Do we live in simulations? This puzzling hypothetical question.
Paul Sartre is an astrophysicist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the Flat Iron Institute, the host of the shows Astronaut Q&A and Cosmic Radio, and the author of How to Die in the Universe. This article was contributed by Sartre to Space.com Expert Voices: Comments and Insights.
Is everything we know and feel, including real existence, a virtual world created by an invisible unknown being? In 2003, Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom first proposed this famous simulation hypothesis.
But does this simulation hypothesis provide a compelling point of view, or is it just an interesting idea? Let's discuss it together.
First, assuming that our computers will evolve to be more powerful, efficient, and comprehensive, then sometime in the distant future (to make this hypothesis hold, without caring when it will happen), we will be able to build some stellar computers that are powerful enough to simulate the entire universe and reproduce the physical, chemical, and biological phenomena we have experienced in nature.
Let's assume that consciousness is a perception, wherever it exists (organic brains or digitally simulated brains), and then let any individual simulated by a computer experience a world that is no different from ours.
It's like the movie The Matrix.
Once our descendants build such a computer, they will inevitably create countless simulated creatures — just try to count how many virtual characters have appeared since video games were born. Soon, the number of simulated conscious brains living in computers will far exceed the number of organic brains living in the real universe. If this eventually happens, we will face three possibilities:
1. Our descendants (or other intelligent beings in the universe) will never be able to develop technology that fully simulates the universe.
2. Our descendants (or other intelligent beings in the universe) developed this technology, but they did not use it to simulate the universe.
3. The vast majority of conscious bodies, including you, live in a simulated world.
The simulation hypothesis is the latest in a long history of philosophical speculation that questions the ultimate nature of the reality we experience. Throughout the ages, philosophers have wondered whether we live in a world built by evil devils or in the dreams of others. This is the ultimate form of skepticism that helps remind us that our empirical study of the world is now limited.
From a philosophical point of view, the simulation hypothesis is a good hypothesis. But this hypothesis ends with a triple dilemma – three statements, one of which must be true (if you accept all the assumptions in the argument), but we can't tell which one it is.
You can say you don't know which possibility is most likely to be correct, and you can choose one of them against the other two. For example, you could say that computers can never be powerful enough to fully simulate the universe, or that advanced civilizations will always find analog consciousness morally reprehensible, or you could say that these are inevitable and that we do live in someone else's simulated universe.
However, whichever option you choose, you need to introduce additional parameters beyond the original simulation hypothesis. Alternatively, you can question the hypotheses of the hypothesis.
Reset the computer
Perhaps the boldest hypothesis in this simulation hypothesis is that the number of simulated brains will rapidly outnumber real organic brains. Assuming that the simulated consciousness and the consciousness of the organic creatures experience and feel exactly the same (which is another bold hypothesis), then this is exactly what you can do to calculate the probability that you will live in the simulation. For example, in the distant future, the existence of every billion organic biological consciousnesses may indicate the simultaneous existence of another 99 billion simulated consciousnesses. This means that you have a 99% chance of living in a computer simulation.
However, in 2017, Brian Eggleston, an undergraduate in systems analytics at Stanford University, found a fatal error in his probabilistic calculations of computer-simulated life. Because humans are the only species that have created computers, this simulation hypothesis is based on our existing knowledge of supercomputers. It is humans who create computers, so we know for sure that humans are not computer simulations. On the contrary, we can point to computers and say that humans do not live in the virtualities they have created.
No matter how many simulated consciousness entities our descendants create, whether it's 10 or 10 trillion, we can't use them to calculate our odds of being in a simulation. In other words, their ability to create simulated universes in the future does not give us the slightest idea of what it is like to be in the simulation. We cannot calculate probabilities in terms of future variables. If we can't calculate the probabilities, we can't have the ternary paradox, we can't know more.
Instead, we can only look down on our past—whether humans who lived before us in a certain era (living in a real, non-simulated universe) or those who are happy to create simulated universes of alien beings. At the same time, when one of these entities is possible, we also do not have any absolute evidence that "it" is true, and there is no way to calculate the number of simulated entities that exist.
Do we live in simulations? At the end of the day, we don't know the answer, and the simulation hypothesis doesn't provide a convincing argument. So you don't have to worry and enjoy life!
Related knowledge
The universe (Latin: universe) refers to all space and time and its contents, containing planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The dominant description of the evolution of the universe is the Big Bang theory. According to this theory, 13.787 ±0.020 billion years ago, time and space appeared at the same time, and the universe has been expanding ever since. Although the spatial size of the entire universe is unknown, the equation for the expansion of the universe suggests that the diameter of the universe must not be less than 23 trillion light-years. Currently, the observable size of the universe is measurable, about 93 trillion light-years in diameter.
Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers invented the earliest models of the universe and proposed the geocentric theory, which saw the earth as the center of the universe. [13] [14] Centuries later, more precise astronomical observations led Nicolas Copernicus to develop the heliocentric theory with the sun as the center of the solar system. In proposing the law of universal gravitation, Isaac Newton built on copernicus research, just as John Kepler's law of planetary motion and observations were based on Tycho Brahe.
BY： Paul Sutter
FY：Astronomical volunteer team
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