3 Scientific arguments supporting we might be living in a simulation
By: Sang-Gon Lee
Tags: Physics, Simulation, Simulation Theory

Original post is here

If you were like most people, at least once in a life you probably had a doubt whether the world is what it seems to be. Perhaps you thought everyone else might be tricking you like in “The Truman Show”, or perhaps you thought the world is secretly controlled by aliens and some people are aliens in disguise. Or perhaps you thought we are actually game characters living in the game, which is a simulation. In my case, it was some combination of those — I thought everyone else might be able to read my mind, and were pretending not to be able to.

But regardless of what conspiracy theories you had in mind, I bet ya it was an unfounded theory. It wasn’t based on scientific reasoning. It was just your “gut feeling”, and you couldn’t think of any ways to find the evidence. And that’s how you put that idea aside, and went on with your life.

Now what if I tell you, there are actually some scientific arguments and discoveries that support the idea we might actually indeed be living in a simulation? And what’s more, there are more and more discoveries being made supporting it recently, and more and more physicists are supporting this argument? Elon Musk said that the chance that we are not living in a simulation is 1 in 1,000,000,000. Here are three of the arguments why that might be the case.

Double Slit Experiment

Have you played or seen one of those modern 3D games which present photorealistic graphics? 3D graphics are making impressive advances every year. The thing is, 3D graphics requires a lot of computational resources — it needs gigabytes of storage to store data, enough memory to process and swap out temporary data, and fast CPU (or more often GPU) to drive processing and rendering visual data efficiently. In fact, games are the biggest motivator to push the boundaries of hardware (and some areas of software) advancement. It’s so computationally expensive that 3D graphics developers needed to think of creative ways to save as much resources as possible so that graphics are rendered efficiently.

One such way is to render only what’s necessary to render. If you’re playing a first-person shooting game, you only need to render what’s seen from the player’s eyes, and don’t even bother rendering the things behind the player. No need to render things inside a building that the player doesn’t have access to. That’s why you see weird, broken graphics in the area that glitches take you to, where you’re not able to enter by normal means.

Uh-oh. Not what you’re supposed to be looking at

Basically you save computational power by rendering only what we’re observing. Okay that’s cool and smart, but what does it have to do with our simulation theory? Has someone found a glitched area in “the real world”?

No, at least not yet. But read on.

In 1998 (although the original format of the experiment was by Thomas Young in 1801), one of the most famous and confusing experiments in human history was performed. In the “Double Slit Experiment”, scientists shot an electron beam towards a wall with two slits in the middle, and another wall behind that. As electrons were thought to be particles, the electrons that went through the slits left two lines on the wall behind, as expected. What was mind-blowing was that, when they were not observing, electrons left more than two lines on the wall, a phenomenon that can only be explained by the fact that electrons are waves, not particles. In other words, electrons were behaving like particles when we were observing it, but behaving like waves when we were not observing it. This is called “Observer Effect”.

Electrons behave like a wave when we’re not observing

This result was so mysterious that physicists had to just “accept it”, without understanding why. This concept might be more famously known as “Schrödinger’s Cat”.

Do you start to see the connection? People realized that this phenomenon resembles how we render graphics. Things change state based on whether we are observing them or not, similarly to how the things are rendered or not based on whether the player observes them or not in 3D graphics. This is the first argument supporting the world is a simulation.

Quantum Entanglement

One of modern physics discoveries is “Quantum Entanglement”. In the simplest terms, it’s a phenomenon where a pair of particles share their states, regardless of how far they are. If one particle in the pair decides its state, the state of the other particle in the pair is instantly decided.

Now let’s suppose that one particle in a pair is with us on the Earth, and the other particle is 1 billion light years away from us. Quantum Entanglement states that as soon as the state of the particle on the Earth is determined, the other particle a billion light years away has its state determined. So essentially, some sort of medium carried information between two particles much faster than light. In other words, information (that the particle on the Earth determined its state) somehow travelled much faster than the light here.

Does “travelled faster than light” ring a bell for anyone? Correct, Einstein’s Relativity Theory states that nothing can travel faster than light. No particles, no matter or energy can travel faster than light. But here what travelled was some form of information. Information travelled faster than light.

This seems to suggest that the most fundamental building blocks of the universe are not particles, but information. If the world is a simulation, where it will certainly consist of information (similarly to how computer simulation in our world consists of 0’s and 1’s), it will explain this phenomenon for sure.

One In a Billion

Let’s go back to Elon Musk. Why did he say that the chance that we’re not living in a simulation is one in a billion?

Let’s think about it for a moment. Technologies have made immense advancements in the past 100 years. We can now run photorealistic graphics that are almost indistinguishable from reality. We will continue to make such advancements unless we go extinct, and within a thousand (or more safely, a million) years, we will be able to create simulations that are truly indistinguishable from the reality, to the point where the humans in the simulation have all the neurons and freely think and act just like us.

If you ask why we would do such a thing, think games, experiments, to name a few. But ultimately, think of all the simulations we’ve created so far. Not all of them have clear purpose; we humans like to create things just because we can, even if they’re not useful.

So say we’ve created this simulation that has humans just like us, and the humans in this simulation will evolve and make technological advancements like us. Won’t these humans in the simulation also create yet another similar simulation? And it just goes on and on? This chain will repeat until the reality — the “true” reality — stops existing, probably due to extinction. And what’s the probability that we are placed in this very top of the chain, the true reality? Wouldn’t it be logical to say that it’s very, very small? This is what Elon Musk means by “one in a billion”.

Afterword

Of course, these are just speculations and that’s why I called them “supporting scientific arguments”, not “evidences”. But more and more discoveries are being made that support this theory. Furthermore, so many mysteries in science can be explained with this theory.

Also, if this is true, the afterlife presented by Christian religions (where you go to somewhere and stay there forever) may not exist, but the concept of rebirth given by some other religions like Buddhism or Hinduism may be relevant, in a sense that the data allocated to use will be “recycled”.