Are we living in a simulation? - Girlsplained.
ENGLISH
Hello peeps,
Welcome to another issue of Girlsplaining, where I - a girl - explain things. I don't pretend to be an expert on these topics; in fact, I am not. But I'm a fast learner, and I can easily explain the basics to increase your chances of someday winning 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' with every article you read.
First time reading? Subscribe here!
We have all heard that computers work like the human brain. Why not believe that we too are programmed by a computer to think as a computer does?
Believing that the world we live in is not real but exists inside a computer - just like in The Matrix - is a theory that has gained traction over the years. And it is much more than a simple conspiracy of YouTube. Scientists and philosophers have dedicated themselves to find arguments that support this theory.
The reality is that we know a lot about how the universe was created. I'm talking about the giant explosion called the "big bang" that the universe expanded and eventually, began to create matter. That's where we come from.
But no one knows exactly what generated that first spark. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, in his book 'Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,' “Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. In response, some religious people assert that something must have started it all: God.
But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a superintelligent alien species?"
Not knowing exactly what created the universe, opens the door to the possibility that we could be living in a simulation.
What is the simulation theory?
Like Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the best-known American astrophysicists of this time (also known for being a meme), explained, "the power of our computers is growing dramatically. We create simulated worlds. We make video games with characters that are in the game. Imagine a day where you can simulate such a perfect world with human beings, and you can do it so well that you can recreate all the neurosynaptic thoughts that any human can have, but being part of the simulation on a computer, including the perception of free will."
That is what the simulation theory explains. To believe that someone else, possibly a more advanced civilization, created a world inside a computer so well programmed that it would allow us to trust that everything is real.
DeGrasse Tyson believes that if this was true, not everything is already programmed and created, but rather, that they are being done as we discover them.
For example, if someone starts digging towards the center of the earth and approaches a space that is not yet designed the system alerts, and a programmer builds more depth.
Or perhaps we have never been able to travel faster than the speed of light because that would imply we could reach other galaxies that have not yet been programmed.
Where does this theory come from?
Ever since Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford raised the concern in the late 1990s with the advent of computers.
In a paper published in 2003, he described that at least one of these three hypotheses had to be true: “(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.”
Let's say that the first hypothesis is not real, that would mean that society would evolve so much that it would reach a posthuman stage. If that happens, then the second would not be real either and this posthuman society could develop enough technology to create a simulation of their ancestors. Therefore, we should have more reason to believe that we are indeed living in a simulation. That would make us as real as the characters of the Sims or Fortnite.
What seems to be inevitable is that human civilization will reach a point where most of us go extinct. What happens as a result of that episode is not yet fully defined.
The difference between the simulation argument and any other philosophical assumption (for example, believing that the senses lie to us) is that they all come from doubts. The simulation argument doesn't. It starts with what we know and can see in our world.
"We assume that science teaches us about the rules and laws of the world, that we have computers in the external world, and those computers are getting better and faster over time. And then, that scientific reality is used to think about what kind of capabilities are going to be available to more mature civilizations. To draw the implications of that and end up in this position where we can say that one of the three previous propositions is true," Bostrom explained.
The same philosopher said that we do not have enough evidence to support or disregard the simulation argument and its three hypotheses. We should distribute our beliefs between both possibilities (whether or not we are part of a simulation).
If we study our own evolution, we could list a lot of things that we could not do before because technology was not available yet. But eventually, it has improved, and we have been able to do almost all of the things we pictured as impossible.
This behavior of constant improvement indicates that eventually, we will have computers with such capacity that those would allow us to simulate a complete and complex world. And if they also evolve so much that they could simulate others. In the end, we will end up having one real society and infinity more simulated.
If we believe that there is a possibility that there are infinite simulations, the probability that we are one is very high.
A counterargument is that something all simulations have in common is the power to simulate themselves, but we don't have that power yet. So either we are the real civilization, or we are the last one in the chain, we are not that evolved yet and we have not been able to create other simulations, but we eventually will.
Therefore, explains deGrasse Tyson, if the previous theory basically proved that we were a simulation since the probabilities that we were not a simulation we "one to infinity," this new theory puts us at 50/50 chances.
A fifty percent chance that we are or are not a simulation is far less traumatic than believing that there is only a 1/infinity % chance that we are not.
So that's it, guys. That's the simulation theory girlsplained (pretty simplified). This video also explains it short and easily:
Now let's have fun with untested "simulation glitches" stories.
Many people who fervently believe that we are part of a simulation have some stories they see as "glitches in the matrix." Bostrom does not support those stories because he believes that in the same way, whether or not we are a simulation, people will always have such a story, then we cannot use them as an argument.
That aside, I think there are fun stories to read.
In February of 2016, I went to Ross with my mom to buy something for a job interview I had the next day. As we were walking into the store, the security guard said, “Hey, back again?” with a little too much enthusiasm. My mom and I didn’t say anything about it, thinking he probably mistook us for some other people who were just here.
We got our stuff and left, and made a quick stop at Big5 on the way home. It was a Monday night. It was around 8:30 pm at this point, and the Big5 and Ross weren’t close to each other. Anyways, we went to Big5, got what we needed, and at the checkout, the lady said, “Oh hey! You guys came back!” My mom and I looked at each other like, “what the hell? Is this happening?”
We asked the lady what she meant and why she thought she had just seen us and if she was sure she did not see some doppelgängers. She said, “Well I guess it could have been doppelgängers, but I swear it was you guys. You guys were just here, and we talked.”
We didn’t ask about what because we didn’t want to know, but we told her about the guy at Ross who had said he just saw us too. I know it could be that there were just two people who were there before us, but both of them looked at us like we were so familiar, like we were just there.
This story implies that the flaw in the simulation would be that they had doubles doing the same thing as they were minutes before. The same user shared that he was afraid of coming home and meeting the other version of him who had come home earlier.
I found another story on the channel of Matthew Santoro, a North American Youtuber who related in this video five stories of people who discovered that they lived inside a simulation. This one is my favorite:
The pandemic made us all stay at home and pay much more attention to our partners. In the case of a guy named Tony, spending all that time with his girlfriend made him find a “real glitch” in the matrix. He worked as a Ph.D. student at a computer science department of a prestigious university. He lived with Jenna, his girlfriend. They had been together for years, and they knew everything about each other.
One day Tony realized something was strange. He went into the kitchen and saw Jenna making a cup of coffee. She usually criticized Tony for drinking coffee with sugar, but that morning she was pouring sugar into her cup. When Tony asked her about it, she acted surprised and said she’d always put sugar on her coffee.
Tony ignored that moment because he thought maybe he was mistaken, but then, other things started to become more apparent. Jenna’s routine changed and even her likes and dislikes flipped. Tony felt as if she had been reprogrammed as an entirely new person.
One day, Jenna asked Tony “How is Larry doing?” but Tony didn’t know anyone named Larry. Jenna got angry and said, “of course you know Larry, he works with you at the company, you’re always talking about him.” When Tony tried to explain that he worked as a Ph.D. student at a university and that he didn’t know Larry, Jenna couldn’t understand. It felt as if someone had gone terribly wrong for one of them.
This story raises the idea that we can be reset and reuploaded with new "drivers" which would make our tastes, routine, and life change forever.
There are millions of stories that we can find online, especially on Reddit, and if we think about it too much, surely we'll also have a story that we can tell that could sound like a failure in the matrix.
I do not know if we can actually perceive these types of errors, or if our life would change if it was confirmed that we truly live in a computer simulation. But I find it entertaining to read about it.
What do you think? Do we live inside a simulation?
Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something. If so, please recommend it, leave a comment if you want me to explain any particular topic, or buy me a beer if you truly enjoyed it.
What did you think of this article?