If reality wasn’t real, how long would it take for you to realize that reality?
That’s the question at the heart of the problem at the top of today’s video,
and the answer requires a major existential rethink. Forget everything you thought you knew,
all the memories you thought you had, and even all the knowledge you thought you held about
simulation theory itself… because we could yet be many, many planes away from the truth.
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question;
is modern life simulated by an ancient civilization?
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It doesn’t always happen that a genuine scientific, cosmological theory blends
in so well with science fiction thought experiments and manages to retain its
own credibility… but that’s exactly what has happened with the Simulation Hypothesis. And,
while it was famously put forward, in its modern guise, by the Swedish thinker Nick Bostrom… it’s
a dramatic line of enquiry that actually dates back centuries. To René Descartes,
in particular, who said it was perhaps impossible to “clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep”.
Descartes was famously interested in getting to the bottom of what is (and was) real… laying the
groundwork for simulation theory, one of the most contemporary approaches to that question.
Nick Bostrom took up the mantle in 2003, upon the release of his paper titled;
“Are You Living in a Simulation?”, published in the journal “Philosophical Quarterly”. In
the years and decades since then, the idea has gathered yet more high profile backers,
not least Elon Musk - who said on the Joe Rogan Experience that he felt it was
“most likely” that there are “many, many simulations” - and Neil deGrasse Tyson - who
has suggested the odds that we’re living in a sim should be at least fifty-fifty.
Bostrom’s original argument rests largely on the assumption that one of three propositions must
be true. Either, 1) humankind will most likely go extinct before reaching a posthuman level,
or 2) that any possible posthuman civilization is also unlikely to build and run ancestor sims, as
though that unlikelihood in itself were a shared characteristic, or 3) we are almost certainly
living in a simulation, right now. In this way, we either die out before it’s possible to make a sim,
and the same goes for every other group; OR the making of a sim just isn’t something that
advanced groups do; OR it is something that they do, and therefore it’s extremely probable that
we’re in one. With that third one, the statistical probability is really the key… because if ancestor
sims are possible at all in this reality, then the chances that we will be the first
to achieve them are so slim they’re almost zero. And therefore, the chances that we are simply one
of a potentially infinite number contained within one are so high, they’re almost one.
But, is an ancestor sim even possible, from the outset? Bostrom argues that yes, it is.
As preamble for his main theory, he describes how the computing power of advanced groups could far,
far outstrip our own. By crunching the numbers for a hypothetical, Matrioshka Brain-style,
planet-sized supercomputer, and by estimating the computing requirements of the human mind…
Bostrom arrives at the staggering conclusion that the potential of a future computer could make it
possible “to simulate the entire mental history of humankind… by using less than
one millionth of its processing power for one second”. If there’s anything to make you feel
small and insignificant, then it’s probably that. Bostrom suggests that not only everything you are,
but everything that everyone is (and ever has been) collectively… might
also be achievable for a computer in only slightly more than the blink of an eye.
And so, with all of this in mind, where could (or would) an ancient civilization come into the
equation? Naturally, we aren’t here considering ancient civilizations within recorded history,
or even of Earth. If Earth, as we know it, really were a sim,
then whoever’s created it would clearly not exist on it. While to us it’s home,
planet Earth to them is more like an open world video game. The ancient Egyptians, Sumerians,
the early humans of the Stone Age… they’re all simply earlier stages of that game, just as we
today are only the latest installment. Again, it’s enough to make you feel very, very small.
The ancient civilization sim-runners, however, are bigger than all of that,
and all of us… because they are the ones that are busily rendering our reality. As
though in the background, although not in the sense that we could ever hope to uncover them,
because they literally exist beyond what’s physically possible (from our point of view)
and are incomprehensible to us. Although, in fact, some interpretations of simulation theory
do link this fundamental unknowability back up into our own existence… by, for example,
suggesting that microscopic phenomena wouldn’t need to be consistently there, so long as nothing
is appreciably absent to those living within the sim - i.e., us. Bostrom himself highlights this,
writing that our hypothetical sim-runners need only to make it so that simulated humans
“interacting in normal human ways… don’t notice any irregularities”. A similar argument could
be made as to why the wider universe is always so inevitably distorted from our position, too;
we know the other stars and planets are there, but we can’t know them in detail, because they’ve
never been created in detail, because they’ve never been that important to the sim we’re in.
It follows, then, that the sim-runners would need a vast and specific understanding of some
seemingly very complex ideas; like what makes a universe… what shapes
life experience… and what are the limits to any one being’s knowledge. For this reason,
it could well be that they are ancient, within their own level of reality. They must certainly
have had some kind of in-depth experience, in order to have even the imagination to
conceive all of this - all of our own lives - into being. Let alone the supreme technical
knowhow to actually make it happen. Indeed, that assumption is somewhat wrapped up in their
“posthuman” moniker. But, then again, another interpretation could be that, on their level,
the universe as we know it is actually quite a basic design… in which case, they perhaps need
not be quite so ancient, after all. That part of today’s question remains especially up for debate.
To finish, though, Bostrom leads us to yet another paradigm shifting realization, toward the end of
his paper, suggesting that “it may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman”,
as well. He goes on to describe such developments - effective simmed sims - as having to play
themselves out on “virtual machines”. That is, as though on an unreal computer,
from the point of view of the base reality. But, from there, with Bostrom also revealing
that “virtual machines can be stacked”, there’s really no end to how many times this same process
could be repeated over and over and over again. Our own potentially ancient simulators could then
have their own potentially ancient simulators, who then have their own, and so on. Quite where
that hypothetical chain would end, quite when we’d reach the absolute, fundamental, bottom,
base reality is intrinsically unknown. Although Bostrom argues that if we ourselves ever develop
simulated realities, then we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation,
too. Again, the chances of us being the first to achieve it are just so incredibly farfetched.
So, what’s your verdict? Is this a sim? Are our sim-runners a sim? Are their
simulators a simulated invention, too? If the simulation hypothesis were ever
proven to be irrefutably correct, how far would you go back before you were
satisfied that you’d landed at the base camp for literally everything?
For now, and even if this world is actually only a steady stream of seriously sophisticated code,
there’s a lot of life to live within it. Ancestor program or not,
there are experiences everywhere to be had, to enjoy, and to remember. That’s how modern life
might be simulated by an ancient civilization, but it’s still ours alone to make the very most of.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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