Why Quantum Physics, AI, and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game
Outstanding MIT computer scientist and Silicon Valley video game developer gives 10 reasons to validate the "Simulation Hypothesis": our reality is a simulated, uneven 3D world where we all have individual characteristics, levels and quests, all controlled by some giant Artificial Intelligence.
Recently, the idea that we can live in a giant video game, or as it is sometimes called, the Simulation Hypothesis, has received a lot of attention due to prominent figures like Elon Musk who openly discussed this idea. As Virtual Reality technology has become more sophisticated, we are beginning to take a closer look at virtual worlds like those found in the ubiquitous Oasis in Ready Player One, soon to be featured in the blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg.
Some, like science fiction writer Philip Dick, strongly believed we were living in some kind of simulation. Others, such as the futurist Ray Kurzweil, popularized the idea of loading our consciousness into a silicon-based device, which would mean that we are just digital information. Others, such as Oxford lecturer Nick Bostrom, go further and think that we can indeed be artificially modeled by consciousness in a ready-made model!
Science Fiction or Mystic?
Like my first exposure to the greatest ideas, I discovered the Simulation Hypothesis by watching and reading too much science fiction.
The first time was during an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the holographic character realized he was in a simulation and wanted to get out of it. Is it possible that we are in a "holographic" space and that there is another world, I thought?
Promotional video:
The Star Trek character realizes that he is in simulation.
Although it was only a passing thought at the time, and it was before The Matrix was released in 1999, when the idea became popular and grew in the mass consciousness. I thought then that such a simulator could exist, with or without alien overlords, which makes this situation a nightmare (as in the version of the giant video game Matrix, or in Elon Musk).
The Matrix laid the idea in the mass consciousness that we are in a simulated reality.
As a computer programmer and video game designer, I have to admit that this idea isn't really all that crazy. A civilization that has implemented a modern simulation like ours may be many thousands (even millions) of years older and ahead of us; it's not so hard to imagine that such a civilization creates much more complex games than we are able to build today.
As I began to study quantum physics and its startling revelations about the nature of "objective" and "subjective" reality, I started thinking again about the idea of a giant multiplayer video game. Moreover, as I delved deeper into Eastern traditions, in particular yogic and Buddhist philosophy, I found that their ideas about the nature of the world actually dovetail with the idea that we live in a simulation.
After all, why could it be a video game
Let's take a look at the main reasons we might be living in a simulation:
1. Pixels, Resolution, Virtual and Augmented Reality
One of the main arguments that Musk makes is that a more advanced civilization will have games with very high resolutions - so high that we cannot distinguish between the “real” world and the “simulated” one.
Today we are already seeing with virtual reality that "full immersion" is possible. Anyone who plays compelling VR games will understand that you can forget about the real world and “believe” that the world you see there is real.
As a great example, I played a prototype VR game Ping Pong last year (built by Free Range Games), and although it was an unrealistic resolution, I lost myself and thought I was playing ping pong for real. So much so that I put my racket on the ping-pong table and leaned on the table. Of course, it was a VR table, so it didn't really exist - I ended up dropping the paddle (actually the Vive controller) on the floor. When I leaned on the "table", I almost fell before realizing that there was no table in reality. In other words, to quote from the Matrix, there is no spoon.
In Ready Player One, the realistic immersive virtual reality world, Oasis, becomes the final salvation.
Think what pixel resolution we might have in a hundred years, let alone in a thousand years! This can be pretty convincing. Also, as AR (augmented reality) technology develops, to project onto the retina, without external glasses, we could see things around us that don't actually exist in reality. This raises the idea that the world “out there” may indeed be just a projection in our minds.
2. Pixels, Quantums and Zeno's Paradox
I recall sleepless nights at Massachusetts Institute of Technology during my senior year, when I had philosophical arguments with my classmates about the nature of reality. This was the first time I heard about Zeno's paradoxes. The idea was that if space is continuous, like numbers (you can always find an infinite number of numbers between any two numbers), how then can you touch an object like a wall? You would always have to cover half the distance without ever reaching it.
Zeno explained the paradox with the example of Achilles and the tortoise. If the turtle was ahead of Achilles, how can he overtake her if he will always be “halfway there”? (Note: From Vicky: Let's say Achilles runs ten times faster than a turtle, and is behind her at a distance of a thousand steps. During the time it takes Achilles to run this distance, the turtle crawls a hundred steps in the same direction. When Achilles will run a hundred steps, the turtle will crawl ten more steps, and so on. The process will continue indefinitely, Achilles will never catch up with the turtle).
When I first heard about this paradox, my initial reaction was that space must be quantized - there must be some minimum distance that we travel. Later, I discovered that I am not alone in this idea; whether this "minimum" number is Planck's constant or any other number is not as important as the very idea that the physical universe as we know it can be composed of pixels. Like a video game! How many pixels are there in the real world? To use an unscientific term, fuck it.
3. Open World and the Illusion of Infinite Possibilities
Early video games were very linearly structured, such as space invaders or Pac-Man. There was a limited set of "movements" that were only allowed using some kind of "input" external control, and within each level there was a specific goal, and you moved linearly through the levels.
As video games evolved and 3D models of the "world" became commonplace, video games have taken an evolutionary leap. From the player's point of view, it felt like you could move and do whatever. Examples of open world games range from GTA (Grand Theft Auto) and WOW (World of Warcraft), or The Sims, which mimicked life and eventually virtual worlds such as Second Life. Of course, the idea that the world is endless there, and that we can do "anything" within this world, is a carefully thought out illusion.
Game developers know this isn't true. Using 3D modeling, we can create a world that is generated and looks infinite, but is actually a collection of maps and rules. In any game, no matter how “open” it appears, there are main tasks, quests or achievements that are displayed by game developers. Is it possible that we have a similar illusion of "openness" in life?
Open world games like Second Life create the illusion of free choice.
4. Collapse of Probability Waves, Future and Parallel Universes
In quantum physics, one of the most intriguing ideas is matrix probability, which is an interpretation of how subatomic particles can simultaneously have the properties of both a wave and a solid particle. At the level of an electron or a photon, a wave is interpreted as a set of probabilities of where a particle can be at any moment in time. When we observe a specific possibility, then the wave of probability is called “collapse,” and we see one particle in a specific place.
The wave of the probability of the location of the particle.
Some interpreters have taken this at the macro level to say that there is a set of probabilities in which we exist simultaneously both in the present and in the future.
Which of the possible paths are we following? There is no good explanation; how the probability wave collapses is one of the biggest mysteries in quantum physics. The best answer physicists have come up with is that consciousness somehow determines the collapse.
Physicist Fred Alan Wolff, for example, says that information from these possible scenarios is coming to us in the present and that we are sending a “wave of supply” into the future that interacts with “waves of suggestions” from the future into the present. What possible future we plan for depends on the choices we make and how these two waves super-pose for each other (or cancel each other out).
These are amazing results. Future probable selves send information back to the present, and we consciously choose which path to take.
Several possible futures send us information that we use to make decisions.
Another related aspect of quantum physics that sounds like science fiction is the theory of parallel universes, where we make decisions in different “universes”. If this is true, then there is a specific timeline of multiple universes that fork every time we make a decision, leading to different time paths (in fact, the theory of parallel universes was put forward to solve the time travel paradox).
It reminded me of the very first video game I made at MIT. The way the computer chooses the next step was to project the possible futures, and then use a certain algorithm to “rank” those options, and then bring those values back to the present, and at the end the AI will choose the path to go.
Do the possible futures that we calculated in our game really exist? Or were they just probabilities? I realized that this is not too different from what happens at the quantum level, except that in existing games like chess or checkers, we use a simple function (based on the rules of the game) to decide which path most optimal. We used the minimax algorithm in game design, trying to maximize our outcome and minimize the outcome of our opponents at every “turn of the future”.
Minimax Algorithm: A simple AI for assessing future outcomes and choosing the best path.
Suppose that there is another "function" in the Great Simulation of Life that evaluates these possible futures, and we, on some subconscious level, choose which of these possible options and paths we can take from the present forward, just like in a video game !
5. Observations and conventional image
When we have a 3D video game, we render the world using 3D models. In some games, we allow user-generated content to remain in the world even after leaving the game for other players to see.
In video games, this "model" of the "world" exists outside the perception of the character. In the optimization trick, we are not rendering the entire world on each player's computer. We only do the part of the world that the player is in, and then usually only at a certain point at a certain time. It would be impractical to display the whole world!
What's more, 3D video games have reproduction optimization techniques based on what the player is watching. These techniques were pioneered in first-person shooters like Doom and are now widely used in VR headsets.
A philosophical question that arises in both quantum physics and video games is that if no one is in a certain part of the 3D world - no one is observing it, or the player is not there, is there a possibility of its existence?
Like Schrödinger's mysterious cat, who is neither alive nor dead, the world of video games relies on the player logging in to map the world. If no one enters a particular room or any particular world, what state is it in? For example, what happens if players are not logged into any of the MMORPG servers like World of Warcraft? The servers are running, but nothing happens until the player logs in to watch what is happening.
Spiritual and Mystical traditions
The following several reasons reflect interesting parallels between some spiritual and religious traditions, in particular the Eastern traditions and the Simulation Hypothesis. If you're not interested, skip to reasons # 9 and # 10.
6. The world is an Illusion
In many mystical traditions, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, we are told that the world around us is in fact an illusion. Maya, translated from Sanskrit as illusion, is used to describe the world that we see, and Brahman is the real world.
In Buddhism, the idea is that in order to “wake up,” you must admit that the world around us is an illusion. In fact, the term "Buddha" literally means "wake up."
In modern terms, they simply describe the type of video game we all got into, like the HoloDeck from Star Trek. We found ourselves in an illusory world, while there is a real world that we cannot perceive normally if we do not “wake up”.
There is actually a branch of Buddhist yoga called Dream Yoga that is used to help us "wake up". In Dream Yoga, in the form of lucid dreaming, participants are taught to be aware that the dreams we experience at night are “simulated” experiences. By learning to acknowledge that we are in a simulation, we can "wake ourselves up." The idea is that if we can do it in the "fake" dream worlds, then we can do it in the "fake world" of real life, which is also simulated reality!
7. Multiple Lives, Points, Levels and Experience
According to many Eastern traditions, we actually experience several lifetimes, gaining experience in each life and moving on to different levels of "evolution".
In early video games like Pac Man or Space Invaders, each player had many lives - the player accumulated points until the character was killed. The player could “continue” from the place where they died, or “start over” until the scary “GAME OVER” message appeared on the screen.
In MMORPGs, the player usually has a character that stores a specific set of experiences between gameplay sessions (character state). If we start from the beginning, the player, of course, remembers the skills they have accumulated in previous lives, but the character starts with zero values in their status.
This is similar to how it is interpreted in some Buddhist traditions that when we are born, although we keep the tendencies of past lives, we cross the "river of forgetfulness" when we "start over". There is still a place in these traditions where we keep all our experience and our points. Where? This is not explicitly stated, but it looks like they are being uploaded to some kind of "cloud server".
In some traditions, we experience multiple lives on the wheel of reincarnation. Sounds like a video game to me!
Let's take a look at Western religious traditions. When I grew up in the Islamic tradition, I was told that this life contains a "scorecard" in which everything is written, every good deed ("swab"), and every bad deed ("haram") and depending on the scores at the end of your life (and on the Day of Judgment, the day of Kyamath) you will go to Heaven or Jahanam. In Christian traditions, there is also the idea of two angels behind them and the idea of going either to Heaven or Hell (with Purgatory). Again, we have the same idea: the game state of the game, which is loaded somewhere “outside” the provided world.
8. Quests, Karma and God-like AI
In Eastern traditions, our life experience is not accidental; there is a system that keeps track of what we think and do, and then creates situations in the world of our past deeds, and this is called Karma
Now, if you are going to develop a seemingly open game, a simulation that can track billions of players, you will need to track quests and achievements for each person.
In today's video games, quests / achievements / tasks are the same for every player. However, it is not very difficult to imagine a more complex video game in which quests were chosen based on the player's past experience. And as in a certain level of a video game, the player can face similar problems over and over again until he can pass the test.
To complete these "personal quests" you will need to sync yourself up with a very large base of "players" and "NPCs" or non-playable non-player characters (billions of concurrent players in the Grand Simulation). You also need to find out which group of other players can be compatible, right now, in a certain section of the 3D world, with game quests. The result of every interaction in the game can have lasting consequences, leading to big problems in the future.
Analysts have to track billions of concurrent players (which we can't do in any video game today). It would seem that an artificial intelligence system would be ideal for this kind of task. It might not even need to be that smart if the rules were well defined and it could scale infinitely!
Let's move from East to West, towards more traditional religious foundations. In these religions, everyone prays to God. Let's assume for a moment that God is real. What is God? What intelligence, if it existed, could keep track of so many, billions of individual prayers and timelines? Which can keep track of those, on the Day of Judgment, who must move to a lower, less pleasant level ("Hell") of the game or move to a higher, more pleasant level ("Heaven"). You guessed it - this is an extremely complex AI.
Final Reasons
Moving away from spiritual traditions, let's return to science for our last two reasons.
9. Playable Characters (PC) vs. Non-Playable Characters (NPC)
(Note: (PС) - a character under the direct control of the player; (NPC) - a character controlled not by the player, but by the computer)
Nick Bostrom, a professor at Oxford University, has long been a supporter of the Simulation Hypothesis. The argument in favor of this theory is that civilizations are unlikely to survive unless they do, when they have powerful computers that can simulate "ancestors." Bostrom concludes: We are most likely an imitation of consciousness, not real biological beings. From his famous article:
“The only thing that future generations can do with their super-powerful computers is detailed modeling of their ancestors or people like their ancestors. Because their computers will be so powerful that they can run a large number of such simulations. Let's assume that these simulated people are conscious. It may then be that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race, but rather to humans modeled by the advanced descendants of an ancient race. And then it can be argued that if this were the case, we would rationally think that we are most likely among imitated minds, and not among the original biological."
As a video game developer, this reminds me of our attempts to create realistic “NPC” or non-playable characters. As games got more complex, these AI characters got more sophisticated. We are rapidly approaching an AI that can pass the Turing test, and it will be artificial intelligence indistinguishable from a human (if you talk to it).
I think back to early text games like Zork, where the characters are trying to talk to you and we are trying to make them realistic. The AI has made significant progress, but we currently have no NPCs that can pass the Turing test. Once we do this (in 10 years? In 100 years? In a thousand years), the likelihood that the people we interact with inside the simulation will begin to interact with the NPCs incredibly increases. Professor Bostrom believes that "we" are simulated consciousness.
10. Speed of Light, Wormhole, etc
Curiously, in our Universe, as far as we can tell, the fastest speed at which we can move from point A to point B is the speed of light. It is also the speed of electrical systems and electromagnetic waves. In a typical video game, the fastest way we could send information from one player to another would be through electrical wires. We cannot move in space at a speed that will be faster than the speed of electromagnetic waves, since our idea of space is generated by a certain form of electromagnetic waves?
In the virtual world of Second Life, if you try to move from point A to point B, you will be stuck in the "space" of the game and have to move slowly - if you were walking or flying. On the other hand, you can instantly teleport to another part of the game, with the result that another part of the 3D world will be displayed around you.
Do we also have this ability in real life? Some physicists have put forward the theory of wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges that would allow us to break through the fabric of space-time. You can compare this mainly to the teleport in video games.
Wormholes allow us to move from one place to another in the 3D world.
Conclusion
These are just some of the reasons why we may all live in the video game, The Great Simulation. I have not even given some more esoteric or psychological reasons here (which would take an entire book).
As computer science and artificial intelligence are rapidly advancing their capabilities, perhaps a simulated world will be created that looks and feels as real as our own. Video games started with simple rules of what can be done and simple 2d worlds have rapidly progressed into MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) with millions of players interacting in a simulated world. As computer technology advances, the chances of creating a billion players plus a simulated world like ours is rapidly approaching.
Moreover, quantum physics gives us a description of the universe (or multiple universes) that makes no sense from the point of view of "objective reality", but requires the use of consciousness. Sometimes these incredible finds defy common sense, if we live inside a video game, and not physical reality, then consciousness is the equivalent of our "login".
Eastern traditions, especially Buddhist traditions, have long argued that we live in a world of illusion and that we experience many lifetimes trying to complete our individual quests, all of which are stored outside of "this world." There is a gigantic system that not only preserves this, but creates new situations for us to get our "achievements". It sounds like a video game to me.
All of these fields, computer science / artificial intelligence, quantum physics, and Eastern spiritual traditions point to one plausible scenario: we live in a very complex video game that I call the Great Simulation.
Like all simulators, our world can be real as long as the "simulation" is running.
It reminds me of a quote from British intellectual Havelock Ellis about dreams. He said, “Dreams are real as long as they go on. Can we say something more about life?"
Can we really ??