Is The Universe A Simulation?

In 1970, a British mathematician named John Conway created a project known as the Game of Life. Even though it's a game, it isn't one that you necessarily play. The Game of Life is a zero-player game, which doesn't make much sense when you hear it. The way it works is you put in a set of initial conditions and then observe. That's it! Once you put the initial conditions in, the game runs itself. Other than the small set of rules that the simulation follows, it runs on almost nothing. Some patterns only run for a few generations before they die out, while others seemingly go on forever.

This got me thinking: if a simulation as small as this, with very little variables, can result in something huge, what if we scale this up to, say, the size of a universe? A simulation that's more than just dots on a screen, but a simulation with galaxies, planets, and life. More importantly, if that is possible, how do we know that we aren't living in one of those simulations right there?

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At first, the argument for our universe being a simulation just sounds like complete nonsense. However, when you actually take a look into it, it seems to become more and more plausible. How do you observe things? Well, you see them, or smell them, or observe them with any of your senses. This is your subjective reality — a reality based on the subject, you. You are alone in your own head. Everything that you observe or interact with enters your journey with neurons firing in your brain in a certain way to create your view of the world.

With this being said, can you prove that there is an objective reality? That is, a reality that exists independently of our knowledge of it? Sort of an overarching reality that encompasses all of our subjective realities. It exists without our observation of it. That sounds kind of confusing, though. You can't know that an objective reality exists without someone or something to observe it. For example, if I went outside and stated that it was freezing, and you went outside and stated that it was scorching hot, that is where our subjective realities come into play.

From this, it seems that two different minds, two different people, can observe a single object in multiple ways. In an objective reality, it would just be either freezing or just scorching, regardless of either one of our observations. In an objective reality, in order to prove something exists, you would have to observe it without observing, which is an obvious contradiction. This kind of begs the question: can you prove that anything outside of your own mind is actually real?

Babies aren't exactly the smartest things in the world, but they do give us good insight into how we learn, how our minds develop, and how we become aware of the world around us. If you look outside your window, you might see a tree or another house, or maybe your car in the driveway. But you don't need to physically look out there to know that those things exist. This is known as object permanence — the knowledge that objects exist even when we aren't perceiving them in any way.

However, we aren't born with the skill; it's something that is developed over time. I'm sure you've seen or even played peekaboo with a baby before. When you cover your face, babies less than about a year old will believe that you disappeared into thin air. But when you take your hands away, you're back, back into their reality. The knowledge that things exist even when you can't observe them isn't learned until about one and a half to two years into life. But is that actually true?

This goes back to your subjective reality. Sure, after a while, you might learn that some things seem to exist when we aren't observing them. But how can you be certain? At the end of the day, it is just your subjective reality. It's due to your consciousness that you can even observe anything.

Take this for example: when you've looked at your computer, or phone, or television, or whatever device you're watching this on, you know that all of those things are composed of atoms, but you can't really see them, can you? It's not until we take a device such as a microscope to observe them that we can actually see these atoms that make up everything. We can't see them until they're observed closely.

So, if this is true, this can make simulating a universe a million times easier. Simulating an entire universe with billions of galaxies over billions of light-years would take up a lot of computing power and would really just be a waste. All the posthuman species would have to do is just simulate the consciousness of its subjects.

Or maybe even subject? Is there any way to prove that anyone you talk to on a daily basis isn't just another function of code in the simulation? All the simulation has to do is just trick you into believing the world around you is real. When you play video games, you'll notice that things don't render completely when you aren't looking at them. It's a waste of power and energy. Since video games are basically simulations of our own, why wouldn't the simulated universe follow a similar strategy?

It's a very arrogant statement coming from humans, but hear me out. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It's a pretty popular psychological question, and it fits really well here. In a simulated universe, if no one is around or conscious of that even taking place, there's no reason for it to make a sound or for the tree to even fall in the first place.

If we stumbled upon that tree later on, it will just be lying on the ground to give the illusion that it fell. If we aren't observing galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field, what's the point of them existing in the simulation at all? It can be possible that just bits and pieces of what we call the universe exist and are observed at a single time.

If we look back at where technology was a hundred years ago and compare it to now, you can see an obvious difference. If technology continues to advance at any rate that's greater than zero, then it is possible that in the future, whether it be 100 or 1 million years, we will eventually have technology with near unlimited computing power. But all I keep talking about is power and energy. How would a civilization even get this kind of power?

Remember those creepy Russian dolls that, when you open them up, there's another doll inside and then another, and another? There's a concept that's basically that, but on a stellar scale. Take our Sun, for example. It's really big and really hot, and it radiates a ton of energy. If we could somehow harness all of that energy, we could use it to simulate millions of universes simultaneously.

But how are we supposed to gather all that energy? Using a little something called matryoshka brains. If an advanced civilization was able to build a mega structure and surround the Sun in multiple layers, just like the dolls, they would have all of the Sun's energy at their disposal. A civilization capable of this could most likely do this with multiple stars and thus will be able to simulate as many universes as they'd like.

We can run simulations on our own computers that project our universe on a large scale. The Illustrious Project does this very well. Just like the Game of Life, the project is much like a zero-player game. Scientists who created the project gave it certain properties that match our universe near the beginning and then just let it run. It's able to project our universe on a large scale very accurately, actually. And that's just with the computing power we have today.

In the future, simulations like these will get more and more accurate until eventually, it may even be realistic. However, it cannot be perfect. When we observe atoms and attempt to view electrons or other particles, we cannot know both the position and momentum of these particles with a hundred percent certainty. This is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. There's a limit to what we can know about the mass, energy, position, and time of a particle, meaning that in any simulation, there is no way to accurately represent everything exactly as it was.

You can never truly have a perfect simulation of reality. It will always be slightly slower than the actual reality itself, even with an infinite amount of computational power at your disposal. In order to combat this, limits have to be put in place; tricks and sleight of hand have to be used. A good example is this: if you have an old computer and try to run the newest games on it with 20 Google Chrome tabs open while also listening to music, you'll see an obvious decline in your computer's performance.

The old computer doesn't have the computing power necessary to handle all of that strain, so it slows down. Now think of black holes: when you're around that much matter in one place, that much information in one spot, time literally slows down. It's as if whoever created the simulation slowed down parts of the simulation to keep the energy required low.

Could this be an explanation for the speed of light? Could this be the speed of computation of whatever simulation we may be in? There's no way to tell, and all of this is theoretical and, to be honest, insane. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't think about it. It could actually help answer some of the most sought-out questions we ask.

For example, the Fermi paradox. When we look out into the universe, we don't see any other signs of life. Are we really alone? Are we just a glitch in the simulation, or are we just not looking hard enough?

Take the creatures that exist at the bottom of our oceans. Are they aware that we humans even exist? Are they aware of anything outside of their immediate vicinity? Do they know that they're living on a big rock floating around a hot ball of gas orbiting some big black hole of death in the center of the galaxy that sucks anything and everything in? Probably not.

What if we're just like those creatures? But the furthest that we can observe or are aware of is what we call the observable universe. Perhaps the universe cannot exist without conscious minds to observe it. The idea of simulated universes could also explain the multiverse theory. The idea of a multiverse is just that: multiple universes, or perhaps infinite universes.

In many situations, when there's a high chance of someone getting killed or someone has a near-death experience, they are reported to have said that their life flashed before their eyes. Their most special moments and memories from their life all come rushing back to them in an instant. Researchers from Hadassah University in Jerusalem analyzed multiple cases of people who experienced these near-death experiences.

In almost all of these cases, those being interviewed stated that they had lost all sense of time. One of them wrote, "There is not a linear progression; there is a lack of time limits. It was like being there for centuries; it happened all at once." Another respondent stated, "I could individually go into each person and feel the pain that they had in their life. I was allowed to see that part of them and feel for myself what they felt."

When people experience these things, it was as if they were living another life. They experienced things they never felt before. It was as if they stepped foot into an alternate reality. The idea of time didn't exist for a short while, and they were able to analyze things that no other living person could do.

When you're talking with a friend and have that weird déjà vu feeling that you've had the same conversation before or that you've experienced exactly what they're feeling without actually having been through it, perhaps you, in another universe or another simulation, actually had that same thing happen to you.

The illusion of free will allows us to live our lives in any way we see fit, but what if every single decision that you've ever made has been pre-programmed into the simulation that we could exist in? Every decision you make branches you off into a parallel universe, a parallel simulation, where every choice that you have ever made has led you to this exact very moment at home on your phone watching this very video.

Current technology already greatly surpasses human performance and speed. That's why many big companies like Tesla use robots and other machines to do jobs that humans can't do as effectively. Biological neurons, those are the neurons that fire in your brain every second of the day, operate at a peak speed of about 200 Hertz, whereas modern microprocessors operate at at least 2 gigahertz—a whole 7 orders of magnitude faster.

Even with modern technology, a superintelligent AI, for example—a human mind that runs on hardware faster than the brain—could make decisions millions of times faster than current humans. It would be able to think of every outcome and pick from the best ones. However, we are not superintelligent AI. There is a limit to what the human brain can do and observe.

We have, though, made some very important discoveries that keep us asking questions. Most importantly, math. Math seems universal. There are numbers and patterns in things from the size of atoms to things the size of galaxies. Discoveries that we humans have made only in the past couple of thousand years have allowed us to ask crazy questions, like: are we living in a simulation?

If we were to put every single one of the possible billions of simulations into a hat, jumbled them around, and picked, now what are the chances that we will grab the original one—the one that made all the simulations in the first place? What are the chances that the Earth we’re living on even exists? Perhaps an advanced alien species came upon our dead planet after billions of years and found traces of our DNA, traces of our existence, and then made a simulation out of that to learn about the history of the barren wasteland of a planet they had just stumbled upon.

If that's the case, then hello! We can never know for sure. All we can do is observe and hope that our Game of Life is one that we can win.

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