Science says we are living in a simulation
Lately there have been some articles poppin’ up along the lines of “Elon Musk is wrong. We aren’t living in a simulation.” But I am here to show you that there is scientific evidence showing that we are indeed living in a simulation.
In an interview Musk said the following:
“The strongest argument for us being in a simulation, probably being in a simulation is the following: 40 years ago, we had pong, two rectangles and a dot,” Musk said. “That is what games were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality, if you assume any rate of improvement at all, the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”
This created some controversy, because — as many articles have shown — this line of reasoning is flawed. One of the articles I encountered said:
“To take an example with which Mr. Musk is deeply familiar, space exploration went from virtually nothing to landing men on the moon in the decade between the early 60s and the early 70s. A Muskian projection made in 1973 would have confidently assumed we’d be in Alpha Centauri by now, given that rate of progress.”
I wish we would’ve reached there, c’mon how cool would that be? Even though all these articles are right, they are wrong. This is a virtual reality and I will show it to you.
Binary code. The 1 and the 0. By making patterns of 1’s and 0’s and patterns of those patterns, and then patterns of those patterns, and then patterns of those patterns… (this will go on for some time, but I’m sure you get the gist) we are eventually able to create virtually everything (pun intended). All software, all websites, all apps, all storable music, all games and all videos are created using 1’s and 0’s. Most of us don’t realise that what you see on the screen now is just data and so is our physical reality.
It even seems that plants are using mathematical formulas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_fern
Physics, which is the ruleset of our reality, is mathematical. E=MC^2 being a famous example. General relativity is a theory which is widely used and accepted. But why is the speed of light a constant? Well… I bet there are a lot of scientists out there who are well versed in the theory, but will not be able to tell you the why.
To understand this, let’s take a look at our own created online multiplayer games where we render data on the server (the computer you are connected to) and on the client (your computer). The server sends data to you, which your computer receives, interprets and subsequently converts it into an experience. And you too send data to the server, so that other players now have the latest information about you. But there is a limit to how fast this happens.
In reality this will be dependent on the computing power of the server, the computing power of your computer and the internet speed. We can face lag (stutters in the experience) because of this. But let’s assume we have all the resources and we have the best internet connection with 0 delay (ping), how can we make it the most consistent experience? This is done by locking the rendering speed. On the server you have tick rate, which will determine the speed upon which everything is updated. If a server has 100 tick rate, then it means that the server updates 100 times per second. On your computer you have frames per second. And in reality you have the speed of light, because this will give you the best experience. Thank god.
The speed of Light is light-ning fast: 299 792 km/s or 186 282 miles/s
Next up Quantum mechanics. Yes even this theory shows you that this reality is computed. Quantum mechanics deals with the small things. Namely particle’s. Oh I mean waves. Damn, I actually don’t know (any typical mainstream scientist).
In certain circumstances a “minute fragment or quantity of matter” behaves like a wave. The double-slit experiment is an infamous example which shows us that.
If we shoot electrons, or any other particle for that matter, one by one through the two slits, we don’t see an imprint of two slits on the screen behind it, but instead we see an interference pattern (as shown in the illustration above). Yes this is what actually happens in real life, now deal with it. But when we repeat the experiment with a measuring device to see which slit it actually goes through, we see the expected double slit imprint.
The act of measurement is what changes the outcome. It seems that the best description of this tiny “it” is a probability distribution (Copenhagen Interpretation) until it is measured. Meaning if we don’t know exactly where it is, it could be everywhere within the probability range.
Now to understand this, you need to think about a computer game like GTA. Whenever you move forward you will suddenly see things appearing. A bridge is now rendered and visible for instance. Our computers aren’t good enough to render everything, imagine the whole immense landscape of GTA5 being in the memory of a computer, holy shit! Our reality is even bigger, but apparently our reality too is built in such a way that it renders things on the fly, thus saving up memory. It will render the exact position of a photon only once we look there, otherwise it could be here in this percentage or there in that percentage.
So how does reality work exactly? In the first scenario the measurement happens on the screen, so upon rendering it will just take a draw from the probability range, which contains the probability that it went through both slits. In the other scenario it is rendered before it goes through a slit because the the device measures it. After that it’s location is known, thus not a probability anymore, and now it has to go through one or the other slit.
GTA is for the most part deterministic. The bridge will always be there, because it is programmed to be there. But our reality is not programmed in that way, it is of probabilistic nature. Since I’m a developer I can’t help but see the link of a particle and a data object. What if a particle is actually some code like this:
This will look really familiar to developers. Boom! No more confusion whether it’s a particle or wave. It’s none of the above, it’s just a data object!
Let’s also think about our current model of beginning of our reality. First there was nothing and then suddenly… The Big Bang happened. It is a confusing thing to understand. How can something come forth out of nothing? It’s weird as fuck. But now imagine it being digital. We can very easily create things from nothing. To give an example, initially this digital piece of paper was blank, and now it’s filled with this digital content. Our reality had to have some initial code to set things up like the initial amount of energy and the functions to determine how this energy can interact. So we have; the strong force, the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the gravitational force. I won’t go into all the detail here (I’m not rocket scientist after all), but once you have all the physical laws (code) there, you can run the program and the big bang will happen.
These are strong suggestions that reality is indeed a simulation. So what implications does this have? What are we? Are we a piece of code ourselves? If reality is digital, do we have an admin? Who or what is doing the computing? Can we find out?
Sources
Is life a video game? | Elon Musk | Code Conference 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KK_kzrJPS8
Are We Living in a Muskian Matrix?https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/civilized-death/201606/are-we-living-in-muskian-matrix
