Actually, this is my favorite theory about the universe. And not only mine. Physicists, philosophers, and ordinary thinkers have long been discussing the question: can we be virtual? Not like in The Matrix, but almost: what if our world is a simulation? And what could that mean? After all, if you, me and all people on Earth and every grain of sand in space were really characters in a giant computer game, we might not even know about it. While this idea works well for a movie, it's also a well-founded scientific hypothesis. Scientists debated the controversial idea Tuesday at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Discussion at the American Museum of Natural History.
Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, estimates the odds of being a program on someone else's disc at 50/50. “I think the likelihood of this could be very high,” he says. He noted the gap between the intelligence of humans and chimpanzees, despite the fact that more than 98% of our DNA is shared. Perhaps there are beings out there somewhere whose intelligence greatly exceeds ours. “We would be just idiots around them. If so, then I can easily imagine that everything in our life is just a figment of someone's imagination, created for other people's entertainment."
Virtual consciousness
A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003, when he suggested that advanced civilizations with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. In addition, they could probably run many, many similar simulations, up to the point where the vast majority of consciousness is more artificial within the simulation than real from the original ancestors. So simple statistics suggest that we are most likely among the modeled minds.
There are other reasons to believe that we can be virtual. For example, the more we learn about the Universe, the more - it seems to us - it becomes tied to mathematical laws. Perhaps this is not a given, but a function of the nature of the Universe in which we live. “If I were a character in a computer game, I too would eventually find that the rules seem very rigid and mathematical,” says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "They just reflect the computer code they were written in."
In addition, ideas from information theory emerge in physics. “A very strange thing came up in my research,” says James Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. - I got to the correction codes - browsers work thanks to them. How did they end up in the equations I've been studying about quarks, electrons and supersymmetry? This led me to realize that I can no longer call people like Max crazy."
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Skepticism, skepticism
Nevertheless, not all those present agreed with this statement. “If you find an IT solution to your problems, it could be a coincidence,” said Tyson. "When you are a hammer, every problem is like a nail."
And the statistical argument that most consciousnesses in the future will be artificial rather than biological cannot be taken at face value either, says Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University. “There are simply no well-defined probabilities underlying it. It follows from this argument that there are many entities that want to imitate us. But as for me, this is strange. We are very interested in ourselves. I don't know why higher species would like to imitate us. Randall also says he doesn't quite understand why other scientists are interested at all in the assumption that our universe is a simulation. She believes that this idea is zero without a stick.
Such hypotheses, which relate to the very foundation of our being, as a rule, turn out to be essentially untestable, but some scientists believe that they could find experimental evidence that we live in a computer game. One idea is that programmers tend to cut corners to make the simulation work easier.
“If the universe is based on simulation, there must be a problem of limited computational resources, which we also have, so the laws of physics must work on a finite number of points in a finite volume,” says Zoren Davudi, an MIT physicist. “So we go and see what kind of signatures we’ve found might indicate a volatile spacetime.”
Evidence can come, for example, in the form of an unusual distribution of energies in cosmic rays that hit the Earth - this would indicate that spacetime is not continuous, but consists of discrete points. "This kind of evidence would convince me as a physicist." But proving the opposite - that the universe is real - can be even more difficult. "It is impossible to get evidence that we are not in simulation, since any evidence we get can be simulation."
Life, Universe and Everything Else
But if it turns out that we really live in a certain "Matrix", then what? After all, we are not going anywhere.
"I would recommend going and doing something interesting," Tegmark says, "so the imitators don't knock us out."
Yet such an outcome raises some weighty spiritual questions. “If the modeling hypothesis is correct, we open the door to eternal life and resurrection, and to things that are formally discussed in a religious context. The reason is quite simple: if we are programs in a computer, then as long as the computer is not damaged, the program can always be restarted."
And if someone created our simulation, does that make him God? “We can create simulation worlds in this universe, and there is nothing creepy about that,” says David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at New York University. "There's nothing creepy about our creator either." From the other side, we are the gods of our own simulations. But one question remains: what happens if a bug is found that will disable the entire program?