“That’s the kind of evidence that would convince me as a physicist,” Gates said. “Then we go back and see what kind of signatures we find that tell us we started from non-continuous spacetime.” That evidence might come, for example, in the form of an unusual distribution of energies among the cosmic rays hitting Earth that suggests spacetime is not continuous, but made of discrete points. “If there is an underlying simulation of the universe that has the problem of finite computational resources, just as we do, then the laws of physics have to be put on a finite set of points in a finite volume,” said Zohreh Davoudi, a physicist at MIT. One idea is that the programmers might cut corners to make the simulation easier to run. Such existential-sounding hypotheses often tend to be essentially untestable, but some researchers think they could find experimental evidence that we are living in a computer game. “I actually am very interested in why so many people think it’s an interesting question.” She rated the chances that this idea turns out to be true “effectively zero.” I don’t know why this higher species would want to simulate us.” Randall admitted she did not quite understand why other scientists were even entertaining the notion that the universe is a simulation. The argument says you’d have lots of things that want to simulate us. “It’s just not based on well-defined probabilities. “Kind of like if you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”Īnd the statistical argument that most minds in the future will turn out to be artificial rather than biological is also not a given, said Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. “If you’re finding IT solutions to your problems, maybe it’s just the fad of the moment,” Tyson pointed out. Yet not everyone on the panel agreed with this reasoning. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realization that I could no longer say people like Max are crazy.” Room for skepticism “I was driven to error-correcting codes-they’re what make browsers work. “In my research I found this very strange thing,” said James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland.
SIMULATION ARGUMENT CODE
“That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”įurthermore, ideas from information theory keep showing up in physics. “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Perhaps that is not a given, but a function of the nature of the universe we are living in. For instance, the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.Īnd there are other reasons to think we might be virtual. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.”Ī popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors.
“We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. He noted the gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence, despite the fact that we share more than 98 percent of our DNA. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said. Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. Researchers pondered the controversial notion Tuesday at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History. The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of “The Matrix,” but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis. NEW YORK-If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it.