Probably a better way to understand it is the now-infamous example of Schrödinger’s cat, which is a cat that the physicist Erwin Schrödinger theorized would be in a box with some radioactive material and there was a 50 percent chance the cat is dead and a 50 percent chance the cat is alive. Well, there are a few different aspects, one of which is this mystery they call quantum indeterminacy, which is the idea that a particle is in one of multiple states and you don’t know that unless you observe the particle. When you say there are aspects of our world that would make more sense if they were part of a simulation, what do you mean exactly? Rizwan Virk But there is plenty of evidence that points in that direction. I think there’s a very good chance we are, in fact, living in a simulation, though we can’t say that with 100 percent confidence.
Life is a simulation how to#
They took a couple of decades of figuring out how to model physical objects using 3D models and then how to render them with limited computing power, which eventually led to this spate of shared online video games. Now, it’s a much more sophisticated video game than the games we produce, just like today World of Warcraft and Fortnite are way more sophisticated than Pac-Man or Space Invaders. The truth is that there’s much we simply don’t understand about our reality, and I think it’s more likely than not that we are in some kind of a simulated universe. There are lots of mysteries in physics that are better explained by the simulation hypothesis than by what would be a material hypothesis. Sean IllingĪre we living in a simulated universe right now? Rizwan Virk That is the basic version of the simulation hypothesis. And if he takes the red pill, he wakes up and realizes that his entire life, including his job, the building he lived in, and everything else, was part of this elaborate video game, and he wakes up in a world outside of the game. In that movie, Keanu Reeves plays the character Neo, who meets a guy names Morpheus, who is aptly named after the Greek god of dreams, and Morpheus gives him a choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill.
Life is a simulation movie#
You can think of it like a high resolution or high-fidelity video game in which we are all characters, and the best way to understand it within Western culture is the movie The Matrix, which many people have seen, or even if they haven’t seen, it’s become a cultural phenomenon now beyond the film industry. The simulation hypothesis is the modern equivalent of an idea that’s been around for a while, and it is the idea that the physical world that we live in, including the Earth and the rest of the physical universe, is actually part of a computer simulation. Pretend I know absolutely nothing about the “simulation hypothesis.” What the hell is the simulation hypothesis? Rizwan Virk So I reached out to Virk and asked him to break it down for me.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. I know nothing about computer science, but this idea that we’re all characters in an advanced civilization’s video game is, well, kind of awesome. Rizwan Virk, a computer scientist and video game designer, published a 2019 book, The Simulation Hypothesis, that explores Bostrom’s argument in much greater detail and traces the path from today’s technology to what he calls the “Simulation Point,” the moment at which we could realistically build a Matrix-like simulation. It’s a difficult argument to wrap your head around, but it makes a certain amount of sense.
We can’t know for sure which of these is the case, Bostrom concludes, but they’re all possible - and the third option might even be the most probable outcome. In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones. Yet there are plenty of smart people who are convinced that this is not only possible but perhaps likely.