Your world is a lie. Why we are almost certainly Living in a simulation. One of my favorite movies is the Matrix. The hero of the movie, a computer programmer by the name of Neo discovers that his life and everything he has ever known has been a lie.
Because his entire reality has been a computer simulation. And what he finds out is that the real world is controlled by an AI master computer, called the architect.
As fantastical as that scenario sounds, it is entirely plausible. Could you be living a lie this very moment?
Could your entire reality including everything you’ve ever known, be nothing more than pixels on a super advanced computer simulation?
The astonishing answer is coming up right now…
The argument that we may be living in a simulation goes something like this:
A sufficiently advanced intelligent civilization could easily create ancestor simulations. How? Well, because they would have the computing power to do so.
The amount of computing power needed to simulate a human mind can be roughly estimated.
Hans Morovec, an expert in robotics at Carnegie Mellon university estimated this to be about ~1014 operations per second, based on actual computer modeling of individual nervous tissues.
Another estimates by Nick Bostrom of Oxford University have shown this to be up to 1017 operations per second based on simulating the interconnection of synapses in the brain.
And this kind of simulation would make the simulated beings conscious because they would essentially have exactly the same brain capability of any real humans.
Do we have the capability to perform these kinds of computations? No not currently, but many people including Ray Kurzweil, Director at Google, have argued that such technology is only a couple of decades away.
K. Eric Drexler, a PhD engineer from MIT outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube that could perform 1021 operations per second.
And Robert Bradbury, has conceptualized a hypothetical computing megastructure, called a Matryoshka brain, based on a planet sized Dyson sphere that would have computing power on the order of 1042 operations per second.
Based on the highest number needed to simulate a brain, 10^17, a total computing power of 10^27 would be all that is required to simulate the brains of every single person on earth.
And if and when a Matryoshka brain could be built, it could simulate Trillions and trillions of earths.
In fact, based on these computational densities, even a much smaller computer structure the size of let’s say the Empire State building could easily simulate a trillions of humans.
To make a simulation, not only would the brain need to be simulated, but also our environment and the passing of time.
How much computing power would this require?
Well, simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level would require a computer theoretically bigger than the size of the universe, so that is not possible.
But if all we are trying to do is create a realistic simulation for humans, we don’t need that level of granularity.
When people look up at the night sky for example, those stars and other objects can be simulated with very few pixels to give is sufficient realism.
So for example when if the computer saw that a human was about to look at a planet through a telescope or a bacteria through a microscope, it could fill in all the details in the moment the observation was being made.
In fact no errors could ever occur because the master computer could simply stop time, go back and correct the error, and rerun that part of the simulation, so that any mistakes would be erased.
If we simulate the brain of 100 billion humans for 100 years per human and 30 million seconds per year, with 10^17 operations per second, the figure would be 10^37 operations.
So even with a computer 0.001% the size of a Matrioshka brain, you could run this entire simulation in less than 1 second.
So even a computer with this capability would have enough computational capability to keep track of all the thoughts of all current human beings living on earth millions of times over.
And a super intelligent human civilization of the future may eventually build an astronomical number of such computers.
So the computing power needed to run millions or billions of ancestor simulations is potentially possible with just a minor fraction of the computing power that a super intelligent civilization is likely to have.
Nick Bostrom, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University has argued that there are three possibilities for the future of advanced intelligent beings in the universe:
1) Possibility 1 is that nearly all technologically advanced civilizations go extinct before they have the capability to create ancestor simulations.
2) Possibility 2 is that of all technologically advanced civilizations, none are interested in creating ancestor simulations that are so detailed that the simulated avatars are conscious.
3) Possibility 3 is that if the above two are not true, then we are almost certainly living in a simulation.
Why would 3 be true? Because if any of the technologically advanced civilizations of the universe is not exinct, and is interested in creating ancestor civilization, then they would almost certainly create millions or billions or even trillions of such simulations because it would only require a fraction of their computing power.
And if billions of simulations are happening, then many more simulated people than non-simulated people are conscious. So it is much more probable that we are one of these conscious simulations than actual real living beings.
So we are most likely inside a simulated reality.
But then again possibilities 1 or 2 could be true. If we do go on to create computer games with ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against possibilities 1 and 2.
If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing may just be a tiny piece of all existence.
The physics of the real universe where the computer running the simulation is located, may not even be anything like our universe.
The crazy thing is that there are 7 billion of us humans on earth. Even if one of us discovers that he or she is living in a simulation, then all of us are living in a simulation.
But then again, the overlords might rerun the simulation to make sure that none of us discovers that we are living in a simulation.
Well, given that our master program would know everything that is going on, including every firing of every neuron in our brain, I’m not sure this video is ever going to get seen, because they could prevent me from making it.
And if I do make it, you will be prevented from seeing it.
And if you do see it, your brain may be manipulated to think I am nothing but a quack, and you will dismiss it.
I can just about feel your dismissal of this video right now.
– but you better be careful that it is you who are thinking it, and not some mind control architect pulling the strings gloating that this is…”a harmony of mathematical precision.”
