What is Simulation Theory and are we living in a simulation? We will dive into it!
Is Our World Just A Fake Simulation, Created By A Higher Civilization?
We live in a big simulation that runs on gigantic computers of a highly developed civilization. Some billionaires and researchers believe that. They even want to find errors in the matrix. Others think the simulation hypothesis isn’t true. What do you all mean? We provide some arguments for and against the thesis so that we can discuss it with you.
It's amazing how realistic these worlds are. Not quite 50 years ago, the first copies of the Atari slot machine classic Pong were pushed into the gambling halls. The video game consisted of just a few lines, a whirring square, and two counters for the score. Today, games like Red Dead Redemption 2 paint huge landscapes on our screens and televisions filled with forests, cities, and hundreds of characters. The graphics engines behind it simulate how sunlight penetrates human skin and is reflected. They cover tracts of land with realistic weather and ensure that horses' testicles shrink when temperatures drop.
If you believe developers , video games that can no longer be visually distinguished from reality, or at least look like big blockbusters, are no longer decades away, but only a few years. For the Tesla boss and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, this is exactly one of the strongest arguments for the fact that the world we live in is possibly just a kind of video game itself, a simulation that was created by a higher race or our descendants. Because if we almost manage to create virtual spaces that look like the real world, what are further developed beings capable of? We ourselves would therefore not be biological, but digital intellectual beings who beat our way through a hyper-realistic image of what may exist out there. The chance that we exist in reality, says Musk, is "one in several billion".
The simulation is statistically conceivable
This theory, which at first seems completely crazy, does not come from Elon Musk himself, but from the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom. In 2003 he published Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? that made waves around the world. Bostrom hypothesized that a highly developed civilization like mankind could come to a point where it had enough computing power and energy to recreate the lives of billions of individuals in a computer program.
Science fiction authors like Robert Bradbury have shown what that might look like. In an essay he invented the matry brain . This is supposed to be a huge shell that - comparable to a Dyson sphere - completely encloses a star. As a result, the entire energy of the star could be used to operate gigantic computer systems that fan out around the shell like onion skins.
Before a civilization could create something like this, however, it would have to master numerous social and technological challenges. Nick Bostrom therefore postulated three possibilities for a civilization like mankind in his simulation hypothesis.
1. Possibility:
It dies out before it reaches a stage of development in which it grows beyond the current limits of thought, knowledge and action and thus becomes such a post-human civilization with outstanding technical abilities.
2. Possibility:
3. Possibility:
According to Bostrom, the probabilities for each of these possibilities are sometimes more, sometimes less balanced, depending on the current state of research . This means that the possibility that we live in a simulation would be less than 50 percent - but it would still be comparatively high. In theory, one civilization in the history of the cosmos with this technology and the will to create a simulation is enough to produce an almost infinite number of it. Eventually, a simulated civilization itself may eventually get to a point where it develops one or more simulations. These in turn could do the same and so on and so forth. From a purely mathematical point of view, the option that such simulations exist and that we live in one of them is therefore entirely plausible.
Will we ever know the "truth"?
Waiting for evidence for or against a simulation takes too long for some. If there is one, then, like in a video game, there must also be ways of triggering errors with certain actions. These could then allow the program behind it to be exploited and things to be done that are not intended: We could use cheats to stop climate change, eliminate diseases or even simulate the world above it to leave. Possible means, could be upcoming experiments with particle accelerators or quantum computers. They have the potential to overload components of a simulation, if it is there, and exploit possible bugs.
But believing in a simulation, he says, is no crazier than believing that the world and everything in it was created by an Almighty God. “Why shouldn't it be true?”. Two tech billionaires from Silicon Valley are said to be more convinced. They, which claimed at least the US investor Sam Altmann, engaged in secret a group of scientists to find out whether and how to escape the simulated world of illusion. But even if that could succeed, it would not be certain that, as in the Truman Show , the real world is waiting behind the hypothetical outcome . Possibly there are other simulated realities created by civilizations that are also likely to doubt and try to break out.
Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that the developers of a simulation might have considered that we were looking for errors in the matrix or outputs. Any attempt to find evidence for a simulation could be undermined with exactly that data. According to Bostrom himself, the only strong evidence for a simulation would therefore be that mankind itself realizes such a simulation as he describes it. Or when a Windows window appears in the sky that says “You live in a simulation” and “Click here for more information”.
Written by gamzeno
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