Could Our Universe Be a Fake? | Episode 110 | Closer To Truth

Perhaps our entire universe is like a gigantic computer game, the creation of super-smart hackers existing somewhere else? Before you smirk and laugh, watch and think! Featuring interviews with David Brin, Nick Bostrom, Raymond Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, and Martin Rees.

Season 1, Episode 10 - #CloserToTruth
Archive episode. First aired in 2008.

Closer To Truth host Robert Lawrence Kuhn takes viewers on an intriguing global journey into cutting-edge labs, magnificent libraries, hidden gardens, and revered sanctuaries in order to discover state-of-the-art ideas and make them real and relevant.

Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[thehistoryprof]

Love the no boundaries free thinking this series represents. Unique and in a class of its own. Thanks.

[AlienRelics]

An 8-bit game character would think, "No one could build a computer powerful enough to simulate all the detail of the world."

[cvsree]

Universe is a dream. As long as we have desires, we cannot wake up from this dream.

[DesertTalk]

I found Kurzweil interesting. I have similar thoughts regarding information. Martin Rees always has clarity in his explanations. A great sequence of interviews.

[longcastle]

If the simulators can intervene, please get rid of Putin. And his pal Trump along with all his lackeys. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

[cynthiacole]

The concept of living in a simulation is as hard to accept and understand as NOT living in a simulation. For my brain anyway.

[PetraKann]

The question “do we live in a simulation?” Is part of the simulation

[ronvanderveen]

Onward and upward!!! Cheers 🍻 truth and honesty growing exponentially. What a time to be alive. !!

[buggy]

I think it’s both:
consciousness is fundamental and the simulation is the vehicle that consciousness rides in. Our base reality uses simulations (universes) to explore itself

[mikeharper]

Have you ever seen an editing mistake in a movie, such as a cowboy wearing a Seiko watch when the movie was depicting a scene during the 1800’s. Or a quick glimpse of a plane flying in the same movie? In the 1970’s, a friend and I were witness to such an anomaly that happened in our imaginary and simulated world and existence. We weren’t watching a movie inside a theater, we were walking down a dirt path in the San Bernardino mountains on our way back to the car after a failed fishing venture. As we were walking, a group of geese flew out from the underbrush of the mountainside and I for some reason, which was just immature playing around, decided to point my fishing pole at the birds and pretended to shoot at the birds, even making a playful sound with my mouth to simulate the sound of a gunshot, and then, suddenly, the “matrix” made a mistake as one of the birds froze in midair, as if time had stopped. The bird hung in midair and defied all the laws of nature and physics and just froze there in space. And after 5 or 6 seconds, as the matrix was trying to calculate an escape from this error, the bird suddenly went into a vertical position while simultaneously spreading out its wings and it began to rotate along its vertical axis and the spin was accelerating. This caused the bird to further defy all the laws of nature and physics as it began to ascend upwards about four feet into the air before finally just stopping all together and then fell not the thick underbrush of the mountain, out of our sight and reach. My friend, who been in front of me on the path, slowly turned around and then gingerly reached out his hand to push the fishing pole I was holding so that it was pointed away from him. I reminded him that it was a fishing pole. He told me he knew that but after seeing what happened to the bird, he didn’t want to take any chances. So we both had witnessed the exact same thing. Then we tried to find the bird but the thick underbrush of the mountain prevented us from getting it. I thought about this anomaly for years before realizing that our reality is just a very powerful hologram existence, an illusion, and as Einstein said, “A very persistent illusion.” That was over fifty years ago and my life has had several anomalies in it that have brought me to the belief that there are no coincidences in life. Every moment has a purpose and meaning. And it all culminated into a quick peek behind the curtains about eight months ago that revealed to me our true nature and essence inside this tiny universe. But that takes us to the topic of consciousness and is a fall inside the rabbit hole that even a thousand books couldn’t explain. It truly all is just a dream inside of a dream.

[jollygreen]

Go walk in front of a bus and let me know if it’s fake.

[matthewfischer]

This idea is no different then the idea of an omnipotent god, it’s as old as humanity itself. Regardless, if this universe is somehow playing itself out on a computer in a separate reality, it changes nothing. More times then not a scientific simulation entails setting up the scenario then letting itself play out to see what and how it all happens. Unless it’s some child’s video game of course, in that case we’re all screwed.

[mockupguy]

I would not call a simulation fake. A simulation exist, it is real.

[JClay-lfnx]

Who created the creators of our simulation? Wouldn't the same rules apply to them as well, so that they're perhaps simulated beings creating other simulated beings...and so on.

[Cloninginvesting]

So happy to see that mainstream science is open now to all the possibilities

[LatinosOver]

To be clear - I don’t claim that the simulation hypothesis is true - in fact, my gut feel is that it isn’t. But there are things out there that DO point in that direction.

The simulation hypothesis is “unfalsifiable” - we can never prove that we AREN’T being simulated because the simulation can be arbitrarily good - and any flaws in it would simply look like the kinds of quirky things that happen in quantum physics all the time. Proving it’s true is incredibly difficult - because, again, no matter how weird and quirky things get (and we know that they do!) - this can all be attributed to “how the universe works” - and we can put together elaborate theories to explain those quirks.

Let me point out a couple of simple examples:

I happen to have been a video game and simulation programmer for most of my career - so if a universe simulator were to be written - I’m the kind of guy who’d be writing it…and the kinds of short-cuts that I’d take are the kinds of things we should be looking out for.

If I were designing a “universe simulator” - I’d want to distribute the workload across many computers. I’d probably do something like Linden Labs did with their “Second Life” simulation - which is to assign one computer to every such-and-such volume of space. Perhaps I’ll have one computer for every cubic parsec of space. There would be an ungodly number of these computers - but hey - I live in a universe one level up from ours - the laws of physics are probably different there - so maybe I can build a very large number of computers very cheaply.

Now - when something happens inside one of those cubic parsecs that impacts events in one of the neighboring cubic parsec - I’ll need those two computers to exchange information about the event. So if a star explodes in one parsec-cube - then all of the surrounding parsec-cubes will need to be told that there is a transfer of light, gamma rays, etc.

Fine so far…but hold on a moment - how many computers have to get that information? Well, in theory, ALL of them do - a world that’s a thousand parsecs away would need to obtain light from the supernova…so I might have to share that information across a few BILLION computers!

Argh…that’s a real pain in the butt to do.

Ooohhhh! I know - why don’t I make the speed of light be REALLY slow - and have it be “The Cosmic Speed Limit” - and not allow anything - not even information - to travel faster than that!

Now, the computer in which the star explodes only has to tell it’s immediate neighbors - and over the course of a few years, they can tell their neighbors - and so forth.

Limiting the speed of light drastically reduces “latency requirements” and makes my simulation MUCH easier to put together.

So … we could argue that the extremely weird fact that there is a cosmic speed limit is some sort of a hint that maybe we’re in a simulation!

In case you think that’s unlikely - I once worked for a company that made a multiplayer online game (World of Tanks) - which (just like Linden Labs) assigned one server computer to every square kilometer of the gaming area (it may have been more than 1km - I forget). The servers updated their game world 60 times per second - and communicated back and forth between themselves at the end of each update cycle.

So when you fired a gun or launched a missile, it could not possibly travel faster than 1 kilometer per 16 milliseconds. That conveniently meant that every server computer only had to pass on information to its immediate neighbors in each update cycle - and if a missile needed to travel more than a couple of kilometers - then it would take 16 milliseconds to cross each kilometer.

In effect, that game had a “speed of light” limitation of 60 kilometers per second.

Would the Albert Einstein of that simulated game world think:

“Oh wow! There is this weird cosmic speed limit - isn’t physics strange!?!”

… or would he just assume:

“There is a weird cosmic speed limit - we must be living in a simulation.”?

It’s hard to say … but in our case, we’ve been happily accepting the finite speed of light as a “Law of physics” for about 100 years now … and in all that time, we’ve never once thought that this “proves” the simulation hypothesis.

Then, we have the expansion of space. This is amazingly useful to our hypothetical hyper-programmer. Because space slowly expands, we cannot ever see things beyond about 42 billion lightyears. So between that and the finite speed of light, we have a clever way to pretend to simulate an infinite, unbounded universe with only a finite number of computers.

Many video games have a very hard time covering up what happens at the edges of their game world.

Then, there is “The Big Bang” - which is also very useful as a starting point for the simulation. Starting it with a zero sized singularity - and having that create both space and time - provides all sorts of conveniences. It means that the universe didn’t have to be created in every detail in a way that would be completely invisible to observers within it. In fact, if “creationism” were true - that would be concrete proof that we were living in a simulation … but a very poorly implemented one. Starting with the Big Bang makes simulation very consistent - with no weird flaws due to inconsistent initial conditions.

Real video games often suffer from that exact problem. In one video game I worked on at Midway Games, we started the game with simulated people randomly placed in the game world. But once in a while, one of them would be randomly dropped into a location which they could never possibly have gotten into in the real world - and they’d be trapped there forever! If the inhabitants of that game were intelligent, then events like that would clearly demonstrate that they lived in a simulation.

Starting with the Big Bang prevents you from accidentally making mistakes of that kind because everything evolves consistently from an informationless initial state.

Of course the finite speed of light, the expansion of space, the Big Bang, and quantum weirdnesses, by themselves, prove nothing. Even things like quantized properties of the universe and things like the “uncertainty principle” which might be hiding “roundoff errors” can also be interpreted as a convenience for the programmers OR as “just the way the universe works”.

So we can pile up things that suggest that the universe MIGHT be simulated - but we can’t ever truly prove it … and we certainly can’t ever DISPROVE it.

This problem is a lot like “The Existence of God” … you can’t disprove it - and there isn’t (yet) any convincing evidence that proves it … so we should be at least agnostic on this topic … veering towards an atheistic (a-simulation-ist) position.

[Cloninginvesting]

This is what Vedanta talks about all the time, everything is a simulation of Brahman.

[Cilexius]

Everyone talks about the matrix movies, when it comes to the simulation hypothesis. Considering the ancestor simulation, the movie "The 13th Floor – Bist du was du denkst?" would be much more appropriate.

[ronaldmorgan]

As believer in a supreme being outside of this universe that created this universe, then of course I would believe that the universe is a simulation. It has been made, and it is undoubtedly different from where the supreme being resides. Does it matter? Not really, unless we use our knowledge to destroy the simulation, and us with it. My solace--aside from living what I believe to be a good life--is that there is a connection between where we are, and where we came from. And, the ability for the creator to use that connection to move me from the simulation to the creator's "area" when my time in the simulation has ended

[benbarkerdreaming]

When I used dmt one time I could see that everything has a super complex mandala like a computer chip... And higher consciousness could read these mandala and read all the information about your energy your experiences and make up from the beginning of your creation to the end...