simulation hypothesis book

The Simulation Hypothesis

An mit computer scientist shows why ai, quantum physics and eastern mystics all agree we are in a video game.

• 4.3 • 12 Ratings

Publisher Description

The Simulation Hypothesis, by best-selling author, renowned MIT computer scientist and Silicon Valley video game designer Rizwan Virk, explains one of the most daring and consequential theories of our time.  Drawing from research and concepts from computer science, artificial intelligence, video games, quantum physics, and referencing both speculative fiction and ancient eastern spiritual texts, Virk shows how all of these traditions come together to point to the idea that we may be inside a simulated reality like the Matrix. The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our physical reality, far from being a solid physical universe, is part of an increasingly sophisticated video game-like simulation, where we all have multiple lives, consisting of pixels with its own internal clock run by some giant Artificial Intelligence. Simulation Theory explains some of the biggest mysteries of quantum and relativistic physics, such as quantum indeterminacy, parallel universes, and the integral nature of the speed of light. “There’s a one in a billion chance we are not living in a simulation” -Elon Musk “I find it hard to argue we are not in a simulation.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson “We are living in computer generated reality.” -Philip K. Dick Video game designer Riz Virk shows how the history and evolution of our video games, including virtual reality, augmented reality, Artificial Intelligence, and quantum computing could lead us to the point of being able to develop all encompassing virtual worlds like the Oasis in Ready Player One, or the simulated reality in the Matrix.  While the idea sounds like science fiction, many scientists, engineers, and professors have given the Simulation Hypothesis serious consideration. But the Simulation Hypothesis is not just a modern idea. Philosophers and Mystics of all traditions have long contended that we are living in some kind of “illusion “and that there are other realities which we can access with our minds.  Whether you are a computer scientist, a fan of science fiction like the Matrix movies, a video game enthusiast, or a spiritual seeker, The Simulation Hypothesis touches on all these areas, and you will never look at the world the same way again!

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Our Verdict

THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS

An mit computer scientist shows why ai, quantum physics and eastern mystics agree we are in a video game.

by Rizwan Virk ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2019

A well-crafted discussion of simulation that is unexpectedly persuasive.

A writer explores the idea that life is merely a simulation in this nonfiction book.

What if the real world isn’t real but just some kind of computer program? As Virk ( Treasure Hunt , 2017, etc.) puts it, “The fundamental question raised by the Simulation Hypothesis is: Are we all actually characters living inside some kind of giant, massively multi-player online video game, a simulated reality that is so well rendered that we cannot distinguish it from ‘physical reality’?” Though the idea first entered the public consciousness courtesy of the blockbuster Matrix films, it is actually a topic that has interested people for far longer than video games have been around. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave suggests a similar concept, as do the teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism. Jung was interested in the notion of mental projection while Philip K. Dick—who frequently imagined such situations in his fiction—firmly believed that the world was a simulation. In this book, Virk explains how the Simulation Hypothesis is not as out there as it may initially seem, outlining how computer science, humanity’s understanding of physics, and mystical traditions going back thousands of years all point to the idea that the world may not be as “real” as people think it is. The author’s prose is clear and accessible, laden with pop-culture references and elucidated scientific concepts. He excels, particularly, in making the notion of a simulated reality—something that many readers might brush off as a subject best left to the very high and very paranoid—feel relevant to everyone: “The goal of what we call science is to understand the nature of reality. If we are in fact inside a video game, then science becomes a matter of ‘discovering’ the rules of this video game.” Most readers will likely not come away convinced that they are living in the Matrix, but, particularly with his discussion of quantum mechanics, Virk proves that reality is a much trickier thing than people are usually inclined to admit. Those looking to expand their brains for a few hours should enjoy this cerebral work.

Pub Date: April 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-9830569-0-4

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Bayview Books

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

GENERAL NONFICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Rizwan Virk

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

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by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

Episodes from the life of lady mendl (elsie de wolfe).

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

More by Ludwig Bemelmans

developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

by Ludwig Bemelmans

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• Future Perfect

Are we living in a computer simulation? I don’t know. Probably.

Why this computer scientist thinks reality might be a video game.

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Are we living in a computer simulation?

The question seems absurd. Yet there are plenty of smart people who are convinced that this is not only possible but perhaps likely.

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

We can’t know for sure which of these is the case, Bostrom concludes, but they’re all possible — and the third option might even be the most probable outcome. It’s a difficult argument to wrap your head around, but it makes a certain amount of sense.

Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist and video game designer, published a 2019 book, The Simulation Hypothesis , that explores Bostrom’s argument in much greater detail and traces the path from today’s technology to what he calls the “Simulation Point,” the moment at which we could realistically build a Matrix -like simulation.

I know nothing about computer science, but this idea that we’re all characters in an advanced civilization’s video game is, well, kind of awesome. So I reached out to Virk and asked him to break it down for me.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Pretend I know absolutely nothing about the “simulation hypothesis.” What the hell is the simulation hypothesis?

Rizwan Virk

The simulation hypothesis is the modern equivalent of an idea that’s been around for a while, and it is the idea that the physical world that we live in, including the Earth and the rest of the physical universe, is actually part of a computer simulation.

You can think of it like a high resolution or high-fidelity video game in which we are all characters, and the best way to understand it within Western culture is the movie The Matrix , which many people have seen, or even if they haven’t seen [it], it’s become a cultural phenomenon now beyond the film industry.

In that movie, Keanu Reeves plays the character Neo, who meets a guy names Morpheus, who is aptly named after the Greek god of dreams, and Morpheus gives him a choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill. And if he takes the red pill, he wakes up and realizes that his entire life, including his job, the building he lived in, and everything else, was part of this elaborate video game, and he wakes up in a world outside of the game.

That is the basic version of the simulation hypothesis.

Are we living in a simulated universe right now?

There are lots of mysteries in physics that are better explained by the simulation hypothesis than by what would be a material hypothesis.

The truth is that there’s much we simply don’t understand about our reality, and I think it’s more likely than not that we are in some kind of a simulated universe. Now, it’s a much more sophisticated video game than the games we produce, just like today World of Warcraft and Fortnite are way more sophisticated than Pac-Man or Space Invaders. They took a couple of decades of figuring out how to model physical objects using 3D models and then how to render them with limited computing power, which eventually led to this spate of shared online video games.

I think there’s a very good chance we are, in fact, living in a simulation, though we can’t say that with 100 percent confidence. But there is plenty of evidence that points in that direction.

When you say there are aspects of our world that would make more sense if they were part of a simulation, what do you mean exactly?

Well, there are a few different aspects, one of which is this mystery they call quantum indeterminacy, which is the idea that a particle is in one of multiple states and you don’t know that unless you observe the particle.

Probably a better way to understand it is the now-infamous example of Schrödinger’s cat , which is a cat that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger theorized would be in a box with some radioactive material and there was a 50 percent chance the cat is dead and a 50 percent chance the cat is alive.

Now, common sense would tell us that the cat is already either alive or it’s dead. We just don’t know because we haven’t looked in the box. We open the box and it’ll be revealed to us whether the cat is alive or dead. But quantum physics tells us that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until somebody opens up the box to observe it. The cardinal rule is the universe renders only that which needs to be observed.

How does Schrödinger’s cat relate to a video game or a computer simulation?

The history of video game development is all about optimizing limited resources. If you asked somebody in the 1980s if you could you render a game like World of Warcraft, which is a full three-dimensional or a virtual reality game, they would say, “No, It would take all the computing power in the world. We couldn’t render all those pixels in real time.”

But what happened over time was that there were optimization techniques. The core of all these optimizations is “only render that which is being observed.”

The first big game to successfully do this was called Doom, which was very popular in the 1990s. It was a first-person shooter game, and it could render only the light rays and objects which are clearly visible from the point of view of the virtual camera. This is an optimization technique, and it’s one of the things that reminds me of a video game in the physical world.

I’m going to do the thing that non-scientists always do when they want to sound scientific and invoke Occam’s razor. Isn’t the hypothesis that we’re living in a flesh-and-blood physical world the simpler — and therefore more likely — explanation?

I’ll bring up a very famous physicist, John Wheeler. He was one of the last physicists who worked with Albert Einstein and many of the great physicists of the 20th century. He said that physics was initially thought to be about the study of physical objects, that everything was reducible to particles. This is what’s often called the Newtonian model. But then we discovered quantum physics and we realized that everything was a field of probabilities and it wasn’t actually physical objects. That was the second wave in Wheeler’s career.

The third wave in his career was the discovery that at the core level, everything is information, everything is based on bits. So Wheeler came up with a famous phrase called “it from bit,” which is the idea that anything we see as physical is really the result of bits of information. He didn’t live to see quantum computers come into reality, but it’s looking more like that.

So I would say that if the world isn’t really physical, if it’s based on information, then a simpler explanation might in fact be that we are in a simulation that is generated based on computer science and information.

Is there any way, in principle, for us to prove definitively that we’re living in a simulation?

Well, there’s an argument the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has made that’s worth repeating. He says that if even one civilization got to the point of creating one of these high-fidelity simulations, then they can create literally billions of civilizations that are simulated, each with trillions of beings, because all you need is more computing power.

So he’s making a statistical argument that there are more likely to be more simulated beings than there are biological ones, just because it’s so quick and easy to create them. Therefore, if we are conscious beings, we are more likely to be a simulated being than a biological one. That’s more of a philosophical argument.

If we were living in a computer program, I assume that program would consist of rules and that those rules could be broken or suspended by the people or beings who programmed the simulation. But the laws of our physical world seem to be pretty constant, so isn’t that a sign that this might not be a simulation?

Computers do follow rules, but the fact that the rules always apply doesn’t rule in or rule out that we could be part of a computer simulation. One of the concepts that ties into this is a concept called computational irreducibility, and it’s the idea that in order to figure something out, you can’t just calculate it in an equation; you have to actually go through the steps to figure out what the end result would be.

And this is part of a branch of mathematics called chaos theory. There’s the old idea that the butterfly flaps its wings in China and it results in a hurricane somewhere else in the world. To figure that out, you have to actually go through and model every step of the way. Just because the rules seem to apply doesn’t mean that we’re not in a simulation.

In fact, it could be more evidence that we’re in a simulation.

If we were living in a simulation as convincing as The Matrix , would there be any discernible difference between the simulation and reality? Why would it matter ultimately whether our world was real or illusory?

There are a lot of debates around this topic. Some of us wouldn’t want to know, and would rather take the metaphorical “blue pill” like in The Matrix .

Probably the most important question related to this is whether we are NPCs (non-player characters) or PCs (player characters) in the video game. If we are PCs, then that means we are just playing a character inside the video game of life, which I call the Great Simulation. I think many of us would like to know this. We would want to know the parameters of the game we’re playing so that we could better understand it, better navigate it.

If we are NPCs, or simulated characters, then I think it’s a more complicated answer and more frightening. The question is, are all of us NPCs in a simulation, and what is the purpose of that simulation? A knowledge of the fact that we’re in a simulation, and the goals of the simulation and the goals of our character, I think, would still be interesting to many people — and now we’re back to the case of the holodeck character from Star Trek that discovers that there is a world “out there” (outside the holodeck) that he can’t go to, and perhaps some of us would rather not know in that case.

How close are we to having the technological capacity to build an artificial world that’s as realistic and plausible as The Matrix ?

I lay out 10 stages of technology development that a civilization would have to go through to get to what I call the simulation point, which is the point at which we can create a hyperrealistic simulation like this. We’re at about stage five, which is around virtual reality and augmented reality. Stage six is about learning to render these things without us having to put on glasses, and the fact that 3D printers now can print 3D pixels of objects shows us that most objects can be broken down as information.

But the really difficult part — and this is something not a lot of technologists have talked about — is in The Matrix , the reason they thought they were fully immersed was they had this cord going into the cerebral cortex, and that’s where the signal was beamed. This brain-computer interface is the area that we haven’t yet made that much progress in, but we are making progress in it. It’s in the early stages.

So my guess is within a few decades to 100 years from now, we will reach the simulation point.

This article was originally published on April 18, 2019.

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Rizwan Virk’s Amazing Book Exploring the Simulation Hypothesis: In-Depth Book Review

Inspired by the topic of the Simulation Hypothesis after seeing this book brought to me by a good friend. Rizwan Virk’s book is aimed squarely at the simulation hypothesis, not dressed up among other philosophical topics. It is direct and to the point. It is said that the ‘simulation hypothesis’ is not in the realm of science fiction today but is being supported mainly by scientists, computer engineers, and physicists who study quantum mechanics.

Didn’t even Elon Musk say we have a one-in-a-billion chance that we’re not living in a simulation? In this book, the author, a game developer and computer engineer, summarises the reasons why this hypothesis is gaining strength in all areas of physics/computer science/philosophy.

In short, if the development trend of today’s video games maintains the current pace, it is expected that shortly, simulations will be able to reproduce the reality we live in and the simulated characters living in it will be able to develop vivid simulations that they do not even know they are a simulation. The author calls the ‘simulation point’ that makes it possible to implement such a ‘simulation’, but if we can achieve that level of development, paradoxically – we are in the simulation run by the advanced life forms before us, and we are very It is a highly advanced technology that we cannot even suspect.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his 1993 paper. Are you living in a Computer simulation Considering the technology, it is said that it is possible to run hundreds of thousands of simulations instead of just one or two, and if so, it is said that they have shown a kind of thought experiment that probabilistically we are more likely to be ‘simulated’ rather than ‘real’. (Nick even proved it by using math with difficulty – who said that if you go out with philosophy, you will starve to death?)

From the first chapter to the ‘ simulation point ‘, the author introduces step-by-step what technologies humanity has already prepared and what more skills are needed in the future. It is said that the game progressed like a kind of mind map – in which the computer writes the worldview, the player types Yes/No, and moves on to the next stage – since it was not possible to implement the game with graphics in the early days of the computer. Then, two-dimensional RPGs (Role Playing Games) were introduced in the 1980s when some basic graphics became possible. It is said that the adventure format, in which different scenarios are performed according to the worldview/state of character/character selection, is popular and has become the basis of more complex MMORPG games in the future.

In particular, it was the first-person shooting game called Doom that brought about a dramatic change in graphics. I was happy to remember playing a Wolfenstein (Nazi-killing game) game with my brother who was a trial version of the same company before that. He said that it was groundbreaking that he started rendering in 3D from a first-person perspective (like Super Mario) from 2D until then. Also, Doom allowed two players to participate in a shooting game at the same time, which was later referred to as an MMORPG game. (MMORPG Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game – Like Wow).

It is said that non-playing NPC characters in the game are also meaningful in the simulation hypothesis. In other words, the Nazis shot are not players in the game, but characters created in the game, and this is said to be AI in a sense. If there is a simulation point that enables the technology to bring people and the world to life as if in real life, this person in front of me right now is a ‘playing character’, ‘real human’, or ‘non-playing character’ NPC. It is said that it will not be able to distinguish whether it is a virtual human or an AI.

It is said that his (Virk’s) curiosity about games and the world began when he was a child playing F1 (Formula 1) games. Racing cars can’t get off the track, but who lives in the city over the mountains? What’s the name of the woman in the game crowd?

Anyway, I have a feeling that the topic is leaking because I am talking about the game rather than some of the wider concepts. Today, like CG (computer-generated) scenes in movies, graphics are developing tremendously. However, it is said that video games or online games are not easy because graphics must be implemented according to the movement of the player in real-time, rather than graphics that appear at a fixed time from a woven angle like a movie. The development of VR and augmented reality AR is also said to be approaching the simulation point.

Virk also talked about the possibility that the realm of our ‘consciousness’ would be downloaded in digital form and stored on silicon or USB. This is a setting from a comedy series called Upload, which I saw on Amazon, and it was interesting to say that the ‘information’ and ‘data’ of our consciousness in the end (even if the language we use is different) corresponds to the realm of neuroscience and even religion. We know that quantum mechanics deals with the fact that the laws of physics that we know work well in the macro world, but do not work in the micro world of atoms and electron nuclei. In the double slit experiment to determine whether a substance is a particle or a wave, a conclusion is drawn based on the ‘phase’ that comes out of passing the material through a certain plate. The phase shows that the substance is a wave wave, but a ‘detector’ is installed If we check this, we conclude that the substance is a ‘particle’. The fact that the very act of ‘observing’, ‘detecting’, and ‘recognizing’ something determines whether the properties of matter are particles or waves must have been a great shock to modern physicists of the 20th century who have studied Newtonian physics, and it is true for me as well.

Perhaps, modern intellectuals think that science, logic, and reason rule the world, but when we move into the quantum world, we know very little, and in the end, why the hell does matter react in this way in the quantum world, and what physics we know is. It raises the original question of whether it is based on The simulation hypothesis a hypothesis that emerged from the struggle of modern physics based on quantum mechanics at the same time as the development of ultra-high-level video games. It may still sound absurd to some, but haven’t we always come up with a theory to explain the world first, and then adopt a new theory that best explains the world? Then, it seems the time has come to actively consider the simulation hypothesis.

In particular, the fact that our act of ‘recognition’ determines the properties of matter is that when a user plays a game today, only the image and world that appears in front of him are realized on the screen, and the world beyond that is the user’s ability to reach or Proponents of the simulation hypothesis say that it is similar to rendering in which images are not realized until the screen is turned and ‘looked at’. One of the many hypotheses that explain the particle-wave riddle of quantum mechanics is the multiverse, so at every decision moment, the universe physically branches and creates infinitely many physical worlds, isn’t it too inefficient? Rather, everything exists as probabilities and information of possibilities, and when we perceive and make certain observations, the world is realized in front of us. It is as if the wavefunction of matter is broken down into particles through the act of observation.

The author (Rizwan Virk) takes Zeno’s paradox as an example and says that the concepts of time and space are not continuous as we have thought, but rather discrete units. Einstein’s Quanta A small unit of light… It was interesting to compare this story to the segmental pixels of an online game. Just as DNA contains our individual information, everything in the world is now becoming ‘information-based digital’ rather than ‘physical’ due to the rapid development of digital. if it is condensed. We will be able to download and play consciousness and history at any time, so there is no reason not to assume that we are now avatars running simulations. After all, we are information.

And it was interesting to have a 3D printer as one of the examples that showed the possibility. After all, doesn’t a 3D printer implement a physical/three-dimensional object with only ‘information’ about the object? Now, of course, there are limits to what 3d printers can implement. With the development of the present speed, if a 3D printer can one day realize even the units of ‘atoms and electron nuclei’, it will eventually be possible to create everything in this world. If so, the saying that in the end, everything exists only as information comes to mind.

If we look at the examples of leaves and crystals resembling fractal principles in our natural world. Based on this fractal principle, computer graphics implement graphics similar to nature. Is this a coincidence? Isn’t the fractal principle coded in someone’s computer being implemented in the natural world we see?

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The simulation hypothesis: an mit computer scientist shows why ai, quantum physics, and eastern mystics all agree we are in a video game audible audiobook – unabridged.

The Simulation Hypothesis , by best-selling author, renowned MIT computer scientist, and Silicon Valley video game designer Rizwan Virk, explains one of the most daring and consequential theories of our time.

Drawing from research and concepts from computer science, artificial intelligence, video games, quantum physics, and referencing both speculative fiction and ancient eastern spiritual texts, Virk shows how all of these traditions come together to point to the idea that we may be inside a simulated reality like the Matrix.

The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our physical reality, far from being a solid physical universe, is part of an increasingly sophisticated video game-like simulation, where we all have multiple lives, consisting of pixels with its own internal clock run by some giant Artificial Intelligence. Simulation theory explains some of the biggest mysteries of quantum and relativistic physics, such as quantum indeterminacy, parallel universes, and the integral nature of the speed of light.

“There’s a one in a billion chance we are not living in a simulation.” (Elon Musk)

“I find it hard to argue we are not in a simulation.” (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

“We are living in computer generated reality.” (Philip K. Dick)

Video game designer Riz Virk shows how the history and evolution of our video games, including virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing could lead us to the point of being able to develop all encompassing virtual worlds like the Oasis in Ready Player One , or the simulated reality in The Matrix .

While the idea sounds like science fiction, many scientists, engineers, and professors have given the simulation hypothesis serious consideration. But the simulation hypothesis is not just a modern idea. Philosophers and mystics of all traditions have long contended that we are living in some kind of “illusion“ and that there are other realities which we can access with our minds.

Whether you are a computer scientist, a fan of science fiction like The Matrix movies, a video game enthusiast, or a spiritual seeker, The Simulation Hypothesis touches on all these areas, and you will never look at the world the same way again!

• Listening Length 9 hours and 22 minutes
• Author Rizwan Virk
• Narrator Kory Getman
• Audible release date May 15, 2019
• Language English
• Publisher Bayview Books
• ASIN B07RWQ4GKK
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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The big idea: are we living in a simulation?

Could the universe be an elaborate game constructed by bored aliens?

Elon Musk thinks you don’t exist. But it’s nothing personal: he thinks he doesn’t exist either. At least, not in the normal sense of existing. Instead we are just immaterial software constructs running on a gigantic alien computer simulation. Musk has stated that the odds are billions to one that we are actually living in “base reality”, ie the physical universe. At the end of last year, he responded to a tweet about the anniversary of the crude tennis video game Pong (1972) by writing: “49 years later, games are photo-realistic 3D worlds. What does that trend continuing imply about our reality?” This idea is surprisingly popular among philosophers and even some scientists. Its modern version is based on a seminal 2003 paper, Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? by the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. Assume, he says, that in the far future, civilisations hugely more technically advanced than ours will be interested in running “ancestor simulations” of the sentient beings in their distant galactic past. If so, there will one day be many more simulated minds than real minds. Therefore you should be very surprised if you are actually one of the few real minds in existence rather than one of the trillions of simulated minds.

This idea has a long history in philosophical scepticism (the idea that we can’t know anything for sure about the external world) and other traditions. The Chinese Taoist sage Zhuangzi wrote a celebrated fable about a man who couldn’t be sure whether he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. René Descartes imagined that he might be being manipulated by an “evil demon” (or “evil genius”) that controlled all the sensations he experienced, while the 20th-century American philosopher Hilary Putnam coined the term “brain in a vat” to describe a similar idea. But while Neo in the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix really is a brain (or rather a whole depilated body) in a vat, the simulation hypothesis says that you do not have a physical body anywhere. “You” are merely the result of mathematical calculations in some vast computer.

There are many possible objections to this idea even getting off the ground, as Bostrom notes. Perhaps it is simply not possible for computer-simulated beings to become conscious in the way we are. (This would defeat the “assumption of substrate independence”, according to which minds are not dependent on biological matter.) Or perhaps all civilisations destroy themselves before getting to the simulation stage. (Plausible if not necessarily comforting.) Or perhaps advanced civilisations are simply not interested in running such simulations, which would be surprising given the kinds of things humans do – such as developing video deep-fake technology or researching how to make viruses more virulent – even though they seem to be very bad ideas. The simulation hypothesis is perhaps attractive to a wider culture because of its nature as a cosmic-scale conspiracy theory as well as an apparently scientific version of Creationism. The inconceivably advanced alien running its simulation of our universe is indistinguishable from traditional terrestrial ideas of God: an all-powerful being who designed everything we see. But is this god the god of deism (who sets up the laws of nature but then absents himself while creation runs its course), or a more interventionist figure? If the latter, it might make sense to court their favour.

How, though, should we please such a god? Not necessarily by being virtuous, but by being – assuming the simulator is watching us for its own pleasure – at least entertaining. This line of reasoning might imply, for example, that it is one’s duty to become a florid serial killer, or a guy who tries to colonise Mars and buy Twitter. “Be funny, outrageous, violent, sexy, strange, pathetic, heroic … in a word ‘dramatic’,” counsels the economist Robin Hanson, considering that assumption in his 2001 paper How to Live in a Simulation . “If you might be living in a simulation then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others,” he concludes, and “live more for today”. One commonly despairing reaction to the idea that we might all be simulated is that this renders our lives meaningless, and that nothing we see or experience is “real”. The Australian philosopher David Chalmers, in his recent book Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, argues otherwise. For him, a digital table in VR is a real table. It is no more disqualified from being “real” by the fact that it is, at bottom, made up of digital ones and zeros than a physical table is disqualified from being real by the fact that it is, at bottom, made up of quantum wave-packets. Indeed, some esoteric theories of physics consider “reality” itself to be at base quantum-computational or mathematical in nature anyway.

Is there any good reason to actually believe the simulation argument, though? Or is it just aesthetically piquant techno-religion? Chalmers observes that it is at least more plausible than earlier iterations of scepticism such as Descartes’s evil demon, simply because we now have functioning prototypes (video games, VR) of how such a simulation might work. Others have speculated that there may be clues to the fact that our universe is a simulation hidden in the very fabric of the “reality” that we can investigate: perhaps the simulation cuts corners at very small scales or very high energies. Indeed, experiments (for instance in Campbell et al., “On Testing the Simulation Theory”, 2017) have been seriously proposed that might reveal the answer.

But not so fast. Remember that we can’t know what the goal of the simulators is. Perhaps, for them, the game is not merely to observe us as an indefinite planet‑sized soap opera, but simply to see how long the sim-people take to prove that they’re in a simulation. At which point, the game ends and the simulation is turned off. Perhaps we’re better off not finding out.

Steven Poole is the author of Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas, published by Random House. To support the Guardian and the Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

Further reading

Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David J Chalmers (Allen Lane)

Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos by Seth Lloyd (Vintage)

The Simulation Hypothesis : An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are in a Video Game by Rizwan Virk (Bayview)

• Philosophy books
• The big idea
• Science and nature books
• Consciousness
• Computing and the net books

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BREAKING:  DA says Trump led 'cook the books' scheme to bury 'porn star payoff.’ Defense says ‘there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election.’

Elon Musk says we may live in a simulation. Here's how we might tell if he's right

Is the world around us real — or are we living in a simulation, like characters trapped inside some space alien’s video game?

That sounds like a question you might hear at a midnight screening of "The Matrix," but lately it’s become the subject of serious academic debate. High-profile proponents of what’s known as the “ simulation hypothesis ” include SpaceX chief Elon Musk, who recently expounded on the idea during an interview for a popular podcast .

“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality,” Musk said before concluding, “We’re most likely in a simulation.”

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson agrees, giving “better than 50-50 odds” that the simulation hypothesis is correct. “I wish I could summon a strong argument against it, but I can find none,” he told NBC News MACH in an email.

Reality comes under attack

The current assault on reality began with a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom . In it, the University of Oxford philosopher laid down some blunt logic: If there are long-lived technological civilizations in the universe , and if they run computer simulations, there must be a huge number of simulated realities complete with artificial-intelligence inhabitants who may have no idea they’re living inside a game — inhabitants like us, perhaps.

These beings might imagine themselves real but would have no physical form, existing only within the simulation.

If computer-loving aliens truly exist, Bostrum argued, “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation .” And then people like Tyson and Musk found their minds blown.

Now scientists are searching for ways to put the simulation hypothesis to the test. Bostrom is eager to see more concrete developments of his idea. Experiments that could distinguish physical reality from a simulation “are what would be needed for it to be a bona fide scientific assertion,” he told MACH.

The Big Questions Is the universe conscious?

Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is more expressive about what such experiments could mean. “If there were bugs in the program running our universe, like in the Matrix movies, those could clearly have observable effects,” he says. “Just like God appearing in a thundercloud could be pretty good empirical evidence in favor of religion.”

Looking for gaps in the sim

Any such bugs in our Matrix world would have to be extremely subtle, or else we would have noticed them by now. Silas Beane, a nuclear physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, proposes that we may be able to ferret out previously overlooked flaws by uncovering the mathematical structure used to build our simulated reality.

He points out that scientists in his field use a lattice-like set of coordinates to simulate the behavior of subatomic particles . Maybe the aliens (or whoever built our simulation, if it exists) used that approach, too. If our reality is built on top of a lattice, there’d be a fundamental coarseness to it, since there could be no details in our mock-universe smaller than the resolution of the simulation.

Even if the resolution limit is too small for us to observe directly, Beane says, we may be able to detect it experimentally. In a paper he wrote with two colleagues, Beane proposes that a simulation lattice could affect the behavior of ultra-energetic particles known as cosmic rays , affecting their orientation and maximum intensity.

Instruments like the Telescope Array, a network of 500 detectors scattered across 300 square miles of Utah desert, watch for cosmic rays as they crash into Earth’s atmosphere from deep space. The detectors have already discovered particles as much as 100 quintillion times as energetic as visible light. That seems like a great place to start hunting for bugs in any simulation.

It would be a delicate task: High-energy cosmic rays are rare, and the deviations from ordinary physical effects might not be obvious. But Beane and company are encouraged that making such a measurement is feasible, at least in principle. “There always remains the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators,” the authors write.

Is our world badly rendered?

Another way to sleuth for glitches in the simulation is by looking inward rather than outward. In a recently proposed test, former NASA engineer Thomas Campbell and his colleagues point out that human video game designers typically maximize the efficiency of their programming by generating only the parts of the virtual world that players can see . If our Matrix overlords are similarly focused on efficiency, they may be meticulous about simulating details while we’re watching an event, but allow a looser style of simulation when they think nobody is looking.

Following that line of thought, Campbell is focusing on subtle quantum physics experiments, where gaps in the simulation might be most obvious. He has conceived several tabletop optics arrangements that would shoot a laser beam through an elaborate sequence of slits, mirrors and detectors. Photons of laser light would follow different paths contingent on whether they are behaving like waves or like particles , which in turn depends on the structure of the setup.

Or rather, it should depend only on the setup. If reality is rendered at the moment we are watching, Campbell theorizes, his experiment could yield results normally considered impossible, such as being able to predict whether an individual photon passes through or bounces back when it hits a half-reflective mirror. That outcome would "represent an unambiguous indicator that our reality must be simulated," he writes.

As a huge bonus, Campbell claims the experiment could also explain the weird way that events in quantum physics seem to be influenced by the observer: It may be a quirk of the simulation we live in, not a fundamental aspect of reality.

Science The 7 biggest unanswered questions in physics

Marcus Noack, a computational physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab with a keen interest in the simulation hypothesis, sees problems with these attempts to outsmart the Matrix. For instance, Campbell assumes that a simulation would be for our benefit only, “but what if the simulator does not simulate us just for us, but rather to observe how everything plays out?” And Noack notes that Beane’s approach would come up empty if the lattice of reality is too fine for us to detect — or if the wily simulators have built in systems to defeat any test we might run.

The bottom line, Noack says, is that it’s impossible to test the simulation hypothesis as a whole. The best we can do is explore a “limited neighborhood” of notions about how the simulation might work, and hope that the designers are too lazy or too indifferent to prevent us from discovering their handiwork.

Simulations all the way down?

That assessment seems to combine the worst of both worlds: We don’t know if we’re living in a simulation, but merely knowing that we might be in a simulation seems pretty depressing. Tyson calls it “a creepy concept.” Bostrom adds that it “seems to foster a sense of absolute dependency.”

But there are also constructive ways to look at the simulation hypothesis. Aaronson sees it as a fresh way to contemplate “the ancient mysteries of where our universe comes from , who or what created it, and why.”

Noack also finds it a fruitful thought problem about where human research might be headed. “I simulate many phenomena that represent only a tiny subset of all the physical things going on around us,” he says. “I’m interested in the computational effort a world simulation would need, and the computer involved.”

The rapid advance of AI research and computer modeling raises the possibility that one day we humans might create our own hyper-realistic simulations containing self-aware digital beings. That possibility is both inspiring and disconcerting. It also introduces a new set of brain-hurting questions. Would these simulations-within-a-simulation be the end? Or could our simulated beings keep going and create yet another layer of simulation, and so on?

“There could be an infinite stack of simulations if there were infinite serial computing power available at the bottom level and in each higher level,” Bostrom says. Fortunately, in a finite universe things can never get quite that crazy, he says: “As far as we can tell, the serial computing power available to a simulator in our universe is finite, in which case we could only create finitely many levels of simulations.”

Phew. So maybe that’s one small consolation: We might be in a simulation, or a simulation in a simulation, but at least we can be pretty sure that it’s not simulations all the way down.

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