Do We Live In A Simulation?

“You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”

Remember the iconic lines? You might have already recalled the scene too. Emanating from the 1999 science fiction film “The Matrix”, this conversation between Morpheus and Neo is the beginning of the “true reality” that follows.

Have you ever felt something weird about the world around you? Like there needs to be something else beyond our perceived reality or there is a veil preventing us to experience the real reality by making us totally immersive in the current reality. As if there is someone or something else, a higher construct, maybe a creator, better say a programmer or a simulator, who decides every action of ours, and hence nothing in this reality can be determined at all?

It is at the whims of this higher being to allow us to be born, experience this life, have thoughts, feelings of love, grief, fear, and at last be dead. All which seem natural to us, are not natural at all, but a programmable code that is being executed for reasons unknown to us.

The Allegory of the Cave
The notion of our universe and reality itself being a simulation is not something new. Similar ideas can be traced back to the time of ancient Greece when the famous philosopher, Plato presented “The Allegory of the Cave” in his work “Republic”. The core theme of his allegory is that it is not possible to have true knowledge based on perception.

The central idea goes like this – consider some prisoners in a cave who have been enslaved from their birth, shackled by their legs and necks, so that they can neither move nor see what is behind them. They can only look at the front where lies a big opaque wall. Behind them, at a certain distance, is a fire lit up that casts shadows of the other people passing by or doing some activities. All through their life they can see only these shadows and listen to whatever little they can.

These shadows are the prisoner’s reality, but not an accurate description of the real world. Now, if a prisoner is freed and can stand, move and walk, he would certainly find his way out of the cave and see the light. Light, here metaphorically resembles true knowledge and the darkness inside the cave is nothing but the perceived reality.

Are We Created By Our Descendants?
A paper published in the year 2003 by Nick Bostrom, a professor at Oxford University, has been instrumental in re-igniting the concept of the Simulation Hypothesis once again. He talks about a term called “Ancestor Simulation” according to which our descendants, much more distant in the future and enormously advanced, created us in a simulation to either see how their past evolved or more probably to solve some critical issues by programming the same limits of reality.

Nick Bostrom argues that at least one of the following propositions is true:
1) humans are likely to go extinct before they reach a stage where they can simulate reality
2) any such future human civilization is capable of creating simulations but they don’t do
3) they certainly simulate realities and we are almost certainly living in a simulation.

The first proposition can be explained in terms of “The Great Filter” whose central idea lies in a belief that there are natural or artificial hindrances to all the civilizations that reach a particular stage in their evolution, further to which no evolution is possible and they cease to exist. The filter prohibits such kind of advancement that could lead civilizations to perform simulations on such a bigger scale.

The second proposition revolves around the idea that, if somehow, a civilization passes the Great Filter and believes it has all the technologies at its disposal to perform simulations and create realities, it still won’t be willing to do so.

Can reality be replicated to the fundamental level?
One reason for the advanced civilizations to not perform simulations may be due to the enormous computation power that is practically impossible to render the complete reality. The processing power of computers or supercomputers, no doubt, is astonishing, but there is a limit to that too, known popularly by Moore’s Law.

The processing power which has been doubling every two years over the past half-century has already begun showing a decline. Anything and everything literally is governed by the laws of Physics, and no matter how much technical prowess a civilization can possess, it would not be able to replicate reality to the level of the fundamental particles.

Another reason not to create simulations could also be due to an ethical impasse. Advanced civilizations, up to a certain extent, would have in place a robust law that could prevent conscious beings like us to undergo suffering. This, in turn, is counter to the notion of us inhabiting a simulated reality as our reality is composed of numerous miseries and hardships.

That brings us to the final proposition of the possibility that we do live in a simulation. If this proposition is plausible, then what would be the far-reaching implications? What would it mean to us and our experiences of the current reality? No doubt, the implications would be inclined toward a false reality, a trifling and purposeless world in which everything is a sham.

You Create Your Own Reality
While on one hand, one aspect of Quantum Mechanics stands against the simulation hypothesis, the other one – superposition favors it. According to the Observer Effect, by the very act of watching, an observer affects the observed reality. Any phenomenon is believed to exist not in a single state, but in a superposition of multiple states until unobserved. When it is being observed or measured, the wavefunction collapses, and the single state is revealed.

This is analogous to video games in which the Avatar gets to see the new encompassing realities when he travels in a particular direction by making a choice. Only the new environment gets rendered thereby saving the memory or the processing power of the computation.

If we accept the simulation hypothesis, we, in turn, would also accept the indeterministic nature of reality where anything is possible and nothing can be determined. If somehow, we can escape this simulation and come out of it, we would be certain that we had been living in one. But would we be 100% certain? According to the Infinite Regresse concept, we might still be under a bigger simulation and the act of escaping the first simulation could only be part of the simulation itself. In other words, any proof that we find could just as well be simulated in and of itself.

A Glimmer of Hope!
Whatever the truth, this puzzle continues to baffle philosophers and physicists alike. But this scenario of us living in a simulation also gives hope, to find the true reality which is far more extraordinary, deeper, and mysterious than one could ever imagine.

So, which pill are you willing to take – the Blue or the Red one?