. Perhaps they want to study us or maybe they are really into genealogy. Because they are so advanced, they would have the ability not only to model us but to create living sentient versions of us in their simulation. The reason why this is likely to be the case with our own world is that it is far easier for these beings to simulate their ancestors than it is for us to reach their level of technology. We would more likely die out. Therefore, probability indicates that we are living in a simulation.
If you think this argument is sketchy, then keep reading. Bayesian arguments are a crutch when evidence is lacking. The entire field of evolutionary psychology stands on similar arguments. It depends on making a lot of assumptions about how the world works and how likely things are to happen that we have never observed then assuming that the argument with the highest probability is the truth. That is a reasonable guess but hardly a basis for accepting anything as true.
It suffers from what is called the “matching” problem where hypothetical arguments are not matched by observations. Already, the idea that a classical computer could simulate our universe has been debunked. Quantum mechanics makes that impossible because of the computational complexity. So could the universe be running on a quantum computer in some other universe?
What if I want to show that we are all living in a simulation?
I want to take the red pill and wake up to the “real” world. How would I go about it? What is the enlightenment or gnosis for simulation theory?
Since it is cast as a scientific-ish theory, maybe we can escape through science. The first step would be to look for evidence in this universe that something is amiss:
If we are all plugged into some kind of Matrix, we would expect there to be some digital limits to reality that we could test. These digital limits would require either that “Lorentz” transformations such as rotations and accelerations are not perfect but are actually violated at some level, something that has never been measured and is extremely constrained by current observations. Even in a digital simulation where Lorentz symmetry is explicitly taken into account like Loop Quantum Gravity, there would be rounding errors. These are mathematical consequences of a digital simulation, even a quantum one. Hence, even the most advanced beings could not avoid them.
A simulated universe could not have any sort of continuous nature. It could not be made of all the real numbers like 0, 0.1, pi, and the square root of 2. It would have to leave some out because even a digital simulation with an infinite number of bits cannot account for all the real numbers. Famed mathematician Georg Cantor proved that you cannot do that in the 19th century. Thus, one way to prove that we live in a simulation is to perform an experiment that relies on any given real number being represented in the universe.
While quantum physics has shown that many quantities that classical physics assumed were continuous are actually “quantized” meaning that they come in discrete packets, there are others where we have not demonstrated any quantized nature. Some of these are mass, energy, and momentum. Photons, for example, can take on any frequency. What you can’t do is take light at a given frequency and cut it to anything smaller than photons which all must have a precise amount of energy for that frequency.
But suppose that these are quantized at some level we cannot yet measure, as some scientists have proposed. One thing we would expect to see if the universe is discrete is that it has something called “quantum jitter”. This jitter is the effect of space and time being pixelated. Interferometers like the Holometer at Fermilab in Chicago can detect jitter arising from pixelation in space at the smallest theorized distance units, the Planck length. So far there has been none detected.
Another experiment we can do is to look at reality itself. Are there glitches in the Matrix? These are improbable events, things that the aliens want to happen or don’t want to happen for whatever reason (or maybe just bugs in the sim). One such event might be our own improbable evolution, the so-called anthropic principle, but that hardly points to aliens simulating the universe more than any other explanation. After all, the universe is an enormous, potentially infinite place, so even the least probable things happen somewhere some of the time. The truth is that improbable things happen every day even here on Earth, and glitches in the Matrix are more related to our failure to understand probability than anything fishy going on in reality.
We can go on proposing finer and finer experiments, but we will always fail because the simulation theory is not a scientific theory. By this I mean that it cannot be falsified by experiment. You can always propose an alternative simulation format that invalidates any experimental result. For example, maybe the aliens are clever enough not to simulate the whole universe but only the parts of it we can see like many video games do. Couldn’t they just fake the results of experiments to make the universe appear real? If that is so, then any failure to find evidence for the theory could be fake. Only evidence that the universe is a simulation would be exciting.
If science cannot wake us up, however, perhaps philosophy can:
René Descartes made this argument when he said “I think; therefore, I am.” We don’t know that anything we perceive is real. All we know is that we think, and we can observe our own thoughts. Suppose I am plugged into the Matrix, and the Matrix, far from being a complete simulation of a universe, is simply a simulation of my ordinary life. What exists outside the Matrix’s control? Perhaps my own thoughts.
Conceivably, however, the aliens could censor my thoughts without my knowing it since my mind is part of their simulation (unlike in the movie where the brain was physically outside The Matrix). Operating systems do this all the time with computer programs running inside them. Your operating system interrupts programs, changes their memory, and restarts them and the programs are none the wiser. They run in a state of complete abstraction of the reality of the hardware. Thus, while I know I am thinking, I do not know that all my thoughts are my own. If the aliens are determined to keep me “asleep”, they can simply remove any thoughts they don’t like.
If philosophy can’t wake me up, then perhaps enlightenment can.
Buddhists practice to remove all perception of the passage of time, the senses including the sense of spatial awareness, and all concepts and the awareness of concepts from the mind so that the mind becomes a void, existing in one moment, at one point, infinitely clear. In this state, however, one does not wake up to the fact that the universe is a simulation. One simply avoids the simulation. Whether you can continue in this state permanently is questionable, so you have to return to the illusion. Maybe you know it is all an illusion now, but you don’t know what is real, unless you think that is the void. The void is hardly aliens though.
Can somebody just tell me if we’re in a simulation?
Perhaps this is why the Gnostics relied on special knowledge. Without getting too deep into Gnostic theology which is far from self-consistent, you can imagine it being as if one or more of the aliens disagreed with the whole simulation, e.g., like Jesus Christ à la Morpheus, and came into it to tell us that it was actually a simulation and that there was a real world out there and showed us how to get there. This gets into Jesus basically handing Judas Iscariot the red pill.
As far as we know, Jesus did not tell us that nor did any of the other many characters in the Gnostic gospels and other books, most of whom were not historical figures.
It seems that there is no way to determine if the world is a simulation or to wake up from it and perhaps that is just as well since the entire argument is meaningless. It all comes down to the metaphysics of what is real and how do we know what is real which has a vast repertoire of alternatives to the ill posed simulation theory. These theories of ontology explain what there is. The simulation theory is an ontology theory that explains that what we think is there is simulated. There is a lot more to ontology, like is it objective (meaning that things have an intrinsic nature) or subjective (meaning that I confer their reality to them) or in between. These are open questions that lead in different directions, particularly for the interpretation of quantum physics. While simulation theory gives the impression of being scientific, that sense is false, a consequence of the mathematical language it uses. It is no more scientific than anything out of the Idealist schools of thought.
Simulation theory does have value in that it did shake up ontology theory 20 years ago. It asked that what if question: what if everything we think is real isn’t including ourselves? Are our philosophies built on a desire to be real that has become a belief? What it didn’t do was prove anything because arguments based on the maximal probability of the consequences of your own invented premises are probably illusions. Whether the universe itself is depends on what you think is real.