The simulation hypothesi.., p.23
The Simulation Hypothesis, page 23
In my book Treasure Hunt, I spent a great deal of time on synchronicities and how they might be interpreted and where they come from. There are many different theories about synchronicity, but those who believe that the phenomenon exists generally put the source of synchronicity in one of two buckets:
Spiritual or Religious Perspective. In traditional religions, as described earlier in this chapter, synchronicity may be meaningful messages from God or from our guardian angels, who are trying to get us to notice some course of action or some event that may be important in our lives. From a more new-age perspective, synchronicity comes into play when there are clues that are important for our life plan—our karma—such as paying attention to a specific person or place that will be important to us.
Scientific or Quantum Physics. From a more scientific point of view, synchronicity can be explained by future selves that are sending back messages to us. The idea is that we need to notice certain things in our environment in order to make the choices or decisions that will lead to one possible or probable future. We explored this idea in Chapter 6, Parallel Universes, Future Selves, and Video Games.
A third explanation, one that makes sense, is that synchronicity is actually revealing an order to us that we cannot see in the physical world. In the simulation hypothesis, this becomes more explicit—we are given clues about our next quest, and to makes sure we notice those clues, we are given an external event that corresponds to something we had been thinking.
Informally, when I wrote Treasure Hunt about synchronicity in the business world, I started calling individual events “glitches in the Matrix.” At that time, I had yet to fully develop the arguments around the simulation hypothesis, which are the focus of this book, but the model of living inside a simulation, where our thoughts and actions are (1) monitored, and (2) fed back into a loop that creates seemingly external events based upon our game state and our specific set of quests and achievements, fits very well into Jung’s idea of synchronicity.
Jacques Vallee, in his TED Talk titled “The Physics of Everything Else” in 2011, was more explicit: he said that synchronicity and coincidence may reveal part of the underlying structure of how the universe stores information. He uses the analogy of a physical library—where we store and retrieve books according to physical dimension (book x, shelf y, slot 7). In more sophisticated computer science, Vallee states that we store information “associatively” and statistically retrieve it rather than relying on physical location (i.e., shelf 14):
What modern computer scientists have realized is that ordering by space and time is the worst possible way to store data.… If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, we may be traversing incidents by association; modern computers retrieve information associatively.64
What Vallee was referring to was a more sophisticated way to store and retrieve information—based on association, which might make synchronicities part and parcel of how the universe is assembled, not something “miraculous” or “unexplainable.”
Very close to the idea of synchronicity is the concept of déjà vu—an experience we have when we think we have seen something or someplace or some event play out before. We have a funny feeling—I like to think of this as another type of “glitch in the Matrix”—in fact, in the movie it was explicitly mentioned.
In the introduction of this book, I referenced the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who explicitly believed that we were living in a computer-generated reality. He believed that when we experienced déjà vu it was because we had seen an event or place before—but that reality had been changed. We were in essence sensing a parallel reality that had been rewound and rerun to the present with a different outcome. At a famous speech Dick gave at a science fiction convention in Metz, France, in 1977, he said:
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs. We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present—déjà vu—perhaps in precisely the same way: hearing the same words, saying the same words. I submit that these impressions are valid and significant, and I will even say this: such an impression is a clue, that in some past time point, a variable was changed—reprogrammed as it were—and that because of this, an alternative world branched off.
Our feelings of déjà vu and the revelations of synchronicity revealing an order in the world that defies scientific explanations may be the ordinary everyday evidence that the simulation hypothesis is the best model for our reality.
OBEs, Remote Viewing, Telepathy and Other “Unexplained” Phenomena
In her book, Dying To Be Me, Anita Moorjani, who had an NDE in a Hong Kong hospital, after which she was miraculously cured of lymphoma, reported not just perceiving what was going on in the room around her but also what other people—some hundreds of miles away—were doing. This included her brother, who was on his way from India to Hong Kong to visit her. Dannion Brinkley, who we mentioned earlier in the section on NDEs, reported a similar experience of being able to see what was going on in the hospital while he was “dead.”
This phenomenon, called an out-of-body experience (OBE or OOBE), is not restricted to near-death experiences—religious mystics and explorers of consciousness have been reporting OBEs for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It is one of the unexplained areas of consciousness for which science has no satisfactory explanation in the material point of view. One of the benefits of people who have reported OBEs is a diminishing fear of death and a sense of well-being since they are less afraid of what will happen if they die and leave the body.
A better model is needed to explain how OBEs might work. In many religious traditions and new age philosophy, the physical body is surrounded by an etheric body, which is much more “subtle” than the physical. The etheric body is surrounded by an astral body.
In Yogic literature, the body is surrounded by clear sheaths called koshas. These look like layers of electromagnetic fields around the body. Though it is still controversial in the scientific community, many practitioners claim to see auras, and Kirlian photography was developed as a way to photograph what is going on in the different levels of the aura. The occult explanation is that the astral body travels away from the physical body, and the astral body is free to travel anywhere in the astral realm, which mirrors the physical world in many ways and allows the user to peer into the physical.
Robert Monroe, who wrote about his own experiences with out-of-body journeys in his two books, Journeys Out of the Body and Far Journeys, raised the idea that OBEs were not just about traveling in the physical world but might involve journeying to other realms that are not connected at all with our physical bodies.
In this model of reality, there are other realms beyond the astral, namely the “causal body” in the “causal” realm and where we go after we die. In the Vedas, the five sheaths (koshas) correspond with the three bodies: the gross body, the subtle body, and the causal body. The gross body (sthula sarira) is the physical body that we all know about. The subtle body (suksma sarira) keeps the physical body alive and transmigrates with the soul across bodies and separates from the physical body at birth. The causal body (karana sarira) is the seed that creates the subtle body and the gross physical body.65
While a thorough exploration of these philosophies and the phenomenon is out of the scope of this book, it is important that the subtle body is considered a template for the physical body in the Vedic literature. In many new age doctrines, the etheric body is considered a template that defines the shape and vitality of the cells in the physical body (and is often depicted as a mesh of light-blue lines outlining our body), and the astral body is the one that separates when someone is having an OBE or dying.
The simulation hypothesis may offer a better explanation of this phenomenon. In a simulation, each character has a rendered body. What is this based on? Information about the body (the character) is stored in some non-rendered state, but then a 3D model defines the look, shape, and feel of the character’s physical body. This 3D model isn’t visible to other people in the rendered world, yet it exists somewhere in memory or on disk and is indispensable from the actual character/player. The model is usually drawn using polygons and is considered a “mesh” of lines outlining the shape of the character’s body, which is then textured to create the actual character’s rendering in the game world.
There is a related phenomenon, called “remote viewing,” which involves sensing what is happening in a remote location. During the Cold War, the CIA and the Soviets experimented with remote viewers to clandestinely figure out what was going on in each other’s secure facilities. Subjects like Ingo Swann, Uri Geller and many others showed an uncanny ability to “look at” another physical site from a different point of view in research conducted at the Stanford Research Institute.
A simple explanation for both remote viewing and OBE’s can be offered by the “virtual camera” that is used in most MMORPG and 3D games. The virtual camera shows what the player sees. If the virtual camera is placed from the point of the view of the character, then it would be as if you were looking out of the eyes of your character. Many MMORPGs have the camera just over the back of your character, so you can see what your character looks like.
It turns out that since the client software is doing rendering based on the position of the virtual camera, it is possible, within the virtual world, to place the camera anywhere in the room! It is possible to see your character’s body from above or to go to another part of the rendered world exactly—it’s just a matter of choosing the right x, y, z coordinates in the world and rendering them. This is just like remote viewing, where we can place our “inner eye” to view some other part of the physical world, and like OBEs, where we place our “inner eye” outside of our physical body. It is simply a matter of adjusting the virtual camera inside our shared video game reality!
Remote viewing can be thought of as a type of telepathy, though that term is often reserved for the sending of a mental message from one person to another. Like the other unexplainable phenomena profiled in this chapter, telepathy is completely unexplainable in the current materialistic worldview. As with the other phenomena, the simulation hypothesis provides a much better explanation of how this could work. In every MMORPG, it is possible to send a private message to any other player in the game, whether they are physically present for you in the scene or not. Video gamers do this all the time!
Thus, the simulation hypothesis may be a better explanation for these and other unexplained phenomena than that offered by our current scientific, materialistic worldview or by the religious or occult doctrines of the past. In this way, the simulation hypothesis fits not only the Eastern religious traditions but also the Western traditions and a host of other unexplainable phenomena that have puzzled scientists.
In fact, the simulation hypothesis may provide a logical bridge between the sometimes-competing worldviews of religion and science, covering a gap that might seem unsurmountable at the moment.
Part IV
Putting It All Together
It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.
These lines may have their root in quite different parts of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions; hence, if they actually meet … then one may hope that new and interesting developments will follow.66
—Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics
Chapter 11
Skeptics and Believers: Evidence of Computation
One of the questions that I get asked often is whether it’s possible to prove, or at least to detect, via physical experiments, whether the simulation hypothesis is, in fact, true.
There are some who believe that it is impossible to detect if we are in a simulation any more than an artificial video game character can figure out that it is a character in a video game.
If there is no way to detect that we are in a simulation, it shouldn’t make a difference to us one way or another, should it? So, why bother? We should just get on with playing the game.
Marcus Noack, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, is one of those who believes that it is impossible to test the simulation hypothesis as a whole. He asserts that the best we may be able to do is to look for ways the simulation might work. He believes we can probably detect artifacts of a simulation, perhaps because the designers of the simulation were lazy and left clues for us to detect. 67
David Chalmers, professor of philosophy at New York University, opines that, even if he accepts Bostrom’s statistical argument that we are most likely simulated beings in a simulation, this is not a futile revelation, nor does it mean that the world around us isn’t real in some sense of the word. He says that even if we are in a simulation, everything around us is still real from the point of view of those inside the simulation.68
But when it comes to proving the hypothesis, it gets a little trickier. Bostrom himself says that, while he is eager to try, along with others, he does not think that there would be a clear and obvious experiment that would tell us the answer with 100 percent certainty. Still, even Bostrom admits that there might be ways to detect some evidence that we are more likely (or less likely) to be in a simulation.69
This chapter begins with some skeptics who don’t believe we are in a simulation and describes their arguments as to why it couldn’t possibly be true. We then move to some theoretical (and some actual) experiments that may show evidence of computation embedded in the physical world. This is potential evidence that we are in fact in a simulation.
These experiments are by no means conclusive, so in this chapter we are moving into speculative territory. No doubt in the decades ahead, as more of these types of experiments are derived, and as our own technology marches down the road to the simulation point, we will be able to get more definite answers.
The Categories of Arguments/Experiments
The arguments against the simulation hypothesis fall into several categories:
Evidence of Consciousness. There is a group of scientists and others that believe that consciousness is at the heart of the universe. This includes many physicists—ranging from Max Planck to Amit Goswami and others. Some folks in the camp use this basic idea about the universe as an argument against the simulation hypothesis by stating that Bostrom’s simulation argument cannot be true because it states that we are simulated beings only, as opposed to conscious beings. The objection here is not to the idea of simulation but to the concept of lifeless AI, rather than conscious beings.
Evidence of Negation. These are either experiments or arguments that purport to prove that we cannot be living in a computer-generated simulation, usually because of some physical properties or by calculating the resources that would be required to generate a simulation like our physical world. These experiments and arguments usually show how a simulation of the universe would require infinite resources—a seeming impossibility—or it would require at least as many atoms as there are in physical reality, so what would be the point?
On the flip side, arguments and experiments that have been proposed to find evidence for the simulation hypothesis usually fall into two categories:
Evidence of Conditional Rendering. In this class of experiments, physicists are looking for evidence that the physical universe operates like a computer video game. In a video game, only the items that are directly visible are rendered. This is an important optimization technique used in all 3D video games that saves computing power and resources. The experiments in this category tend to be variations of the delayed-choice double-slit experiment, which we explored in Chapter 6, Parallel Universes, Future Selves, and Video Games. Some of these arguments emphasize that there needs to be an observer. This seems to be implying that if we are in a video game, we need players.
Evidence of Pixels or Computation. As we explored in Chapter 7, Pixels, Quanta, and the Structure of Space-Time , if we live in a computer-generated reality, then the physical world should leave some clues that a computer is generating our reality. These clues could be in the form of pixels (more on these soon), blurring of pixels, or other “artifacts” of coding techniques that could be embedded into the physical structure of our seemingly physical universe.
A Quick Note about Metaphysical Experiments and Consciousness
While the assertions of mystics and religious traditions also tie in to the simulation hypothesis, as we saw in Part III, for the purposes of this chapter, we’ll focus on the scientific model. Thus, we will focus on experiments proposed by physicists and evidence put forth by computer scientists—the two fields that bear directly on a simulation.
Though we are skipping the mystical interpretations in this chapter, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t experiments that can be done in that field. In fact, the Buddha told his followers not to accept what he said but to verify it themselves through their own experience with meditation and karma and reincarnation. Many believe that it is possible to verify for ourselves each of the phenomena that we went over in Part III, regarding guardian angels, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and other instances of paranormal phenomenon, through direct subjective experience.
