'Simulated reality' is the idea that reality could be simulated — often
computer-simulated — to a degree indistinguishable from 'true'
reality. It could contain conscious minds which may or may not know that they are living inside a simulation. In its strongest form, the "
Simulation hypothesis" claims we actually are living in such a simulation.
This is different from the current, technologically achievable concept of
virtual reality. Virtual reality is easily distinguished from the experience of 'true' reality; participants are never in doubt about the nature of what they experience. Simulated reality, by contrast, would be hard or impossible to distinguish from 'true' reality.
The idea of a simulated reality raises several questions:
★ Is it possible, even in principle, to tell whether we are in a simulated reality?
★ Is there any difference between a simulated reality and a 'real' one?
★ How should we behave if we knew that we were living in a simulated reality?
Types of simulation
Brain-computer interface
In a
brain-computer interface simulation, each participant enters from outside, directly connecting their brain to the simulation computer. The computer transfers sensory data to them and reads their desires and actions back; in this manner they interact with the simulated world and receive feedback from it. The participant may even receive adjustment in order to temporarily forget that they are inside a virtual realm (e.g. "passing through the veil"). While inside the simulation, the participant's
consciousness is represented by an
avatar, which could look very different from the participant's actual appearance.
The
Cyberpunk genre of fiction contains many examples of brain-computer interface simulated reality.
Virtual people
In a virtual-people simulation, every inhabitant is a native of the simulated world. They do not have a 'real' body in the 'outside' reality. Rather, each is a fully simulated entity, possessing an appropriate level of consciousness that is implemented using the simulation's own logic (i.e. using its own physics). As such, they could be downloaded from one simulation to another, or even archived and resurrected at a later date. It is also possible that a simulated entity could be moved out of the simulation entirely by means of
mind transfer into a synthetic body (an example of this in fiction is when
SID 6.7 escapes his simulated reality in the movie
Virtuosity).
This category subdivides into two further types:
★ 'Virtual people-virtual world', in which an external reality is simulated separately to the
artificial consciousnesses;
and
★ 'Solipsistic simulation' in which consciousness is simulated and the "world" participants perceive exists only within their minds.
Emigration
In an emigration simulation, the participant enters the simulation from the outer reality, as in the brain-computer interface simulation, but to a much greater degree. On entry, the participant uses
mind transfer to temporarily ''relocate'' their mental processing into a virtual-person. After the simulation is over, the participant's mind is transferred back into their outer-reality body, along with all new memories and experience gained within.
Intermingled
Morpheus teaches Neo inside a small simulated reality
An intermingled simulation supports both types of consciousness: players from the outer reality who are visiting (as a brain-computer interface simulation) or emigrating, and virtual-people who are natives of the simulation and hence lack any physical body in the outer reality.
The Matrix movies feature an intermingled type of simulation: they contain not only human minds (with their physical brains remaining outside), but also the
'agents', who are sovereign software programs indigenous to the computed realm.
Arguments
We are living in a simulation
Nick Bostrom's argument
The philosopher
Nick Bostrom investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation.
A simplified version of his argument is:
:i. It is ''possible'' that a civilization could create a computer simulation which contains individuals with artificial intelligence.
:ii. Such a civilization would ''likely'' run many – say billions – of these simulations (just for fun; for research, etc.)
:iii. A simulated individual inside the simulation ''wouldn’t know'' that it’s inside a simulation – it’s just going about its daily business in what it considers the “real world”.
Then the ultimate question is – if one accepts that points 1-2-3 are at least ''possible'', which of the following is more likely?
:a. We are the ''one'' civilization out there in the universe that will eventually develop the ability to run AI simulations? Or,
:b. We are one of the ''billions'' of simulations that has run? (Remember point iii.)
In greater detail, his argument attempts to prove the
trichotomy, that:
:'either'
# intelligent races will never reach a level of technology where they can run simulations of reality so detailed they can be mistaken for reality; 'or'
# races who do reach such a level do not tend to run such simulations; 'or'
# we are ''almost certainly'' living in such a simulation.
Bostrom's argument uses the premise that given sufficiently advanced technology, it is possible to simulate entire inhabited planets or even larger habitats or even entire universes as quantum simulations in time/space pockets, including all the people on them, on a computer, and that simulated people can be fully conscious, and are as much persons as non-simulated people.
If we then assume that the human race could reach such a technological level without destroying themselves in the process (i.e. we deny the first hypothesis); and that once we reached such a level we would still be interested in history, the past, and our ancestors, and that there would be no legal or moral strictures on running such simulations (we deny the second hypothesis) - then
★ it is likely that we would run a very large number of so-called ancestor simulations;
★ and that, by the same line of reasoning, many of these simulations would in turn run other sub-simulations, and so on;
★ and that given the fact that right now it is impossible to tell whether we are living in one of the vast number of simulations or the original ancestor universe, the likelihood is that the former is true.
Assumptions as to whether the human race (or another intelligent species) could reach such a technological level without destroying themselves depend greatly on the value of the
Drake equation, which gives the number of intelligent technological species communicating via radio in a galaxy at any given point in time. The expanded equation looks to the number of posthuman civilizations that ever would exist in any given universe. If the average for all universes, real or simulated, is greater than or equal to one such civilization existing in each universe's entire history, then odds are rather overwhelmingly in favor of the proposition that the average civilization is in a simulation, assuming that such simulated universes are possible and such civilizations would want to run such simulations.
Frank Tipler's Omega Point
Physicist
Frank Tipler envisages a similar scenario to
Nick Bostrom's argument: a hypothetical cosmological scenario where, as the Universe comes to an end in a
Big Crunch, the computational capacity of the Universe is capable of increasing at a sufficient rate that this computation rate is accelerating hyperbolically faster than time runs out. In principle, a simulation run on this Universe-computer can thus continue forever in its own terms, even though the external Universe lasts only a finite time.
The implication of this theory for present-day humans is that this ultimate cosmic computer will essentially be able to resurrect everyone who has ever lived, by recreating all possible quantum brain states within the master simulation. This would manifest as an "emigration" or "virtual person" simulated reality. From the perspective of the inhabitant, the
Omega Point represents an infinite-duration
afterlife, which could take any imaginable form due to its virtual nature. At first glance, Tipler's hypothesis requires some means by which the inhabitants of the far future can recover historical information in order to reincarnate their ancestors into a simulated afterlife. However, if they really have access to
infinite computing power, that is no problem at all -- they can just simulate "all
possible worlds". (This line of thought is continued in '
Platonic simulation theories').
However, recent observations suggesting an accelerating universe mean that the Big Crunch, on which the theory was originally predicated, is now thought an unlikely scenario. Also, recent ideas in modern physics suggest that time and space are not infinitely divisible, but instead have a
discrete nature. Should these ideas turn out to be true, it would constitute a serious, even insurmountable, hurdle to the Omega point idea, which relies heavily on the (assumed) existence of increasingly small intervals of
time and
space.
Computationalism & Platonic simulation theories
Computationalism is a
philosophy of mind theory stating that
cognition is a form of
computation. It is relevant to the Simulation Hypothesis in that it illustrates how a simulation could contain conscious subjects, as required by a "
virtual people" simulation. For example, it is well known that physical systems can be simulated to some degree of accuracy. If computationalism is correct, and if there is no
problem in generating
artificial consciousness from cognition, it would establish the theoretical possibility of a simulated reality. However, the relationship between cognition and
phenomenal consciousness is
disputed. It is possible that
consciousness requires a substrate of "real" physics, and simulated people, while behaving appropriately, would be
philosophical zombies. This would also negate
Nick Bostrom's simulation argument; we cannot be inside a simulation, as conscious beings, if consciousness cannot be simulated.
Some theorists
[1][2] have argued that if the "consciousness-is-computation" version of
computationalism and
mathematical realism (also known as mathematical
Platonism) are both true our consciousnesses ''must'' be inside a simulation. This argument states that a "Plato's heaven" or
ultimate ensemble would contain every algorithm, including those which implement consciousness. Platonic simulation theories are also subsets of the
multiverse theories and
theories of everything.
Dreaming
In order to demonstrate the possibility that what we accept as reality is a simulation there should be some evidence that we could point to in order to extrapolate that it is in fact an
illusion. Dreaming is one such example where ordinary people are fooled into believing a simulated reality (a dream) is the "true" reality. However, given practice or even chance, it is possible for one to realize that they are dreaming whilst they dream, thus entering a
lucid dream.
The existence of dreams resolves the questions of whether simulations indistinguishable from "true" reality are possible and if humans are too intelligent to be easily fooled by them. As a result the "dream hypothesis" cannot be ruled out, although it has been argued that
common sense and considerations of
simplicity rule against it.
[3]
The philosophical underpinnings of this argument begin with
Descartes, who was one of the first philosophers to question the distinction between
reality and
dreams. In ''Meditations on First Philosophy'', he states "... there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep",
[4] and goes on to conclude that "It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false".
[5] This same
dream argument is posed by
Zhuangzi in which Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly and woke up wondering how to tell the difference between the real world and the dream.
Chalmers (2003) discusses the dream hypothesis, and notes that this comes in two distinct forms:
★ that he is ''currently'' dreaming, in which case many of his beliefs about the world are incorrect;
★ that he has ''always'' been dreaming, in which case the objects he perceives actually exist, albeit in his imagination.
[6]
Both the
dream argument and the Simulation hypothesis can be regarded as
skeptical hypotheses; however in raising these doubts, just as
Descartes noted that his own thinking led him to be convinced of his own existence, the existence of the argument itself is testament to the possibility of its own truth.
Another state of mind in which an individual's perceptions have no physical basis in the real world is called
psychosis.
Quasi-religious arguments
'Prayers'. A simulation may have been built for the purpose of its inhabitants, and so it may respond to their wishes if properly expressed. (This is the secular version of having one's prayers answered if delivered using the correct ritual.) If any sort of prayer or wishing is found to be effective, and is verified to be scientifically inexplicable, then it is grounds to suspect that reality is being simulated.
'Interventions'. The director of the simulation may choose to intervene from time to time in a way that violates the simulation's normal rules. The director may even choose to manifest him/her/itself to the inhabitants. (This is another secular version of a common religious
meme.)
'Past lives'. The inhabitants may have entered the simulation after living for a period of time in an outer world or in a previous simulation, and so they may possess
recoverable "past life" memories. If such memories can be proven to be both accurate and inexplicable, then reality may be simulation which inhabitants can visit multiple times.
Déjà vu is a similar concept such inhabitants may experience for the same reasons.
All three arguments suffer from the same two problems.
★ The evidence for the religious phenomena appealed to is debatable
★ If true, these phenomena can be also explained
theologically. They are not evidence for simulated reality over and above other
hypotheses. However, such explanations are not necessarily contradictory with simulated reality.
We are not living in a simulation
Computability of physics
A decisive refutation of any claim that our reality is computer-simulated would be the discovery of some un
computable physics, because if reality is doing something no computer can do, it cannot be a computer simulation. In fact, known physics is held to be computable.
[7]
The objection could be made that the simulation does not have to run in "
real time"
[8]. But it misses an important point: the shortfall is not linear, rather it is a matter of performing an infinite number of computational steps in a finite time.
[9] These objection do not apply if the hypothetical simulation is being run on a
hypercomputer, a machine more powerful than a Turing machine
[10]. Unfortunately, there is no way of working out if computers running a simulation are capable of doing things that computers in the simulation cannot do. No one has shown that the laws of physics inside a simulation and those outside it have to be the same, and simulations of different physical laws have been constructed.
[11]
The problem now is that there is no evidence that can conceivably be produced to show that the universe is ''not'' any kind of computer, making the Simulation Hypothesis
unfalsifiable and therefore scientifically unacceptable, at least by
Popperian standards.
[12]
CantGoTu Environments
The concept of a CantGoTu Environment takes the ideas embedded in the
Diagonal Argument of
George Cantor, the
Undecidability theorems of
Kurt Gödel, and the limits of
computability highlighted by
Alan Turing, and applies them to
Virtual Reality environments. The argument is set out in
The Fabric of Reality (1997) by
David Deutsch, and runs thus:
:Imagine a computer built to render every possible
Virtual Reality. Suppose all possible environments produced by this generator can be laid out sequentially, as Environment 1, Environment 2, etc. Take time slices through each of these of equal duration. (Deutsch specifies one minute, but this could, in principle be anything, e.g.
Planck time.) Now construct a new environment as follows. In the first time-period, generate in the environment anything which is different from Environment 1, and in the second time period, anything different from Environment 2, and so on. This new environment cannot be found in the sequential layout of environments specified earlier, as it differs from all possible environments by what happens in one particular time-slice. Hence this means that no such universal VR generator can be created, and there are environments which effectively can ''never'' be rendered by any means.
[13]
However, later on in the book, Deutsch goes on to argue for a very strong version of the
Turing principle, namely: "It is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every ''physically possible'' environment."
However, in order to include ''every physically possible environment'', the computer would have to be able to include a full simulation of the environment containing ''itself''.
Computational load
;Virtual people
As of
2007, the computational requirements for
Molecular dynamics are such that it takes several months of computing time on the world's fastest computers to simulate 1/10th of one second of the folding of a single protein molecule.
[14]
[15]
To simulate an entire galaxy would require more computing power than can presently be envisioned, assuming that no shortcuts are taken when simulating areas that nobody is observing.
In answer to this objection, Bostrom calculated that the whole of human history would require roughly 10
33 to 10
36 calculations to simulate.
[16] He further calculated that a planet-sized computer built using known nanotechnological methods would perform about 10
42 calculations per second -- and a planet-sized computer is not inherently impossible to build, (although the speed of light could severely constrain the speed at which its subprocessors share data).
;Brain-computer interface
Some have argued that a dream is a reality being simulated by certain parts of the dreamer's brain by other parts of the dreamer's brain - possibly showing that a 'computer' less powerful than a whole human brain can simulate oft-believable realities for the senses. Similar arguments would apply to vivid recollections, imaginings, and especially hallucinations. However, all of these things are usually less vivid and do not have to consistently obey the laws of physics, which our world does and which constraint presumably requires more computational power. (Another point some have made about hallucinations is that the hallucination cannot be interracted with in a rich, vivid way requiring simulation of multiple senses, possibly because the brain knows it does not have the computing power to support such interraction.)
;Validity of the arguments
In any case, it is perhaps erroneous to apply our current sense of feasibility to projects undertaken in an outer reality, where resources and physical laws may be very different. It also assumes designers would need to simulate reality beyond our natural senses.
Also, a simulated reality
need not run in realtime. The inhabitants of a simulated universe would have no way of knowing that one day of subjective time actually required much longer to calculate in their host computer, or vice-versa. Isaac Asimov pushed the limits of this by claiming that, unbeknownst to the inhabitants, the simulation could even run backwards, or in pieces on different computers, or with a million generations of monks working weekends on
abacuses - all without the simulation missing a beat 'in simulation time'.
Irrelevance
The existence of simulated reality is unprovable in any concrete sense: any "evidence" that is directly observed could be another simulation itself. In other words, there is an infinite regress problem with the argument. Even if we are a simulated reality, there is no way to be sure the people running the simulation are not themselves a simulation, and the operators of ''that'' simulation are not a simulation,
ad infinitum. Given the premises of the simulation argument, any reality, even one running a simulation, has no better or worse chances of being a simulation than any other.
Occam's razor
It has been noted that there is no definitive way to tell whether one is in a simulation. It is generally the case that any number of hypotheses can explain the same evidence
[17]. This situation often prompts the use of a
heuristic rule called
Occam's razor, which prefers simpler explanations over more complex ones, and is often implicated in
skeptical criticisms of far-fetched hypotheses.
[18][19][20][21]
Since it is a heuristic rule, and not a natural law, it is not an infallible guide as to what is ultimately the truth, but only what is usually best to believe, all other things being equal. If we assume Occam's Razor applies, then it would tell us to reject simulated reality as being too complex, in favor of reality being what it appears to be.
Moral license
Widespread acceptance of the idea of simulated reality may create a hazardous situation: if everyone believes that reality is an illusion, then they may feel free to commit crimes and atrocities. Released from the empathetic restraint of their knowledge that life is precious and irreplaceable, would-be criminals might run rampant. They might even feel virtuous in doing so, thinking that they are simply making the game more interesting for the other players.
A similar moral shakeup is instigated by the idea that some or most of the other people inside the simulation may actually be
bots.
However, if we assume that a simulation may consist of multiple participants not unlike today's most popular massively multiplayer online games with millions of players, then some concept of ethics and morality may still apply. For example, if during a simulation a participant picks up a hammer and smashes the hand of another participant, resulting in pain that is identical in all ways neurologically to 'real' pain, then there may still be negative consequences when they awake, albeit the hand would not actually have been smashed.
In addition, the behavior of children and adults playing video games who are aware that it is a virtual environment seem to point toward ethics and moral codes still applying. Although anecdotal at best, game designers go to great lengths to control
player killers who do precisely what is outlined earlier in this section: wantonly killing other players, breaking social norms already established among players, etc.
When examining the possibility of an afterlife, Bostrom points out, "Your fate in that afterlife could be made to depend on how you behaved in your present simulated incarnation."
[22] Therefore, the possibility of "higher levels" may result in a situation where it is in the best interest of participants to behave ethically for fear of reprisals from those existing in those higher levels. In other words, simply because you're living in a simulation does not necessarily mean there will not be negative consequences for actions once outside of the simulation.
Scientific and technological approaches
===
Software Bugs===
A computed simulation may have voids or other
errors that manifest inside. If one can be found and tested, and if the observers survive its discovery, then it may reveal the underlying computational substrate. However, lapses in physical law could be attributed to other explanations, for instance divine intervention, or inherent instability in the nature of reality. Also, certain bugs could be explanations for odd every-day experiences, such as
Déjà vu, explained in
The Matrix as a glitch in the program when something is changed.
In fact, bugs could be very common. An interesting question is whether knowledge of bugs or loopholes in a sufficiently powerful simulation are instantly erased the minute they're observed since presumably all thoughts and experiences in a simulated world could be carefully monitored. Of course, if this is the case we'll never be able to act on our discovery of bugs.
Hidden messages or "Easter eggs"
The simulation may contain secret messages or exits, placed there by the designer, or by other inhabitants who have solved the riddle, in the way that
computer games and other media sometimes do. People have already spent considerable effort searching for patterns or messages within the endless decimal places of the fundamental constants such as
e and
pi. In
Carl Sagan's
science fiction novel ''
Contact'', Sagan contemplates the possibility of finding a signature embedded in pi (in its
base-11 expansion) by the creators of the universe.
However, such messages have not been found, and the argument relies on the messages being truthful. As usual, other hypotheses could explain the same evidence.
Processing power
A computer simulation would be limited to the processing power of its host computer, and so there may be aspects of the simulation that are not computed at a fine-grained (e.g. subatomic) level. This might show up as a limitation on the accuracy of information that can be obtained in particle physics.
However, this argument, like many others, assumes that accurate judgments about the simulating computer can be made from within the simulation. If we are being simulated, we might be misled about the nature of computers.
Taken one step further, the "fine grained" elements of our world could themselves be simulated since we never see the sub-atomic particles due to our inherent physical limitations. In order to see such particles we rely on other instruments which appear to magnify or translate that information into a format our limited senses are able to view: computer print out, lens of a microscope, etc. Therefore, we essentially take on faith that they're an accurate portrayal of the fine grained world which appears to exist in a realm beyond our natural senses. Assuming the sub-atomic could also be simulated then the processing power required to generate a realistic world would then be greatly reduced.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle
German physicist,
Werner Heisenberg, discovered that in the
quantum world observers cannot obtain perfect information about every aspect of a system: “The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.”
This is often, but
inaccurately, stated as meaning that "the observer has an
effect on the observed".
This "disturbance" interpretation of the
uncertainty principle is similar to how scenes are sometimes
rendered in video games, where computational resources are limited. Some areas of the simulation may not be rendered until a participant looks at them. This might resemble
"
observer effect" to a participant.
However, the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle and
observer effect can be explained without assuming that we are currently living in a simulation. The universe could just ''be'' that way.
Digital physics and cellular automatons
In
theoretical physics,
digital physics holds the basic premise that the entire history of our
universe is
computable in some sense. The hypothesis was pioneered in
Konrad Zuse's book ''
Rechnender Raum'' (translated by MIT into English as ''
Calculating Space'', 1970), which focuses on cellular automatons.
Juergen Schmidhuber suggested that the universe could be a
Turing machine, because there is a very short program that outputs all possible programmes in an
asymptotically optimal way. Other proponents include
Edward Fredkin,
Stephen Wolfram, and Nobel laureate
Gerard 't Hooft. They hold that the apparently
probabilistic nature of
quantum physics is not incompatible with the notion of computability. A quantum version of digital physics has recently been proposed by
Seth Lloyd. None of these suggestions has been developed into a workable physical theory.
It
can be argued that the use of
continua in
physics constitutes a possible argument against the simulation of a physical universe. Removing the
real numbers and
uncountable infinities from physics would counter some of the objections noted above, and at least make computer simulation a possibility. However, digital physics must overcome these objections. For instance, cellular automatons would appear to be a poor model for the
non-locality of
quantum mechanics.
Other issues
Non-player characters or "bots"
Some of the people in a simulated reality may be
automatons,
philosophical zombies, or '
bots' added to the simulation to make it more realistic or interesting or challenging. Indeed, it is conceivable that every person other than oneself is a bot. Bostrom called this a "me-simulation", in which oneself is the only sovereign lifeform, or at least the only inhabitant who entered the simulation from outside.
Bostrom further elaborated on the idea of bots:
In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious. It is not clear how much [computationally] cheaper shadow-people would be to simulate than real people. It is not even obvious that it is possible for an entity to behave indistinguishably from a real human and yet lack conscious experience.
The idea of "zombies" may have been borrowed from the video game industry where computer generated characters are known as
Non-Player Characters ("NPCs"). The term 'bots' is short for 'robots'. The usage originated as the name given to the simple
AI opponents of modern video games.
Subjective time
A
brain-computer interface simulated reality may be required to progress at a rate that is near
realtime; that is, time within it may be required to pass at approximately the same rate as the outer reality which contains it. This might be the case because the players are interacting with the simulation using brains which still reside in the outer reality. Therefore, if the simulation were to run faster or slower, those brains could notice because they were not contained with it.
It is possible that time passes slower or quicker for brains in a dream state (i.e. in a brain-computer interface trance); however, the point is that they still function at a finite, ''biological'' speed, and the simulation must track with them. Unless those interacting with the simulation are
augmented and capable of processing information at the same rate as the simulation itself.
A
virtual-people or
emigration simulated reality, on the other hand, need not. This is because its inhabitants are using the simulation's own physics in order to experience, think, and react. If the simulation were slowed down or sped up, so also would the inhabitants' own senses, brains, and muscles, as well as every other molecule inside. The inhabitants would perceive no change in the passage of time, simply because their method of measuring time is dependent on the cosmic clock that they are seeking to measure. (They could perform the measurement only if they had some access to data from the outer reality.)
For that matter, they could not even detect whether the simulation had been completely halted: a pause in the simulation would pause every life and mind within it. When the simulation was later resumed, the inhabitants would continue exactly as they were before the pause, completely unaware that (for example) their cosmos had been paused and archived for a billion years before being resumed by a completely different director.
One practical implication of this is that a virtual-people or a hybrid simulation does not require a computer powerful enough to model its entire cosmos at full speed. Per the
Turing completeness theorem, a simulation can progress at whatever speed its host computer can manage; it would be constrained by available memory but not by computation rate.
Recursive simulations
A simulated reality could contain a computer that is running a simulated reality. The 'parent' simulator would be simulating all of the atoms of the computer, atoms which happen to be calculating a 'child' simulation. By way of illustration: imagine that a human is playing a game of
The Sims in which one of the player's Sims (simulated people) is playing a computer game ''in the game''.
This recursion could continue to infinitely many levels -- a simulation containing a computer running a simulation containing a computer running a simulation and so on. The recursion is subject only to one constraint: each 'nested' simulation must be:
:
★ 'smaller' than its parent reality, because its own memory must be a subset of the parent's;
...'and' must be at least one of the following:
:
★ 'slower' than its parent reality, because its own calculations must be a subset of the parent's; 'or'
:
★ 'less complex' than its parent reality, via simplifications of processes that are computationally intensive in the parent reality; 'or'
:
★ 'less complete' than its parent reality, via approximations of objects that nobody is observing.
The latter is the basis of the idea that quantum uncertainties are circumstantial evidence that our own reality is a simulation. However, this assumes that there is a finite limitation somewhere in the chain. Assuming an infinite number of simulations within simulations, there need not be any noticeable difference between any of the subsets.
Simulated reality in fiction
Simulated reality is a theme that pre-dates
science fiction. In Medieval and Renaissance
religious theatre, the concept of the
world as a theater is frequent. Works, early and contemporary, include:
Literature
★ ''
Accelerando'' (
2005) by
Charles Stross
★ ''
The Cookie Monster'' (
2004), by
Vernor Vinge
★ ''
Darwinia'' (
1998) by
Robert Charles Wilson
★ ''
Diaspora'' (
1997) by
Greg Egan
★ ''
Discourse on Method'' (
1637) by
René Descartes
★ ''
Eternity'' (1988) by
Greg Bear, in particular his introduction of the
Taylor algorithms as a means of determining the simulated nature of an artificial environment.
★ ''
Feersum Endjinn'' (
1994) by
Iain M. Banks (his later novel, ''
The Algebraist'', posits a
religion that believes our
universe is virtual)
★ ''Flight: a Quantum Fiction novel'' (1995) by
Vanna Bonta, posits that our universe is a
virtual metaverse whereby
collective and
individual consciousness creates
reality on the
quantum level
★ ''
Forever Free'' (
1999) by
Joe Haldeman
★ '' (
1998) by
Philip Zhai
★ ''
The Girl Who Was Plugged In'' (
1974) by
James Tiptree Jr.
★ ''
Illusions'' (
1977) by
Richard Bach
★
Jorge Luis Borges' many short stories (and essays)
★ ''
Killer App'' (
2007) by Kenneth Brown
★ ''
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'' (
1994) by Roger Williams
★ ''
Neuromancer (
1984) and
Mona Lisa Overdrive'' (
1988) by
William Gibson
★ ''
Otherland'' (1998) by
Tad Williams
★ ''
Permutation City'' (1994) by
Greg Egan
★ ''
Loop'' (1998) by
Koji Suzuki
★ ''
Riverworld'' (
1979) by
Philip José Farmer
★ ''
Simulacron 3'' (
1964) by
Daniel F. Galouye
★ ''
Snow Crash'' (
1992) by
Neal Stephenson
★ ''
Sophie's World'' (
1991) by
Jostein Gaarder
★ ''
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'' (
1965) by
Philip K. Dick
★ ''
Time Out of Joint'' (
1959) by
Philip K. Dick
★ ''
Ubik'' (
1969) by
Philip K. Dick
★ ''
Valis'' (
1981) by
Philip K. Dick
★ ''
Vurt'' (
1993) by
Jeff Noon
★ ''
The Wonderland Gambit'' (
1995) by
Jack L. Chalker
Film, plays & TV series
★
.hack//SIGN, an
anime series about a person whose mind is trapped in an
online computer role-playing game
★
Avalon by
Mamoru Oshii
★ ''
Better Than Life'' and
Back to Reality in
Red Dwarf, by
Rob Grant and
Doug Naylor
★ ''
The Big O'' by
Hajime Yatate and
Chiaki J. Konaka NB the reality in question has not been confirmed as simulated, but it is extremely likely
★ ''
Brainscan'' by
John Flynn
★ "
The Cage" and "
The Menagerie", the unaired pilot and later episodes (respectively) of '', screenplays by
Gene Roddenberry
★ ''
The Gamekeeper'', an episode of
Stargate SG-1.
★ ''
Danger Room'' A training simulator from the (
X-Men) universe.
★ ''
Dark City'' by
Alex Proyas
★ "
The Deadly Assassin," an episode of ''
Doctor Who'' written by
Robert Holmes
★ ''
eXistenZ'' by
David Cronenberg
★ ''
Good Bye Lenin!'', by
Wolfgang Becker, a Berlin family tries to make the feeble mother believe that
East Germany did not
fall.
★ ''
Impostor'', based on a story by
Philip K. Dick
★ ''
The Island'', directed by
Michael Bay
★ ''
The Truman Show'', directed by
Peter Weir
★ ''
La vida es sueño'' (''Life is a Dream''), a Spanish play by
Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) that evolved from the legends of the early years of
Siddhartha Gautama, the
Buddha
★ The
Matrix trilogy by the
Wachowski brothers
★ In the ''
Doctor Who'' universe.
★ ''
Paranoia Agent'' by
Satoshi Kon
★ ''Possible Worlds'', both the
play and the
2000 film adaptation of that play
★ "
The Sentence", an episode of
The Outer Limits television series
★ ''
Serial Experiments Lain'' by
Chiaki J. Konaka
★ "
Ship in a Bottle" episode of ''Star Trek: The Next Generation'', in which the fictional
Professor Moriarty of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's ''
Sherlock Holmes'' stories is allowed to exist in a simulation of the world
★ In the
Star Trek fictional universe, particularly in and since the series '',
holodecks are simulators aboard
starships and other facilities used for training and recreation
★ ''
The 13th Floor'' by
Josef Rusnak
★ ''
Total Recall'' by
Paul Verhoeven, based on a
Philip K. Dick's story
★ ''
Tron'' (1982) by
Walt Disney Pictures
★ "
The Twilight Zone" has featured a number of episodes involving false or simulated realities of some sort.
★ ''
Vanilla Sky'' by
Cameron Crowe (a remake of ''
Abre los ojos'' by
Alejandro Amenábar)
★ "
The X-Files" has featured a number of episodes involving simulated realities of some sort.
★ "
Welt am Draht" a 1973 German film adaptation of
Simulacron-3 from
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
★ '' (2002) written by Sean Hood
★
Harsh Realm the short lived TV Series created by Chris Carter which took place in a Virtual world.
Interactive fiction
★ ''
A Mind Forever Voyaging'' by
Steve Meretzky
Video games
★ ''
Final Fantasy X'' by
Yoshinori Kitase
★ '' by
Minato Koio
★ ''
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri''
★ ''
Silent Hill''
★ The ''
Fatal Frame'' series.
★ '' and by
Hideo Kojima''
★ ''
.hack'' series.
★ ''
Custom Robo''
★ ''
Kingdom Hearts II''
★ ''
The Sims''
★ ''
The Sims 2''
★ ''
★ ''
There.com''
★ ''
★ ''
Gateway'', a computer game based on the novel of the same name.
★
★
★
★
★
See also
★
Artificial consciousness
★
Artificial life
★
Artificial reality
★
Augmented reality
★
Brain-in-a-vat
★
Computational universe theory
★
Consensus reality
★
Cyberpunk
★
Digital philosophy
★
Evil genius
★ ''
Fabric of Reality''
★
Holodeck
★
Hyperreality
★
Infosphere
★
Lucid Dreaming
★
Mind Transfer
★
Mixed reality
★
The Matrix
★
Tipler's "Omega point"
★
Philosophy of information
★
Reality
★
Reality in Buddhism
★
Second Life
★
Simulacrum
★
Virtual Reality
★ Major contributing thinkers:
:
★
Nick Bostrom
:
★
René Descartes
:
★
David Deutsch
:
★
Edward Fredkin
:
★
Raymond Kurzweil
:
★
Stanislaw Lem
:
★
Seth Lloyd
:
★
Plato
:
★
Frank Tipler
:
★
Zeno of Elea
:
★
Zhuang Zi (Chuang Tzu)
:
★
Konrad Zuse
Bibliography
★
A History of Philosophy, Volume I: Greece and Rome, , Frederick, Copleston, Image Books (Doubleday), 1993, ISBN 0-385-46843-1
★
A History of Philosophy, Volume IV: Modern Philosophy, , Frederick, Copleston, Image Books (Doubleday), 1994, ISBN 0-385-47041-X
★
The Fabric of Reality, , David, Deutsch, Penguin Science (Allen Lane), 1997, ISBN 0-14-014690-3
★
Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos, , Seth, Lloyd, Knopf, 2006, ISBN 978-1400040926
★
The Physics of Immortality, , Frank, Tipler, Doubleday, 1994, ISBN 0-385-46799-0
★
Summa Technologiae, , Stanislaw, Lem, , 1964,
References
1. Bruno Marchal
2. Russel Standish
3. "There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations." Bertrand Russell, ''The Problems of Philosophy''
4. René Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy, from Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911 – reprinted with corrections 1931), Volume I, 145-46.
5. b
6. Chalmers, J., The Matrix as Metaphysics, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona
7. ''PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY AND QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY''
8. Subjective Time
9. " But ordinary computing systems, such as Turing Machines (TM), can only take a finite number of states. Even if we combine the internal states of a TM with the content of the machine’s tape to increase the number of possible states, the total number of states that a TM can be in is only countably infinite. Moreover, TMs can only follow a countable number of state space trajectories. The same point applies to any ordinary computing system of the kinds used in scientific modelling. So ordinary computational descriptions do not have a cardinality of states and state space trajectories that is sufficient for them to map onto ordinary mathematical descriptions of natural systems. Thus, from the point of view of strict mathematical description, the thesis that everything is a computing system in this second sense cannot be supporte"''Computational Modelling vs. Computational Explanation: Is Everything a Turing Machine, and Does It Matter to the Philosophy of Mind?''
10. ''Hypercomputation'', Toby Ord
11. "The Cosmology Machine takes data from billions of observations about the behaviour of stars, gases and the mysterious dark matter throughout the universe and then calculates, at ultra high speeds, how galaxies and solar systems evolved. By testing different theories of cosmic evolution it can simulate virtual universes to test which ideas come closest to explaining the real universe."''Cosmology Machine creates the Universe''
12. Popper, K. ''Science as Falsification''
13. Deutsch, D. (1997), The Fabric of Reality, Penguin Books: in particular see pages 123-131
14.
15.
16. Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? by Nick Bostrom. July 2002. Accessed ''21 December 2006''
17. Undeterdetermination
18. Skeptic report on Occam's razor
19. Skepticwki on Occam's razor
20. 'There is no shred of evidence in my experience, or in my memory that would justify a belief that I am a "brain in a vat". To the best of my determination, it makes no practical difference to the way in which I need to react to my experiences of this reality I experience. So I choose to employ Ockham’s Razor and reject the hypothesis that this "reality" I experience is not in fact the "real" Reality'.[1]
21. "But several things convince us that we are not being deceived about the external world. For a start, it seems an entirely superfluous suggestion"Ash, T. ''The Existence of the Physical World''
22. The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High. Nick Bostrom
External links
''
★
''Anthropic-principle.com'' Website maintained by
Nick Bostrom with a collection of papers on SR and related topics.
★
''The Big Brother Universe''
★
''Computer Universes and an Algorithmic Theory of Everything'' by
Jürgen Schmidhuber
★
''The Computational Requirements for the Matrix discussion on
Slashdot.
★
''Computationalism: The Very Idea'', an overview of computationalism by David Davenport.
★
''The Cutting Edge of Haptics'', an article in MIT's Technology review on touch illusion technology by Duncan Graham-Rowe.
★
''God Is the Machine'' Wired article by Kevin Kelly.
★
That Mysterious Flow", , , , Davies, Paul, (Sept. (2002) Scientific American,
★
''Philosophy & "The Matrix"'' Related to the Warner Brothers movie; including papers by
David Chalmers and other philosophers.
★
''The Simulation Argument'' Website by
Nick Bostrom, Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. Inlcudes his original paper.
★
''Simulation, Consciousness, Existence'' by
Hans Moravec.
★
Simulism, a wiki devoted to the possibility that our reality is a simulation.
★
''What We Still Don't Know'', Channel 4 documentary by British
Astronomer Royal Sir
Martin Rees.
★
''Zombies'' -
Philosophical zombie article by Robert Kirk in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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