Forum

Day to Day we don’t think about driving the car or eating that curry while watching our favourite film. Our senses tell us what is around us and their inputs are trying to form a picture of our universe around us. Most people will not give a second thought to questioning these inputs and thinking about their existence.

But what if our senses were correct in a way that what we are sensing is not really what it seems? If you have ever looked at a really good virtual reality simulation then you will know what I mean. Perhaps the car that you are driving is actually simulated. Perhaps that person walking out in front of you is simulated. Well, I don’t recommend finding out as if those police and that prison are simulated it won’t really matter when you are suffering a virtual life time in prison. Jumping through a wall would be great though as your life sentence could be very short. (That’s only for the wrongly convicted of course!).

So, could we be in a computer simulation? Does it really matter? Should we run at the nearest wall and hope that it is just ones and naughts and we can just go right through?

Nick Bostrom came up with the idea that we could be living in a computer simulation and wrote a paper on it. We have to remember that our technology is not at a very advanced stage. We have only really just discovered technology in comparison to the age of everything else, especially the earth. We flew 100 years ago and can only just crawl into space. In hundreds or thousands or even millions of years the leaps that we will have made would have been astounding and unimaginable to us at the moment. It’s like the difference between Stone Age man and 20th century man but multiplied by a factor of a billion or two.

With technological progress comes supremely advanced computers and with ease there will be many things that we can do that we can either dream of now or not even imagine. One of those imagined is a computer simulation of a society. The complete brain will be able to be simulated and people will walk around in the simulation with a consciousness the same as ours. It would take an enormous amount of computer power for us to simulate this, too much at the moment and it is impossible, but in the future it may only take the smallest of fractions of their processor time and space.

Nick Bostrom gave three propositions, one of them or more has to be true-

Almost all civilisations at our level of technology become extinct eventually before becoming technologically mature.

There is a very small fraction of superior technologically advanced civilisations that can be bothered to simulate a civilisation.

We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

If the first proposition is false then civilisations will arrive at the point where they can simulate other civilisations. The universe is so big that this is likely to happen. If the first two propositions are false then we are almost definitely living in a computer simulation.

Proposition one could be realised when we look at ourselves and all the destruction and mayhem and weapons we have produced. We could have very easily wiped ourselves out with nuclear weapons, which when you say it like this sounds like a really stupid thing to do but I’m sure they had good reasons at the time to build enough to flatten the Galaxy (well almost), I can’t think what though.

It would probably be some sort of technological creation that would immediately destroy or make non-existent the universe. Producing a super massive black hole could do it, or the computers may work out the answer to the universe life and everything and because there’s nothing else to find out then that is the end.

Would they be interested in creating a new universe inside one of their computers? Well, in a way and in a very small scale we do it all the time when we create games. one that comes to mind is spore. Spore takes you from the very first stages of life to a spaceborne society. It’s not really a serious simulation but it gives you an idea of what can be done.

If we are creating computer simulations and we are a computer simulation then perhaps we could be a simulation of a simulation or even a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. That is very humbling and doesn’t give us much street cred.

Could we ever find out if we are in a simulation? Does it really matter? Well, I think that we would only find out that we were a computer simulation if the people that were simulating us allowed us to find out. Otherwise we would go on living our lives with no knowledge at all and with no way of finding out.

Of course, if we started making our own simulations then we would know that we could be a simulation.