Most scientists who discuss the idea that we could be living within a simulation simply focus on whether it is possible, and whether it is likely.
Possible: well, if computer power keeps growing, one day there will be a computer powerful enough to run such a simulation. And if we can do it (whether we are currently in a simulation of not), then other cultures, somewhere, sometime, can as well.
Likely: Once you have a computer powerful enough to run a simulation indistinguishable from our reality, do you run such a simulation, just once, and only on one computer? No, of course not. So we end up with one reality and many simulations that appear the same. What are the odds we are experiencing reality?
The above is what you typically read about, in a nutshell, but I am going to look much deeper into it.
Powerful Enough: When video games first game out where they the best video games possible? No – but they as soon as we could make them good enough to play, we did. Likewise the moment we have the ability to create a simulation, we will. And we already have. For example, The Sims. Or better still, Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. That software has had a few different versions over the years, but flights taken within the software would easily be in the millions – and each flight in analogous to one running of the simulation we are living in.
For a simulation of the sort we might be in, likewise the moment we are capable of achieving it, it will happen. Once we have the minimum viable hardware and software to pull it off. Now, for all we know, the first version looked like Minecraft. And us characters within it, knew that as our reality.
But to be able to be advanced enough in a simulation to potentially be able to create the same type of simulation, we need a level of sophistication like we see around us. We need to be able to put one trillion transistors on a silicon chip. But that doesn’t mean the simulation is perfect, it might have limits because the hardware isn’t good enough to make it perfect.
Possibly most of the simulations ever run happened on less the perfect hardware, because our overlords tired of such things before the perfect hardware existed. Which means we are most likely in one of the less than perfect simulations.
Indistinguishable: We can’t compare our simulation with the reality it is simulating, because all we know is all we can see. There are plenty of sounds and sights that we cannot sense as humans, and only know about them thanks to science. There could be things around us that we cannot conceive of, and therefore have not looked for them with science. So if something is missing, we might not notice that it is. It could be something that puzzles us, like quantum mechanics.
It Might Have Limits: When you play a first person shooter, or a racing car game, things happen off screen. Cars half a lap away are still racing, but in code only. There is no need to render them graphically unless someone wants to see them.
We may have, with science, reached the limits of the simulation, when we look at quantum particles. These particles exists in a theoretical state, and we only find out their actual state when we look at them – like Schrödinger’s cat. They know when they are being observed, and until then they are just coded possibilities.
Maybe when our simulator masters get a more powerful computer, quantum particles won’t act so mysteriously.
That’s enough on the hardware side of things…
The Software
I am going to presume that there are no aliens playing humans in our game. But that would make sense also…
Punctuated Equilibrium: this is a theory that says species evolve very slowly in general, but when a rare geological event occurs, like a volcanic eruption, then evolution has growth spurts. Without times of great change, things move too slowly. So I expect our creators gave us a world like their own that has dramatic upheavals often enough to keep us evolving quickly.
Even so, maybe we remained as apes too long in too many simulations. So what else can we do to spice things up. How about disruptor characters & religion?
Disruptor Characters: Seeded throughout history are people characters who have some special spark to keep us evolving (physically and as a society). That would be the caveman who invented fire, the inventor of the wheel, the person who decided to build pyramids, or people like Da Vinci and Einstein.
The Moon: I can’t think of anything more capable of starting religious ideas than a solar eclipse. Our moon, amazingly, is 400x smaller than the Sun, and the Sun is 400x further away. Perfect for eclipses. And seems enough like something designed that people have suggested the Moon is artificial.
Experiencing the Simulation
I am experiencing the simulation. So are you. Or are we just characters who think they are experiencing it? This is a deep and confusing question.
Back to video games… people who play video games, they operate a character, but they don’t live in the game itself (see the movie Tron to understand the difference in a fun way).
Possibility 1a – I Am The Player: That would mean that I m the only true player, and I have thoughts and feelings that exist beyond my character. When I die, I stop playing the game and continue my “real world” existence outside of the simulation.
I think this could mean only one player in the whole simulation. Or maybe two if it is some kind of love thing. But if you had two many, who acted and thought differently to all the computer characters, they would collectively realise they are in a game.
Possibility 1b – We Are The Player: Or maybe we the players get so engrossed in this game that we forget about the real world (see the Matrix movies), and we don’t notice that we are different to all the computer-generated characters.
Possibility 2 – Some of Us Are AI Characters: There are no players, and the simulation is meant to be observed through the eyes of the characters presented to us. Think of it like a TV show, or a movie. When you see a WW2 movie, in the movie there are millions of characters doing their war thing, but we experience the war through just one or a few characters.
In the simulation, the AI characters are the whole point, and the other characters are just there, out of necessity to simulate a reality. Maybe some of the AI characters are disruptors, or maybe we all are, potentially. When I say we, I presume that only we can understand what I am writing about. That level of understanding would be wasted on non-AI characters.
Possibility 3 – None of Us Are Special: Or we all could just be the same times of characters, and our overlords can see the experiences of any of us at will. That would be the most taxing scenario, for hardware and software.
So, we could be someone playing a car racing game, or we could be playing multiplayer against a friend, or we could be someone watching one computer driver in the car race, or we could be watching the race through the eyes of any of the computer drivers at will…
Magic
We are already purely in speculation, and now you are going to have to trust my lived experience to speculate deeper…
I believe magic is real, even though is a very weak force (possibly it is a force, like gravity) and mostly useless.
Magic 1 – Telepathy: The type of magic where you can manipulate the world around you, I think is ultimately just one specific type. The ability to influence the decisions of others. You cannot make someone do something they wouldn’t possibly do anyway – like getting me to vote for Trump – but you can nudge someone who is making a decision between this or that.
One real world example which has me believing in such nonsense… as an experiment, on the train to work, at a roughly the time I guessed she would dress (I have never been to her home, don’t know her outside of work, and at work we rarely have anything to do with each other), I concentrated my thoughts on her decisions of what to wear that day. From observation I knew she has a lot of outfits, and I choose chequered pants that I only recalled her wearing twice over a year or more.
That morning she rocked up wearing those pants. The next week I tried again and failed, and I never tried again. One of the problems with magic, and if you study chaos magic you will learn this – is that if you think it is going to work, it won’t. And that is one reason why it is so difficult. It is like trying not to think about something…
Magic 2 – Prescience: While I am sure that telepathy is real, I am even more convinced of being able to see into the future. Specifically, I recognise people from my future. Sometimes they are lovers or wives, sometimes just good friends. It is rare, only happens every few years. In the last 20 years I have experienced it twice with friends, and four times romantically. My second wife the night we met I went home to my flatmate and declared I was marrying her. I have never made such a declaration before or since (we divorced after 13 years).
(Love at first sight, while put down to hormones by scientists, may be prescient for a few, and that is why we consider the ideal love to be magical and not mechanical)
Without describing all of my similar experiences, all I can say is that it fits the ideas that follow, which only came to me this week…
Relational Database: I call it a force called Care. The idea that caring about someone else has influence. A weak influence, and maybe too low to measure, but influence regardless.
For example, everyone knows that sports teams perform better at home than away. Usually cited are familiarity with the field, or having more fans cheering for you. In my experience, as a rugby player, you don’t really hear the crowds except for odd moments when you relax. And knowing the field doesn’t help at all. But what about if more people watching cared about you winning…
I think that how much we care about one another is stored in a database of relationships, and the more we care about someone, the stronger the force of care will be between you. A strong level of care can generate telepathy of some sorts between you.
This above is a software explanation for telepathy – a telepathy that has no scientific explanation in our perceived world.
Is This Live or a Replay?
Random? An age old question is whether the future is pre-determined, or whether we have free will. If we live in a simulation, we can seed the game differently at the start to create different outcomes. And we only know the outcome by running the simulation. But if we seed it the same, and run it, the outcome will always be the same. Unless we add randomisation during the game – randomisation that comes from outside of the simulation. I’ve been playing Randonauts lately that attempts to use eternal randomisation (from a quantum computer) to try and “break the matrix”.
All Simulations are Unique: Now, you would presume that there is no point running the same simulation, seeded the same, without external randomisation, repeatedly. You’d just get the same outcome, there is no point. So the simulation we are experiencing will be unique.
Live or Replay? If the simulations have a purpose beyond entertainment, they are probably recorded for future reference. So are we watching this simulation live as it is is generated, or are we being rerun? Or could it be a mix of both? See below…
What Am I Experiencing?
Non-AI characters do not experience, they are just pawns who do. They will not be asking existentialist questions. They will be voting for Trump 😉
AI-characters will experience, as it is a necessity for them to make the game wok, and for people and society to evolve.
Disruptor characters will definitely have a different experience again. They may feel different or superior to everyone else, they may feel like an outsider. As someone with Asperger’s, I know this feeling, and I have wondered if all disruptor characters are autistic. And we have more now because the simulation is nearing the end, reaching a crescendo…
Future Feedback
This is where it gets weird!
Some characters have magical powers – prescience and telepathy. Now for prescience to work, the future must already exist. If we are experiencing a replay, then nothing can change in the future, and prescience is pointless. If we are running this live as it is being generated, then the future hasn’t been calculated yet, so there is nothing to see.
A mix of both: There is a way to run the same simulation twice, and getting a different outcome, without using randomisation.
We run the last simulation again, seeded in the exact same way. However certain characters who have magic, can recognise people from their future, by referencing the last simulation. And this recognition, which could not happen in the original running because that was the first one, changes how things play out. Maybe a lot, maybe a little, hard to tell. Feedback from the future.
So imagine I come across a biography of my entire life, written years after my death. Yet I discover it during my lifetime, it has come to me via time travel somehow. By reading it, my predetermined life will change somehow, because it has thrown something new into the mix that shouldn’t be there, and it is human nature to not be happy with what they have got, or know they will get. See the TV show Devs.
My best guess is that I am an AI character. Not the only one in the simulation, but most people are not AI.
I may be a disruptor (you could argue that writing this makes me one), it is hard to tell.
Magic is real, not just from my lived experience, but because it fits a model that could be used in simulations.
Because magic exists in this simulation, it isn’t the first one seeded this way – because I can reference the future of a previous iteration.
And it is running in real time, which means the future is not known and I get to decide it.
Which makes me as alive as a series of quantum bits can be.
UPDATED IDEA
There are some humans out there, living in a world just like ours. They have decided they must be living in a simulation, so once they had enough computer power they made simulations of their own world, to try an understand how their own simulation works. We are in one of those.
After proving they could simulate their world, they decided to use the simulations to solve mysteries of their own world. One of those mysteries is prescience – some of their people could see glimpses of the future.
To simulate prescience, they ran a simulation once as a base version. Then they ran it again and again, using the same seeding, and tweaking how much people could sense the future. Every time the run the simulation, they tweaked how much of the future could be seen, and by how many people.
Sometimes the tweaked running of the simulation became the base for more runnings, so we end up with people being prescient about a future, and that future was itself made different due to prescience as well.
Consider that we could be a simulation within a simulation, and we are being run to see how prescience affects things. It has been granted to 1% of the population, and the future is only seen in terms of people and places that have a significant impact on that person’s future.
Or, it is like being given a book at birth that lists the names of people and places that will be important to you one day, and they will all be so, unless you change your world due to foreknowing about one of them, which could mean the others don’t happen.