Creative maladjustment. Satyagraha

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SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS

To be clear - I don’t claim that the simulation hypothesis is true - in fact, my gut feel is that it isn’t. But there are things out there that DO point in that direction.

The simulation hypothesis is “unfalsifiable” - we can never prove that we AREN’T being simulated because the simulation can be arbitrarily good - and any flaws in it would simply look like the kinds of quirky things that happen in quantum physics all the time. Proving it’s true is incredibly difficult - because, again, no matter how weird and quirky things get (and we know that they do!) - this can all be attributed to “how the universe works” - and we can put together elaborate theories to explain those quirks.

Let me point out a couple of simple examples:

I happen to have been a video game and simulation programmer for most of my career - so if a universe simulator were to be written - I’m the kind of guy who’d be writing it…and the kinds of short-cuts that I’d take are the kinds of things we should be looking out for.

If I were designing a “universe simulator” - I’d want to distribute the workload across many computers. I’d probably do something like Linden Labs did with their “Second Life” simulation - which is to assign one computer to every such-and-such volume of space. Perhaps I’ll have one computer for every cubic parsec of space. There would be an ungodly number of these computers - but hey - I live in a universe one level up from ours - the laws of physics are probably different there - so maybe I can build a very large number of computers very cheaply.

Now - when something happens inside one of those cubic parsecs that impacts events in one of the neighboring cubic parsec - I’ll need those two computers to exchange information about the event. So if a star explodes in one parsec-cube - then all of the surrounding parsec-cubes will need to be told that there is a transfer of light, gamma rays, etc.

Fine so far…but hold on a moment - how many computers have to get that information? Well, in theory, ALL of them do - a world that’s a thousand parsecs away would need to obtain light from the supernova…so I might have to share that information across a few BILLION computers!

Argh…that’s a real pain in the butt to do.

Ooohhhh! I know - why don’t I make the speed of light be REALLY slow - and have it be “The Cosmic Speed Limit” - and not allow anything - not even information - to travel faster than that!

Now, the computer in which the star explodes only has to tell it’s immediate neighbors - and over the course of a few years, they can tell their neighbors - and so forth.

Limiting the speed of light drastically reduces “latency requirements” and makes my simulation MUCH easier to put together.

So … we could argue that the extremely weird fact that there is a cosmic speed limit is some sort of a hint that maybe we’re in a simulation!

In case you think that’s unlikely - I once worked for a company that made a multiplayer online game (World of Tanks) - which (just like Linden Labs) assigned one server computer to every square kilometer of the gaming area (it may have been more than 1km - I forget). The servers updated their game world 60 times per second - and communicated back and forth between themselves at the end of each update cycle.

So when you fired a gun or launched a missile, it could not possibly travel faster than 1 kilometer per 16 milliseconds. That conveniently meant that every server computer only had to pass on information to its immediate neighbors in each update cycle - and if a missile needed to travel more than a couple of kilometers - then it would take 16 milliseconds to cross each kilometer.

In effect, that game had a “speed of light” limitation of 60 kilometers per second.

Would the Albert Einstein of that simulated game world think:

“Oh wow! There is this weird cosmic speed limit - isn’t physics strange!?!”

… or would he just assume:

“There is a weird cosmic speed limit - we must be living in a simulation.”?

It’s hard to say … but in our case, we’ve been happily accepting the finite speed of light as a “Law of physics” for about 100 years now … and in all that time, we’ve never once thought that this “proves” the simulation hypothesis.

Then, we have the expansion of space. This is amazingly useful to our hypothetical hyper-programmer. Because space slowly expands, we cannot ever see things beyond about 42 billion lightyears. So between that and the finite speed of light, we have a clever way to pretend to simulate an infinite, unbounded universe with only a finite number of computers.

Many video games have a very hard time covering up what happens at the edges of their game world.

Then, there is “The Big Bang” - which is also very useful as a starting point for the simulation. Starting it with a zero sized singularity - and having that create both space and time - provides all sorts of conveniences. It means that the universe didn’t have to be created in every detail in a way that would be completely invisible to observers within it. In fact, if “creationism” were true - that would be concrete proof that we were living in a simulation … but a very poorly implemented one. Starting with the Big Bang makes simulation very consistent - with no weird flaws due to inconsistent initial conditions.

Real video games often suffer from that exact problem. In one video game I worked on at Midway Games, we started the game with simulated people randomly placed in the game world. But once in a while, one of them would be randomly dropped into a location which they could never possibly have gotten into in the real world - and they’d be trapped there forever! If the inhabitants of that game were intelligent, then events like that would clearly demonstrate that they lived in a simulation.

Starting with the Big Bang prevents you from accidentally making mistakes of that kind because everything evolves consistently from an informationless initial state.

Of course the finite speed of light, the expansion of space, the Big Bang, and quantum weirdnesses, by themselves, prove nothing. Even things like quantized properties of the universe and things like the “uncertainty principle” which might be hiding “roundoff errors” can also be interpreted as a convenience for the programmers OR as “just the way the universe works”.

So we can pile up things that suggest that the universe MIGHT be simulated - but we can’t ever truly prove it … and we certainly can’t ever DISPROVE it.

This problem is a lot like “The Existence of God” … you can’t disprove it - and there isn’t (yet) any convincing evidence that proves it … so we should be at least agnostic on this topic … veering towards an atheistic (a-simulation-ist) position.

SB 

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