Halloween Horrors: The Existential Dread of Simulation Theory
How about a nice helping of existential dread for the Halloween season? But instead of worrying that you’re a fragile shell of decaying cells whose inevitable demise will terminate your brief, flickering existence in a howling void of meaningless nothingness, it’s the worry that neither you nor your too, too fragile husk is real at all, and that you’re just a string of 1s and 0s being run inside a computer.
Welcome to simulation theory!
“Would everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe be artificial? Supporters of simulation theory believe that not only is it possible that we’re living in a simulation, it’s likely.”
“Modern simulation theory comes from Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, who wrote an influential paper on the subject in 2003 assuming that living in a simulation is possible. Bostrom presents the simulation trilemma, which says one of the following must be true:
We destroy ourselves before we’re able to create a simulation.
We’re able to create a simulation, but choose not to. Or
We are definitely in a simulation.
Bostrom believes each of these is equally likely to be true.”
“When a civilization can create a realistic simulation, the most obvious one to create is that of its own early existence. Bostrom calls this an ancestral simulation, and a civilization that can do this wouldn’t just create one simulation, it would create many, and those simulated civilizations might create their own simulations of the universe, and on and on, like Russian nesting dolls of reality.”
Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson both think it’s possible we’re living in a simulation.
“In that program, our program, all the laws of the universe, electromagnetism and gravitational force, are written into the program. The speed of light gets a value. There’s code for Planck’s constants of mass, speed, and time. Avogadro’s number is in there, along with a bunch of other rules that govern the behavior of everything that exists, all part of our program. Even consciousness itself is part of our simulation.”
Philip K. Dick “believed there are many universes, and sometimes those other realities bleed into ours. He claimed to have visions of this, and even wrote stories like The Man in the High Castle, based on these visions, that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another, like so many film transparencies.”
“One way other realities blend into ours could be The Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is when a large number of people have memories of events that don’t match reality. This is called The Mandela Effect because millions of people specifically remember Nelson Mandela died in prison. He didn’t. People remember his wife walking beside his casket in a funeral procession that was on television for two hours that day. This never happened.”
I’m snipping the other Mandela Effect examples, but I would swear that Jaws’ girlfriend actually had braces in Moonraker.
“Philip K. Dick also felt when we experienced deja vu is because something in our simulated universe changed and a new timeline branched off of the current one. We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed.”
“Ever feel like you’ve lived a moment before? That’s because, according to Philip K. Dick and others, you have. Deja vu is the simulation correcting itself with new information.”
It also explains the Drake Equation: “Are we really alone in the universe or does our program only focus on us?”
“Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT, said the strict laws of physics point to the possibility of a simulation putting a cap on the speed of light. Sure is a good way to keep your sims from venturing out too far from home.”
Skipping over the “error correcting code in string theory equations” bit because string theory is garbage.
The deep embedding of math at every level of the universe argues in favor of simulation theory. “We see Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio everywhere.”
“No matter what we study, whether it’s something the size of a galaxy or as small as an electron, everything in the universe seems to follow patterns and rules. In other words, a program.”
The continued growth of computing power indicates how powerful computers in the future could run complex simulations.
While it’s said that you would need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe, that’s not true. Just as in modern simulations, you only need to render what someone is paying attention to at any given time.
The famous double slit experiment is evidence that the universe only renders things when we’re paying attention. “It’s as if the particles are aware they’re being observed.”
“Even though our universe is full of galaxies, those galaxies may not actually be there. If we’re living in a simulation, then stars and galaxies could simply be projections, and only when we get up close, those projections become more detailed. This is an excellent way to save computational resources. And because we’re stuck with a hard limit of the speed of light, getting to far-off places is really difficult.”
Personally, I think simulation theory is probably wrong for a meta-critique reason. All previous metaphorical understanding of the universe (as clockwork mechanism, as organism) have proven wrong, so this one is likely to be wrong as well…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024 at 10:45 AM and is filed under Games, Horror, Uncategorized, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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