Humans Could Be Living In A Simulated Universe Beyond Perception
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3fX2Fvf)
We are always limited by the power of computing, but as computers
get bigger and faster, so does the detail within our synthetic
universes.
But let's imagine a time in the future, a time when computers are
powerful enough to fully simulate a human brain, with its vast array
of interconnected neurons.
These neurons obey the laws of physics, and fire as their chemical
balances change. Thoughts would echo around this synthetic brain,
with electrical signals coursing backwards and forwards.
Not being a philosopher, I will ignore the (seemingly endless)
debates about free will and consciousness, but if you take a purely
mechanical view of the human brain, the synthetic brain will be as
"alive" as the organic brain that made it.
Fed with the stimulus from a synthetic body interacting with
a synthetic universe, it will experience pain and fear, happiness
and love, even boredom and drowsiness.
There are, in fact, some who believe we will all be reborn
in a glorious future, where computers are powerful enough to
recreate everyone who has ever lived, and then sustain them for
eternity.
While this vision of heaven is touted as the Final Anthropic
Principle, some have more bluntly labelled it the "Completely
Ridiculous Anthropic Principle," or C.R.A.P.
But we may not have to wait until the distant future!
To quote the late, great Douglas Adams, "There is another theory
which states that this has already happened."
Not that someone on Earth, or even within our universe, has created
a truly synthetic universe, complete with beings that are clueless to
the fact they are nothing but part of a computer experiment.
No, the startling realization is that we-our very existence, every
thing we have seen, have experienced, or will ever experience-might
be nothing but the chugging of bits in an unimaginable
supercomputer.
As I type this on a laptop, and stare out the train window at the
station rolling past, at the people, the trees, the dirt on the
ground, surely I would know if I was part of a computer program?
But then again, my brain is simply processing inputs, and if the
simulated inputs fed into my simulated brain are good enough, how
would I know?
It is important to remember that this picture is different to the
"Brain-in-a-vat" presented in the Matrix movies. There, an organic
brain is fed information, recreating the synthetic world in which the
characters find themselves.
Instead, our picture is that there is no organic brain. We are part
of the matrix itself.
So, how can we know if we are part of a computer simulation?
It is important to remember our earthly computers are limited in the
way they can represent real numbers, holding only a finite number
of digits for typical calculations.
What this means is that my simulated universes are quantized,
in some sense, with the limited resolution imprinted in the details
of the structure that is produced.
If we are living in a computer simulation, then maybe such resolution
effects are apparent to us. Our world doesn't look like the Minecraft
universe, and so we expect the resolution scale to be smaller than
the scale of individual atoms, rather than large, cubed blocks the
size of footballs.
Just last month, researchers from the University of Bonn, Germany,
suggested we can detect such "chunkiness" of the small scale by
looking how high-energy particles, known as cosmic rays, traverse
huge distances in the universe. As these rays bounce through this
space, their energy properties get modified, and by looking at what
arrives on Earth, we can work out the size of the chunks.
But there are problems with this idea.
Firstly, we are working under the assumption that the computer we
live in operates like an everyday computer. But these everyday
computers are governed by the laws of physics of the synthetic
universe in which we reside.
The unimaginably powerful computer that hosts our universe may
operate in ways we cannot even think about.
Another problem is that those trying to understand the nature of the
very small have already proposed a quantized backdrop of space and
time in which we live.
Is the existence of such a space-time simply a property of a real
universe, or the tell-tale sign of a synthetic one? How can we ever
tell them apart? Do we even want to?
One way of potentially detecting the real nature of the universe
is to search for the extraordinary-or, in the words of my children,
who play video games, "glitches"-where the program doesn't do
as expected.
Perhaps some of the unexplained things we cannot yet explain are
simply glitches in the program (although I am a fan of illusionist
Derren Brown and think the human mind can be easily tricked).
The other alternative is more drastic.
When my synthetic universes are running, they can abruptly come
to a halt for a variety of reasons, such as disk-space filling up,
errors in the memory, or something as simple as the cleaner
unplugging the computer to vacuum the floor.
If my synthetic universe is running when the power goes out,
it simply ceases to exist.
I do hope the cleaners of our potential-hyperdimensional-universe
-simulating overlords are more careful.
