The simulation hypothesi.., p.22
The Simulation Hypothesis, page 22
In computer science, the term “daemon” is actually a self-running process that is accomplishing some purpose, monitoring other computer programs, and generally performing housekeeping on the machine.
Godlike AI would be an AI that was omniscient over all the happenings going on in the world according to various rules. Sure sounds like a server with a very intelligent program keeping track of everything—some kind of digital consciousness that can watch and respond to events as they happen!
Near-Death Experiences
The religious traditions are of course concerned with death and the afterlife. But that’s not to say that science has been totally absent on this front. The definition of death is a tricky one in modern medical science. With the advance of medical technology and procedures, science has become better at keeping people alive even with life-threatening illnesses. This has led to a phenomenon in recent decades of individuals who have been clinically dead for a period of time only to be resuscitated.
Related closely to the traditional religious ideas of an afterlife is the more modern term, NDE, short for near-death experience. Dr. Raymond Moody popularized (some say coined) the term in his 1975 bestselling book Life After Life, and it turns out modern studies of this experience have turned up similarities with the concepts of keeping score and doing a life review and seeing beings in the hereafter.
After talking with more than a thousand people who had a similar experience, Moody became convinced that NDEs were real. Since the 1975 publication of Life After Life, there have been many books written—both by medical professionals as well as firsthand accounts—of people who’ve had them.
Perhaps Moody’s biggest contribution, in addition to popularizing the term NDE and raising awareness of it, was identifying the similar elements that people who’ve had NDEs report going through. Today, there are a number of elements that are considered the core of the NDE experience, including:59
A sense of peace, well-being, and painlessness.
An out-of-body experience. We’ll talk more about this, but many reporters of NDEs say that they could see their physical body on the bed. Others claim they could see and hear family members and doctors who were around the physical body.
A “tunnel experience.” This is a sense of moving through a dark tunnel toward a light.
Beings of light. Many participants report encountering beings of light or other beings who are more spiritually advanced and are waiting for them.
A life review. We’ll expand on this in more detail below.
Life decision. Many participants report the presence of a barrier and making (or being told to make) a decision about whether or not to cross the barrier and return to their body.
Return. Suddenly being back inside their body.
Although not every single person who has reported an NDE reports all of these elements, they are common enough that they are recognized as part of the “core experience.”
One of the individuals who approached Moody about his own near-death experience was Dannion Brinkley, who had been struck by lightning in 1975 and wrote (along with Paul Perry) the best seller Saved By The Light in 1994.
After he was struck by lightning, he ended up in the hospital and was clinically dead for 28 minutes. He reported encountering a being of light who took him through a life review, one of the more dramatic aspects of his experience:
I began to relive my entire life, one incident at a time. In what I call the panoramic life review … I watched my life from a second person point of view. As I experienced this I was myself as well as every other person with whom I had ever interacted.60
While NDEs are difficult to explain from a materialistic scientific point of view (although some scientists have tried to explain it in terms of the firing of neurons), the coherence of the experience suggests there may be more at work and that a broader model is needed. Of course, some participants interpret the experience based on their own religious tradition: the being of light becoming a guardian angel of a particular type, and the place they visit could be called Heaven.
From the point of view of the simulation hypothesis, an NDE becomes much more explainable, whether you subscribe to a traditional Western religious interpretation, an Eastern religious interpretation, or no interpretation at all. During what we call death of the character in the simulation, the player starts to wake up in another reality.
What is this other reality? All we can say for sure is that it is outside the rendered world of the shared video game, and there are other conscious beings there. Like Neo waking up in the pod by Morpheus in The Matrix, we are met by other beings—whether beings of light, angels, or relatives that have passed on—who have been watching us as we play the game.
The life review sounds strikingly similar to the scroll of deeds that was mentioned in Islam, but Brinkley goes out of his way to say that he didn’t feel judged by anyone other than himself. He didn’t see anything he would call “Hell,” which, having grown up in the Bible Belt, was a surprise to him.
Brinkley goes out of his way to describe the life review. In fact, he calls it a “360-degree life review.” He reports that he felt like he was inside a three-dimensional movie recording of his entire life, and could look (and feel) every single situation not just from his own point of view, but from other people’s points of view. This was a jarring experience and one that caused him to change how he related to people after his NDE. It harkens back to the idea in Islam of seeing the impact of your actions, which you may not be aware of.
How could such a 360-degree immersive view of everything that has ever happened in your life be achieved? This would be a startling technical achievement, but, once again, video games are already providing the answer for how this might be done. Recently, a video game startup was able to take the 3D landscape of a multiplayer competitive game and go back and re-render any part of a game that was already played in virtual reality from any point of coordinates in the virtual space. While we obviously cannot reproduce the feelings of other players, we already have the technology to see three-dimensional scenes replayed from other players’ points of view.
So, it’s not very difficult to imagine that, with the simulation hypothesis, an NDE goes from being a mysterious, unexplainable thing to a very explainable scientific process. In fact, the decision to “go back” and continue the life of the character we were just playing is a lot like the crude “insert another quarter now to keep playing!”
UFOs
Switching gears now, one of the persistent areas that science hasn’t been able to explain since the dawn of the atomic age are UFOs, or unidentified flying objects. There have been thousands of reports of physical craft (saucer-, triangle-, and cigar-shaped) during the day and flying lights at night. These reports have come from random people living in the country to military officers and airline pilots. In each of the cases, the objects have exhibited strange maneuverability—often hovering or accelerating or stopping so quickly that they defy our understanding of inertia.
Ufology has developed into a subspecialty of its own, and many books have been written about famous and not-so-famous sightings. The U.S. government’s last official word on UFOs was through Project Blue Book, a task force that included J. Allen Hynek, a well-known astronomer who was on the faculty at Ohio State University and Northwestern University. Project Blue Book was shut down on December 17, 1969. The Air Force and the Department of Defense (DOD) have since then said that the government is “out of the UFO sighting business,” citing the Blue Book conclusion that UFOs are not a threat.61
Dr. Hynek himself continued to study the phenomenon, and both he and his associate, Jacques Vallée, who created the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963, were said to be the models for the French scientist studying UFOs in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Hynek, having defined the term close encounters, also made a cameo in the film).
In 2017, it was revealed by the New York Times that the DOD’s denial of any ongoing UFO research wasn’t quite true. Luis Elizondo revealed that he was in charge of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which had a $22 million budget and was funded by senators including Senator Harry Reid from Nevada. 62 The fact that the Pentagon continued to take these “unidentified” flying objects seriously, while publicly claiming not to do so, underscores their interest in the strange aerodynamic properties of these objects.
One of the most prominent sightings that was studied by this group in the DOD was the “Tic Tac” encounter. Fighter jets from the USS Nimitz reported seeing a Tic Tac–shaped craft that was hovering at a certain point over the ocean, which descended from an altitude of 80,000 to 20,000 feet in seconds and then disappeared. The pilots were amazed at the flight characteristics of the craft, since our current aerospace technology would not be able to perform such maneuvers.
While it’s not our goal to get into proving or disproving UFO sightings, most official and unofficial commissions that have studied them come to the conclusion that while a certain percentage of sightings are explainable, and for a certain percentage there is not enough information to classify them either way, around 5 percent of all sightings have provided enough information to be credible enough to rule out existing known objects or craft. It’s this 5 percent of objects or craft that are of unknown origins and exhibit aerodynamic properties that defy the laws of inertia and gravity which are most puzzling to skeptics and believers alike.
Some UFO sightings have reported that it seemed that the UFO/craft appeared out of nowhere into the physical world. This has led to speculation of either a “cloaking device” or the idea that the craft was able to move in and out of our physical dimension.
How can these phenomena be accounted for if we were, in fact, living in a simulation?
If UFOs were interdimensional, it would mean that there exists a world outside of the physical, and the UFOs are going in and out of our physical reality. If UFOs are extraterrestrials from somewhere else in the physical universe (and this of course is the debate), they would need to use something like wormholes or FTL (Faster than Light) technology to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space. We talked about these ideas in Chapter 6, Parallel Universes, Future Selves, and Video Games.
Wormhole-like travel, or teleportation, would be akin to popping out of the simulation and popping back in at a certain point—behavior that is much easier in a simulated reality than a physical one.
Moreover, some UFO researchers contend that UFO sightings have both an objective and a subjective component. When I met Jacques Vallée in 2017, he told me that he had documented cases where several people were together and some of them saw the UFO and others didn’t. This led him to believe that there was a consciousness aspect to UFOs. What could cause one person to see a UFO and another standing right next to them not to see it?
If we go back to the idea that each of us is conscious in a videogame–like simulation, then each of us would have to render the physical world on our own “computer”—in this case, in our own consciousness. A situation where the commands to render the UFO on person A’s consciousness while not rendering it on person B’s only makes sense in the context of a distributed multiplayer simulation as opposed to a shared physical reality.
Our current understanding of physics cannot explain UFO sightings or the flight characteristics they have displayed, nor can our understanding of consciousness account for the subjective part of the UFO experience. The simulation hypothesis makes this easier, particularly as we build in the idea that consciousness may be involved in seeing (or not seeing) something that looks very physical to some people.
To summarize, several aspects of the UFO phenomenon which have befuddled physicists and researchers are:
Maneuverability. UFOs show maneuverability that defies the laws of physics.
Materialization. UFOs sometimes materialize out of thin air or disappear.
Subjectively Visible. Sometimes one witness sees the UFO and others don't, so there seem to be both objective and subjective aspects of the experience.
These three reported aspects of UFO sightings only make sense when we think of physical reality as a computer simulation or a video game rather than an “objective shared physical reality," evidenced, namely:
Physics Engines. Video games have physics engines that can be flouted easily by the programmers.
Rendering. Objects can be rendered anywhere in the video game so it looks like they appeared out of nowhere.
Conditional rendering. Since all the rendering is done on individual computers, it's possible for one player to see an object in a scene that is not visible to other players, a process we call narrowcasting.
The Fermi Paradox
On the flip side of the UFO phenomenon is the Fermi Paradox, first proposed by physicist Enrico Fermi (whose notable work included the first nuclear reactor, which became the basis for the Manhattan Project). The idea goes that if life/aliens existed on so many worlds in the galaxy, given the length of time the galaxy has been around, aliens would have colonized or traveled to most of the galaxy. Therefore, we should be seeing the aliens much more prominently.
While the Earth started out as the center of our universe, we now know that the sun is a star at the center of our solar system and an unremarkable one in a galaxy full of stars. Moreover, as a result of the discovery of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system; 2,000 have been confirmed and more are being discovered each year), it seems that planets are much more plentiful and potentially habitable than previously assumed. Some estimates put the number of habitable planets at more than one billion!
So where are all the aliens?
While ufology experts will say that we already are seeing aliens regularly, most scientists dismiss the UFO evidence as anecdotal and refer to the impossibility of traveling at or faster than the speed of light as the most likely reason.
Another explanation is that we don’t have the right tools to see them or aren’t scanning the right frequencies. A recent article in MIT Technology Review went over the parameters that a search for extraterrestrial intelligence would need and found that there were eight dimensions in the search grid that need to be examined. The searches to date have only been done (through organizations like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), on one fraction of one of these dimensions, so we have a long way to go!63
But another explanation is that there are no other civilizations, which would also be consistent with the simulation hypothesis. What if in all the galaxies we see, none of the stars are real but are procedurally generated planets/stars that we can observe from Earth but can never actually visit?
In Chapter 1, Stages 0 to 3: From Pong to MMORPGs, we used the example of the game No Man’s Sky, which had 18 quintillion planets. The team didn’t actually create 18 quintillion planets—they were procedurally generated and rendered as needed by the simulation. These planets don’t actually exist—it just depends on the state of the simulation. If a player is visiting a planet, only then does it get rendered. If alien life was also procedurally generated, then it would be easy to add that into the simulation. On the other hand, simply having lots and lots of dead worlds might actually make the simulation hypothesis more likely.
Going back to Chapter 6, Parallel Universes, Future Selves, and Video Games, where we discussed parallel worlds, each universe can be thought of as a different simulation running on a different track. It’s possible that we are living in one of the simulations where all the worlds are procedurally generated and there is no other form of life, but that there are other simulations where the aliens are not just plentiful but have already made themselves known to us.
This is why the simulation hypothesis can be consistent with both the Fermi Paradox and with the UFO believers. It’s beyond the scope of this book to argue either side too forcefully, but by showing how the simulation hypothesis might account for them, it may help explain both sides of this debate—those who believe that not only do aliens exist but they have visited us on Earth and those who believe there are no other advanced civilizations in the galaxy!
Jung and Synchronicity
Switching gears again, the term synchronicity was first introduced by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung in an attempt to explain many aspects of life that bordered on the paranormal. Jung mentioned synchronicity in many of his papers but finally wrote his defining paper on the subject in 1951 in which he described synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle.”
Jung’s more casual definition, that a synchronicity is a “meaningful coincidence,” has caught on and has become a fountain of ideas for many scientists and nonscientists trying to explain how the world works. Jung gave several examples in his original work. One of the most famous was the “beetle” example. A woman that he was treating was having some difficulty with her therapy. She mentioned that she had a dream the previous night that involved a scarab, an Egyptian beetle that appears in many Egyptian reliefs. Just as she told the story, a beetle tapped on the window to Jung’s office. He opened the window and in flew a beetle—probably the closest you could get to an Egyptian scarab in that part of Europe. He said to the woman, “There is your scarab from your dream!” and this seemed to loosen up the energy and she made rapid progress on her therapy.
As in many classic cases of synchronicity, there is no way to logically define cause and effect, but both events, the psychic event (thinking or speaking about something) and the external event, fall together in time (“synchronized”) in a meaningful way. Synchronicity is seen not as a purely scientific or as a purely psychological phenomenon: it is one of the few concepts that includes both. In the previous example, we can’t say whether the beetle tapping on the window at that exact time was caused by the woman telling her dream of the beetle, but we can’t separate the two events either. In fact, Jung corresponded heavily with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, about the concept before writing his defining paper on synchronicity.
