You don't exist, and science is pretty confident of that fact.
Well, it would be unfair to say that you don't exist, you probably do. Just not in the way that
you think you do. Instead of flesh and body, you're likely nothing more than electrons on a
circuit board, your consciousness a long string of code being run by a supercomputer somewhere.
You believe you're real because you've been programmed to think you're real- or perhaps,
if you're really lucky, you actually are real, and it's the rest of the world that's fake. But wait,
let's back up a second because we can already feel some of our audience's heads spinning.
Simulation theory is exactly what it sounds like: our universe, and perhaps our very selves,
is nothing more than a simulation being run by an advanced computer of some sort.
You might be tempted to turn to computer engineers for an answer to the simulation theory question,
but it turns out that spiritual gurus may have a better grip on the ultimate
answer than a scientist or engineer. After all,
spiritual gurus dedicate themselves to the study and development of the spiritual side of life,
seeking to understand the fundamental question of why do we exist at all?
The problem with turning to scientists for an answer on simulation theory is simply put,
that any evidence they can discover to disprove the theory could itself be simulated. Perhaps
religion and spiritualism can give us a better perspective on the question if we are real or not,
and religion has some very uncomfortable clues that we might in fact be simulated.
Eastern religions have a staggering amount of evidence supporting that we in fact live in a
simulation. One of the Buddha's most well known teachings is as follows:
All phenomena are like reflections appearing in a very clear mirror,
devoid of inherent existence. In essence, this perfectly describes any video game- everything
you see in a video game may look real, and have a real effect on a character inside the video game,
but it is all ultimately not real to any observer outside of the video game itself.
If you log into Fortnite and someone shoots directly at you, the real you
behind the screen is completely unharmed by the digital bullets being shot in your direction.
Even more disturbing is the ultimate goal of Buddhism- Nirvana. Nirvana is the ultimate
spiritual goal of a Buddhist practitioner, and only achieved by rising above the “three poisons”,
greed, aversion, and ignorance. Once you accomplish that task, you are rewarded by
being freed from the constant cycle of rebirth, where you live and die a series of lives meant to
act as teaching experiences. Achieving nirvana leads to parinirvana, or the final nirvana, an
afterlife for souls that have been freed from the Hindu and Buddhist cycle of rebirth. What happens
here is indescribable, and the human brain cannot understand it so there is nothing known about it.
At a glance, Buddhism's nirvana seems much like the carrot-and-stick core ideology of
any religion- do good and be rewarded with good, do bad and get the stick
by being forced to live yet another life in our imperfect world. Yet for a computer gamer,
the entire concept of nirvana has a disturbingly 'quest-like' feature reminiscent of any computer
game. It even comes with a respawn feature, just like you would respawn in a game over and over
again until you succeed by overcoming the obstacle in front of you. Imagine a game of Super Mario,
with Mario respawning over and over in front of the bottomless pit he can't
quite get the hang of jumping over- until he does one day and continues on his way.
Buddhism's nirvana seems to point at one of several possibilities for why we even live
in a simulation, which we'll get to soon- but first, what do other religions say?
In the Hindu tradition life is believed to be nothing more than a dream of Vishnu,
and every single human being, along with all of their history, triumphs,
and defeats, nothing more than a miniscule portion of the fabric making up that dream.
When Vishnu awakens, we will cease to exist, no different than if we
were being simulated by a computer and the simulation ended, or the computer shut off.
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, whom all share the same God, don't have as obvious links to
the possibility of the universe being simulated, but they do share a belief in a monotheistic God
who created us to have a personal relationship with him directly. The concept of a single God
in control of the entire universe is no different than the concept of a super intelligent AI
creating a simulated universe, and then populating it with simulated life.
Religion, especially eastern religion,
seems to have strong links to simulation hypothesis, but what does science say?
Well, the most important thing to remember is that if our simulators wished to hide the fact that we
were living in a simulation from us, then we would never be able to find out as any evidence proving
it could be simply edited, and any evidence disproving it could be itself simulated.
Think back on the last time you played a single player video game and engaged in the questionable
behavior of 'save scumming', or reloading a previous save so you could get a beneficial,
or the best, outcome. Your character has in effect witnessed the effects of any number of possible
outcomes, but you literally reversed time for that character and he or she is now only aware of one
outcome- the one you chose for it. So too might our simulators simply reload a previous save state
and then steer us away from the earth shattering discovery that we are in fact, simulations.
But if everything can be edited and we can't even trust our own observations or deductions,
can there ever be any evidence that we live in a simulation? Well, yes,
possibly. One piece of evidence, and it's definitely not good if you like
to think you are a real flesh and blood person, comes from simple probability.
We have observed our own universe and deduced that it largely makes sense. Sure, there's some
things that still bother scientists, but by and large, the universe seems to be understandable,
and the processes by which it operates are themselves also understandable. That would
seem to indicate then that there is a greater probability that our simulated universe is a very
close approximation of the real universe. After all, you're more likely to create a
simulation using values for the universe that you already know work- never underestimate the
probabilistic power of complacency driving people to the path of least resistance.
This means that the real universe is likely as large as ours, which in turn means that it could
potentially be inhabited by numerous highly advanced species- yet no matter how many real,
unsimulated beings inhabited the real universe, the ability to condense information onto a
computer means that by sheer numbers alone, the number of simulated minds are inevitably
exponentially greater than non-simulated minds. That gives you pretty crap odds of being real.
But this is a rather imperfect argument, as it relies on a number of values that we simply can't
ever have precise data on. The real universe might in fact be tiny compared to our simulated
universe- our vast, seemingly infinite universe could be nothing more than a fantasy dreamt up by
a super intelligent species stuck in a boring, mundane universe that's no bigger than a few
solar systems. Consider the popularity of movies, books, and video games set in exciting worlds that
are vastly different than our boring, mundane earth. Intelligence seems to yearn for novelty,
and is easily bored by its own everyday reality- so the real argument here might
be that if our universe is simulated, then the real universe is far more mundane than ours.
Physics might offer better clues to the true nature of our universe. In a computer simulation,
what you can see is limited by the resolution of the program, and if you look close enough
you discover the individual pixels that make up each image. In our world, atoms share very similar
properties with pixels, as we know that atoms make up everything in our material world. Yet,
atoms themselves are made up of even smaller particles known as elementary particles such
as gluons and quarks, with the latter being the smallest particle we know of.
If our universe is simulated, then why add unnecessary complexity by increasing the
resolution of our simulation down to the level of quarks? Why not change the fundamentals of
radioactive decay so that particles smaller than atoms- which we believed for a long time were
the building blocks of all existence- didn’t need up quarks and down quarks to operate? It
seems like adding even smaller fundamental particles is simply adding complexity,
and in a simulation this means added computational power that seems to be completely unnecessary.
Unless our simulators exist in a universe with unlimited energy, it's extremely dubious that
they would run simulations requiring so much energy input to power the massive
amounts of computation needed to simulate every single quark in our fake universe.
Then there's the consideration of the massive amounts of waste heat generated
by the supercomputers crunching such incredible amounts of numbers to make our universe work.
It's famously said that in order to be able to simulate the entire
universe- every single particle within it- you would need a computer as big,
or bigger than the universe, which also seems to indicate that simulation theory
is dead on arrival. Yet modern video games offer clues to getting around this huge problem.
When you play a video game, your computer only animates the part of the world you are currently
looking at. After all, there's no sense in wasting the computing power to animate
whatever is going on behind you. Instead, those details are stripped down to the most
bare amounts of information needed to keep tabs on the parts of the world you aren't looking at,
and when you move the camera around the computer then simulates the new viewpoint
complete with graphical representations for what was just seconds ago, nothing more than data.
You've all experienced what happens when a video game isn't coded optimally to do this,
or when your computer is getting old and slow, and games you play stutter
or hang often as the computer struggles to turn data into graphical representations.
So if our universe is simulated, one way to get around having to constantly track every single
molecule, atom, and quark in existence, is to simply not load those objects until needed-
like when scientists start cracking atoms open to discover what lies inside of them. Not only
would a simulation rarely need to devote the computing power to simulate atoms or quarks,
because we are after all rarely ever interacting with them in a direct way, but it could
completely ignore these elements when they aren't necessary. Until the invention of the microscope,
our simulation would have had no need to simulate every single individual cell, bacteria, or virus,
as we were completely oblivious to their existence and had no way of detecting them.
Right now our simulation doesn't need to simulate the weather systems of every single planet in
the universe, it only needs to run localized simulations in the very, very small areas of
our own solar system we've explored, like a few dozen miles around our Mars rovers for example.
In essence, it's the classic question of does a tree falling in a forest make any noise if nobody
is around to hear it- only in this case the tree makes no noise, and doesn't even fall, because
there's no need to waste computer power simulating any of that if nobody is around to hear or see it.
Therefore, you wouldn't need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe itself,
you would only need a computer with enough computing power to simulate the very small
parts of the universe being directly observed. But there is a fundamental problem with this too,
because as our technology develops, and as humanity expands into the stars, both our
observations of, and interactions with, greater and greater parts of the universe will increase,
requiring more and more computing power to keep the simulation running smoothly.
We will interact more and more with fundamental particles too, not just in research but through
application of our technology, which will mean our simulation will need to begin
accurately simulating exponentially greater and greater amounts of data.
And one single slip-up on the computer's part could give the whole thing away.
Which leaves us with a frightening possibility- what if through our
own technological expansion and growth throughout the universe as a species,
we bring about our demise by simply crashing the program we've been running on this whole time?
Of course, our simulators could simply pause the simulation as we near this point
and install new hardware to accommodate our growth. Or they could just end it,
instantly erasing you from existence, and start over from scratch.
Perhaps then our greatest piece of evidence for why we are not living in a simulation is simply
thus: it would be the single most immoral act in history to even create such a simulation in the
first place. After all, once you have reached the technological sophistication to simulate a mind,
that mind is itself no different than a 'real', biological one- it simply runs on
silicon rather than flesh and blood. Even our allegedly real brains operate on electricity,
with our flesh and blood nothing more than the materials the hardware is made of.
Because a simulated mind is no different than a real mind, then creating a simulated being is
in effect creating a living being, who exists in your universe in the form of electrons on
silicon chips. You would simply be tricking that mind into believing it existed in a
different universe than it really does, and you would be allowing it to grow,
find a mate, breed, and create more simulated minds. Those minds would in turn also reproduce,
creating even more simulated minds, so on and so on for as long as the simulation ran.
In time you would face an inevitable choice: when do you turn the simulation off and commit
the greatest genocide in the universe's history- real or fake. You would have to turn it off too,
because eventually you would run out of materials to build the hardware your computer needs
to continuously expand its computing power in order to keep up with the exponentially
increasing amount of simulated minds, or you would run out of energy to power your
computer. Eventually even your own real universe would end, and along with it the
trillions of simulated minds you had been nurturing inside your simulated universe,
making you the greatest mass murderer in any history- simulated or real.
Then of course, there's always the chance of a stray accident shutting down your simulation,
or destroying your computer, no different than the millions of accidents that happen
every day in our universe and damage sensitive electronics. Only in your case,
that accident just wiped out billions of simulated minds- maybe even more depending
on how long you allowed the simulation to run. Once more, you have become the
greatest mass murderer in history, because you created the simulation in the first place.
Such an act is so unthinkably immoral,
that perhaps it is the greatest evidence for why our universe is in fact not simulated.
Still yearning to find a place in the world? Check out Why Is There
A Universe? Or check out this other video instead!