While the idea of reality not being real is an old one going back centuries or longer
spanning many different human cultures, there were never any good indicators that something
wasn't quite right with the universe until the advent of quantum mechanics and new philosophical
thinking that brought Simulation Theory into the forefront of existentialism.
I stress the word good as far as indicators because many interpretations of the universe
in the past were often based in superstition and the untestable.
If one has a revelation about the universe, say in a dream or even a hallucination, one
might think it all makes sense, but then you come across a person that says "show me".
Rhis would get even more complicated when a theorist could show others, such as Aristotle,
with his view of the universe as spheres within spheres.
From the ground without a telescope, it can be interpreted that way, and was for centuries
much to the chagrin of Copernicus, or Galileo for that matter who spent time under house
arrest for saying "maybe not".
But then modern science came along which gives us a method for understanding the universe
that can be tested, repeated and observed.
Trouble is, the question of the universe not being as it seems only deepened in that process.
I covered much of this in my first video on this subject, link below and in the end screen,
so won't rehash it here but suffice it to say up until now there were mounting indicators
both philosophical and scientific that our universe is at least a very strange place
if not an outright computer simulation created by someone else.
There's always been one main argument against that.
That argument boils down to "it's not", "how do you know", "because it's just not", which
ironically is akin to the argument presented against Galileo.
But now we have an actual strike against it being a simulation.
I don’t think this takes the idea off the table, this really is an emerging subject
and I expect more arguments to come out against it, but it does give the first indicator that
the universe may not be a simulation, and in fact, is impossible to simulate by the
standards of our universe.
In a paper by Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin, link below, they detail that a computer can't
simulate an entire universe essentially because the universe is so complicated that no computer
could do it, or at least a classical computer.
To simulate the behavior of even a few hundred subatomic particles would require a computer
so large that there aren't enough atoms in the universe to create it.
The researchers found that every time they added a particle to the equation, the simulation
would get exponentially more complicated until it became impossible.
But that's a classical concept of a computer, I'm not sure we know enough about quantum
computers yet to say what they can and cannot do.
In addition, here is why I don't think the Simulation theory is anything close to dead
yet.
We would be inside the simulation, not outside it, yet it would be created from outside.
So the number of atoms in the universe doesn't constrain anything since we have absolutely
no idea what's outside the simulation or what rules it runs on and we have to make assumptions
about the programmers, which, if they exist, would undoubtedly be ricidulously more advanced
than we are.
But what it does constrain is whether we could create a simulation ourselves.
This is a problem for the Bostrum view of the simulation hypothesis, the trilemma that
one of three things must be true, that civilizations never reach the level of being able to simulate
their own universe, civilizations invariably choose not to simulate the universe, or we
almost certainly live in a simulation.
In this case, the first is true, civilizations living in simulations simply cannot physically
create a computer that can simulate universes.
This has an odd effect, it simultaneously solves a problem of the simulation question
at large.
If you are running a simulation, and the civilizations within the simulation begin running their
own ancestor simulations and down the line, more and more resources are needed to support
that in the original universe, until it becomes infinite.
Well, if we live in a simulation, but can't physically create simulations of our own,
then that solves a huge problem for the universe’s programmer.
In short, our universe could still be a computer simulation, but if the universe from which
that simulation derives is similar to our own, then we do not live in a simulation.
If it's nothing like our universe, then the question remains open.
But what's changed here is that we probably can't create a simulation of our own, at least
with classical computers, which seems very convenient indeed.
Thanks for listening!
I am science fiction author and futurist John Michael Godier currently shamelessly plugging
my book, Supermind deals specifically with simulation theory as a premise and man am
I glad I chose quantum supercomputers as the vehicle instead of classical ones and be sure
to check out my other books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel
for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live.