Simulation Theory



Elon thinks we’re living in a computer simulation. His argument goes something like this: The first video game (Pong) was released 45 years ago. Today, we have 3D, augmented and virtual worlds that are almost indistinguishable from our world. It’s now impossible to tell the difference between a real photograph or a computer generated one.

NVIDIA Neural Network — A.I. Generated Faces

If we went from 2 rectangles and a dot to nearing real-world pixel to pixel resolution in just 45 years — where will we be in another 45 years? If I may ask, take your eyes off this screen, and just look around.

Are we in a video game? Does Super Mario know he’s in a video game? Elon thinks it’s “1 in billions that we’re in base reality,” and if he could ask A.I. one question, it would be, “What’s outside the simulation?” However, even if we could go outside the simulation, who’s to say we’re not just in another simulation? The simulation theory is just not deep enough.

Eternal Recurrence

Friedrich Nietzsche gives us a much deeper description of the nature of reality. In his book, The Gay Science, he writes:

What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again — and you with it, speck of dust!”

Nietzsche called this the Eternal Recurrence. Everything will return to you exactly as they did and in the exact same sequence. Your entire life has already occurred an infinite amount of times in the past and will reoccur an infinite amount of times in the future.

Poincaré Recurrence Theorem

This isn’t mere philosophy. In physics, the Poincaré Recurrence Theorem states that all systems will, after a sufficiently long but finite time, return to the exact same state as the initial state. To borrow Max Tegmark’s worked example in the May 2003 edition of Scientific American — Based on the number of different ways a volume of space can be filled with fundamental particles, Tegmark assumes that our observable Universe has a diameter of 8x10 ^ 26m, and a nucleon measures 2x10 ^ -13m across. This gives the Universe a capacity of around 10 ^ 118 nucleons and therefore allows for 2 ^ 10 ^ 118 possible ways of filling a Universe-sized space with nucleons (ours being one of those ways). This reasoning leads him to suggest that identical copies of human beings are separated by about 10 ^ 10 ^ 28m and that within 10 ^ 10 ^ 92m there is a volume of space 100 light-years in diameter which is identical to our own local space.

In summary, chance has rolled the dice of life and landed on the right configuration of particles to produce you and me, because, just look around — here we are. And rolling the dice enough times will eventually give you the same numbers twice. Therefore, if you traveled far enough, you will, inevitably, meet a replica of yourself.

Utopia

If we accepted this theory to be true then shouldn’t we aim for utopia? For the greatest good of the human race? Not necessarily. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his book, Notes from the Underground, makes the case:

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.”

Simply put, even if we were to achieve utopia, the first thing we would do is find something to smash out of sheer boredom and ingratitude — I can’t see how it would be otherwise.

If it’s not the greatest good that we should be aiming for, then what’s the point of it all? I propose to you: What if things are the way they are because it couldn’t have been any other way. What if we live in the best of all possible worlds?

The Best of all Possible Worlds

Imagine you can lucid dream every single night.

You’d be able to travel through time, fly with the birds and run and laugh with loved ones through open sunny fields of pure happiness.

Every night you would enter this place (for months, years, decades,…) until you’ve experienced everything your heart desired.

Then what’s left to experience?

You would then dabble in the deepest and darkest regions of your imagination and live in this state until there is nothing left.

This would go on for many more years until you’ve become a shell of your former self. Without purpose, without meaning and without any desire to move forward.

After experiencing all there is to experience, all the highs and all the lows, then what’s left to experience?

The answer is uncertainty.



And that’s the world we live in today, not knowing what tomorrow may bring. What if things are the way they are because there is nothing else. This is where we ended up because it couldn’t have been any other way.