Is everything we know and experience, up to and including reality itself, a simulation created by an unseen and unknowable entity? The simulation hypothesis was first proposed by University of Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.
Does the simulation hypothesis offer a compelling argument? Let's find out.
If the universe is a giant computer simulation, how many bits would be required to run it?
Our computers will grow even more powerful, efficient and capable. At some point in the deep, deep future, we will build a computer so powerful that it will be able to recreate our entire universe.
If we assume that consciousness is the same as ours, any computer that gains consciousness will experience a world that is indistinguishable from ours.
You know, the Matrix.
Once our descendants build such a computer, they will inevitably create countless simulation beings, just try to count how many creatures in video games have appeared and disappeared since we first developed the technology. The number of brains in a computer will vastly outnumber the brains in the real world. We have three possibilities if this happens.
1. The descendants of intelligent beings in the universe will never be able to develop the technological ability to faithfully recreate the universe.
2. The descendants of intelligent beings in the universe will develop the technology, but they won't use the universe as a simulation.
3. The majority of conscious entities, including you, are living in a simulation.
The simulation argument is the latest in a long tradition of thinking that questions the nature of reality. Philosophers have wondered if our reality is a dream or a demon. It is the ultimate form of skepticism and is useful to remind ourselves that there are limits to the study of nature.
The simulation hypothesis is a good one. The hypothesis ends with a trilemma, one of which must be true if you accept all the assumptions in the argument.
You can say you don't know which possibility is the most likely to be correct if you throw your hands up. You can argue for one option over another. You could say that computers will never be powerful enough to faithfully mimic the universe or that advanced civilizations will always find it morally reprehensible to do so. We live in someone else's simulation of a universe and it is all inevitable.
Extra arguments are needed beyond the original simulation hypothesis if you choose one of the options. You could ask the assumptions that go into the argument.
Our expanding universe has other facts.
Simulations assume that they will overwhelm the number of organic brains. If there are no differences between the experiences of simulation and organic consciousness, you can calculate the odds of living in a simulation. There could be 99 billion simulation conscious beings for every billion organic ones in the future. There is a 99% chance that you are among the simulations.
A major flaw in Bostrom's accounting was discovered by Brian Eggleston, an undergraduate systems analysis student. The only known species to build computers in the first place is our descendants. We can point to those computers and say we are not in them, because we know that our descendants will build such computers.
No matter how many conscious entities our descendants make, we cannot use them to calculate the odds that we are in a simulation. Their ability to create simulation universes does not tell us anything about whether we are in a simulation or not. We can not use future numbers to calculate odds. We don't have a trilemma if we can't calculate the odds.
We can't look at our past because either humans living in a nonsimulated, real universe or aliens who enjoy making humans exist. We don't have a way to calculate the number of simulations in existence because we don't have any evidence that either is true.
Do we live in a simulation? The simulation hypothesis doesn't provide a compelling argument that we might. You can enjoy your life again.
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The author of How to Die in Space is Paul M. Sutter, who is an astronomer and host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio.
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