Elon Musk’s 13th Floor theory

Whilst movies like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix have played on the theme that we are living our lives as proxied versions of ourselves, the film The Thirteenth floor is the one that has resonated most with what I believe is a good explanation of our universe.

It seems strange to me that someone like Elon Musk would also attribute such a high likelihood to our existence in this world being a simulation.

Science

So far, the best explanation that science has behind our universe is “the big bang theory”. However we are taught that energy cannot be created or destroyed only transferred. If this is the case then the origins of the energy behind “the bang” are still unexplained.

Religion

A lot of religions are based on ever exising and ever-living god(s). I can live with this — Keep reading!

The living

The sum of the whole being greater that the sum of the individual parts appears to be true when applied to all living things. If we could somehow combine protons neutrons and elections to create any living thing at any place, would that living thing be truly living? Would it be able to operate fully as dictated by their DNA/evolution or just a cadaver of the species it represents?

Simulation/Game

The fundamental part of a game is a co-ordinating loop commonly referred to as ‘the game loop’.

This loop refers to a game-processing todo-list of processes. The game loop is executed once per frame. Currently 60 frames per second is standard.

The game-loop checklist contains steps like check for user input, update sprites, update camera, and most importantly a render-current-frame step which paint the scene as seen by the camera with all the lighting and fx.

Each ‘living’ thing in the game is a sprite. They are registered to the game loop and are given life each time the game loop visits them. The loop queries their current location and proximity to other sprites or objects. It then updates the sprite’s actions with respect to it’s AI as of that frame.

Games creators become Game-gods

If we look at a game like GTA and imagine with the benefit of Moore’s law in 10–20years time. The characters will have much better AI and ‘ability’ to reason. Let’s say one of these characters should ask itself ‘where did all of this come from?’, it would look around and reason that everything is made of two things, matter (one’s) and anti-matter (zero’s).

It may go on to construct a replica of itself from the very fabric of the simulation world. However, without registration to the game loop, the replica may lack the necessary initialisation** steps and registration via the game loop. It will fail to be animated and…live!

It may posit: “This world could never have been created. It’s was simply a ‘big spark’ that brought everything us into being. These zero’s and one’s can’t be created or destroyed, only re-arranged — someday we’ll joypad-tifically figure out how/why they are arranged like this”

Other sprites may believe in creation, believing that the system is too orderly and that game-science doesn’t disprove the creation of the game world by Rock Star.

Others still may believe in the existence of multiple gamer-gods not just Rock Star. They may even consider the likelihood of alternate games and may die for such f’king stupid beliefs!

Whichever they chose to believe, they would arrive at the same dead-end questions and lack of answers sat in their infinitely large cloud-storage based universe made of only two fundamental elements that we have in ours composed of three!

*Time in a game world relative to the hosting (real) world could be so fast as to make the time unreasonable to specify in in-game metrics. Hence it would be reasonable to say that the hosting world and Rock Star(s) lived and existed forever!

**This assumes that creators of the game haven’t added a feature which allows all newly created humans to be initialised and registered to the loop with it’s own AI