Reality 2.1 ??
11th October 2007
About 7 years ago, I was sitting in a movie theater watching a movie called the Thirteenth Floor about some researches who had created a realistic simulated world. They were able to enter it and walk around, interacting with simulated people. Then things started going bad and they found out that they were living in someone else’s simulation.
As I watched the movie, I was thinking that it reminded me of a book that I read a long time ago. When the credits rolled, there was the name of the book that I remembered. Simulacron-3 by Daniel Galouye written in 1964 was one of the first descriptions of what we now know as virtual reality.
The Matrix was also released in 1999.
And, of course, there was the famous “holodeck” on the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation that could let the user enter ficticous Many other science fiction novels, movies, television shows and cartoons have used the theme of a simulated world so real that the inhabitants don’t realize that it is an illusion.
In 1994, Frank Tipler, an physicist published a book titled “The Physics of Immortality”. His thesis was that at the end of time, an amalgam of biological and artificial intelligences would merge into one super powerful entity who would then simulate all the worlds, ages and entities who had ever existed in the universe.
A trilogy by Frederick Pohl featured two power alien races who were battling each other for control of the universe in order to be the ones who dominated the final fusion they thought was coming at the end of time.
Ian Banks in the Algebraist suggested that a religion could be created based on the simulation idea that would essentially supercede all other religions because if we were in a simulation then there could be a super powerful being that created and controlled the universe and any particular religion could now be explained scientifically.
Last year, I was surprised to read an article in New Scientist by a philosopher named Nick Bostrom who was seriously proposing that we might be living in some sort of simulation.
He proposed that many technologically sophisticated civilizations in our universe would naturally experiment with simulated worlds. There would be millions or billions of simulations for each “real” world. If it is possible to create self-aware entities in these simulations, then the odds that any particular self-aware entity is “real” are millions or even billions to one. And that includes us.
So, the next question is what do we do about it if we take this idea seriously. Some say that we should just go on living our lives “as if real”. Others say that we should figure out what the purpose of the simulation is and then fulfill it so we don’t get deleted. And some say that we should figure out how to get out of the simulation.
That last idea raises the question of whether or not it would be possible for a simulated entity to escape to a “real” world. Of course, if the ideas in the movies and books at the beginning of this post are a guide, there might be more than one “level” of simulation. In that case, it might be realistic for a simulated entity to move up the chain of simulations.
Of course, the idea that the world is not “real” is ancient. There was the famous cave analogy of Plato who suggested that what we thought of as the real world was just shadows on a cave wall.
And the Hindus have their Maya, the “veil of illusion”.
Sociologists have their “consesus reality”
and psychologist have the “brain in a box” problem. They ponder the question of how we could know if we were just a brain in a box with inputs feeding us a simulated world. May be possible but not easy.
The solipsitic philosophy suggest that everything that I think I perceive is just an illusion that I am generating. This idea may seem simple at first but actually creates more questions than it answers.
A weak form of solipsism is certainly true in that our brains generate the illusion of a stable 3 dimensional world from fleeting sense impressions.
So I guess the answer to the question of “Are we living in a simulation” must be YES. However, the more interesting question is “Exactly what kind of simulation is it?
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Well, given that (speculatively) all realities are just super-positions of the total wave function, there is no real ‘prime’. (See twelve-tone/serial composition for a real example of this.) A virtual reality would appear to be a sub-continuum. Likewise, would one’s personal mental world. They are both based in matter, subject to quantum principles. It might follow that in each case, that world is a direct consequence of a certain super-position (or set of super-positions). If so, does this make these ‘worlds’ subsets?