On the Absurdity of the Simulation Hypothesis
And how little we really know about anything that we haven’t investigated
By MARTIN REZNY
Granted, I’m not saying that simulation hypothesis is in any way guaranteed to be true. It’s not even certain it would ever be provable even if it is the case — it may be possible to make a simulation from within which it would be impossible to arrive at a physical proof of its nature. It’s not even necessarily the most intuitive idea. But I’m not sure what would warrant calling it absurd.
Firstly, what we have proven is that it’s relatively easy to make a simulated world, which alone makes the urge to check whether our world isn’t simulated the exact opposite of absurd. Our world may not be a simulation, but it does look very mathematical, which appears to not be a necessity for physical worlds. That makes it even more prudent to follow this hypothesis.
The debate is mainly about the technicalities of what may or may not be possible to simulate, like the example with the exponential rise in difficulty of simulating quantum systems shows. Still, the conclusion is not that it absolutely can’t be done, only that it would require stupendous amounts of memory or processing power, as far as we understand computing. Simulating an actual consciousness is in fact much less certain to be possible than this.
From my point of view, our inability to actually make or imagine a computer currently that would be able to simulate a reality like ours with all of its features is a rather weak argument for being absolutely sure that our reality cannot be simulated. We have barely started exploring what quantum computers can do, and these alone prove that different kinds of computers find different tasks differently demanding. Maybe some kind of quantum computer will be able to simulate complex quantum phenomena easily.
As is mentioned at the end of the article that states that we can put simulation hypothesis to rest, the world out there can have different physical limitations than ours. At the very least, it is to be expected that it would contain vastly more particles than it simulates, and we really have no way of knowing what could be the upper limit on how big universes can get, which is why we have no idea how much larger our universe is than its observable portion. Given what we do in games, additional dimensions wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Not to mention that simulations can be cheating in all sorts of ways, creating an appearance of much greater complexity of processes, perhaps only when somebody starts trying to verify them with microscopic or telescopic observations. Then the real bottleneck would be the number of inquisitive observers, unless you simply cheat their perceptions. This alone may make it impossible to prove our world is a simulation, but what do we know now?
Unless we have at least spent some serious time and effort pursuing a hypothesis to no avail, we can’t know how likely or unlikely it is to be true. Expecting Occam’s Razor to always work, that the simplest explanations must be the case, hasn’t worked out in cosmology yet, as more entities than what we considered necessary at any given point in time have always been discovered. Besides, the physical route is not the only one available.
Personally, I’d like to look at our world in terms of its qualitative structural phenomenological features and compare those to the kinds of simulations or games that we find logical to make. While some degree of fuzziness inevitably comes with this approach, it is largely independent of knowing what precise kind of computer is needed to run the simulation. What’s needed to understand is only what one would simulate and related design limitations.
But I do understand the discomfort that many people feel with the idea that this world may be designed. At one point in history, physicists felt compelled to prove that the universe isn’t expanding because that would imply a starting point and therefore that it may have potentially been created, but that’s not a good (or honest) way how to do physics. It turned out that big bang doesn’t necessarily mean “god did it” anyway. What does it mean to be simulated?
Maybe our world hasn’t been designed by an intelligence external to it even if it is, shall we say, simulational. Maybe it’s only being controlled or shaped from within itself by evolved superintelligences, maybe it still assembled emergently because what we understand as meaning is an emergent physical property, and maybe the real significance of it is something that we currently can’t even begin to fathom. In any case, this clearly isn’t “only” a simulation as some people view it, as it contains real people, feels real, and has real physics.
What I know is that everyone who has ever assumed so far that we’ve basically figured everything out was wrong, and that pursuing more and better answers, wherever they may lead, is what science is supposed to do. Ultimately, we can’t know what the pursuit of the simulation hypothesis will bring, as we can’t know that regarding the pursuit of any other hypothesis. For all we know, the string theory could be a complete dead end, and being more fashionable isn’t going to help it. I vote for more curiosity and patience.
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