Do We Really Live in a Simulation?

Revisiting a Very Big Question

In a Nutshell 

Think about it for a moment. Everything you can see, feel, experience, the people you know – aren’t real.

They are instead part of a sophisticated simulation. 

It’s not some fantasy thriller, but a genuine intellectual argument, notably associated with philosopher Nick Bostrom. 

The Simulation Argument

Imagine a civilisation vastly more technologically advanced than ours. It has the technology to simulate an entire world populated by conscious beings. These beings wouldn’t know they were simulated. From their point of view, their world would simply be the world.

Bostrom calls these ancestor simulations.

Now comes the extra scary bit.  If these civilisations can create these simulations, why stop at one? They might create hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions!

And that produces a rather uncomfortable numbers problem. There would be hugely more simulated people than non-simulated ones.

So is there is any chance that we are indeed simulated, created by a technologically advanced civilisation and yet be blissfully unaware. 

Bostrom says that at least one of three things must be true.

First, civilisations like ours almost never survive long enough to be able to create these living conscious simulations.

Second, they do survive and acquire the technology, but almost none of them chooses to use it for this purpose.

Or third, we are almost certainly living in a simulation already.

That’s the choice! 

Is there an escape route?

So the first escape route is not especially comforting, that civilisations have a habit of destroying themselves before getting to the point where they can create the simulations. If nuclear war doesn’t do it, out of control AI might. 

The second escape route is that they survive but decide not to do it. But we have to make quite a strong assumption here. It isn’t enough that most advanced civilisations decide not to create these simulations. Almost all of them need to decide against it.

That leaves the third possibility. We are in a simulation.

But how likely is that?

This is where I become less certain.

It is tempting to say that there are three possibilities, so give each of them a probability of one-third. But should we? It’s an arbitrary guess, though it might be as good as we can do. 

But it’s still a guess. And we don’t actually know what consciousness is and that it can ever be simulated. Then again, never say never in the real, or the simulated, world.

So there are some important assumptions here. Still, it’s  an argument that can’t simply be casually dismissed. And if we got to the stage where it was possible, we would then know that at least one civilisation had reached the necessary technological stage. And we might know that at least one civilisation wanted to run such simulations. Ours again.

Suddenly, the escape routes could start to close off.

What if we are alone?

There is another possibility that interests me. What if ours is the only civilisation ever to have reached anything like our present level of development? Would that undermine the argument?

I put the question to Nick Bostrom. He replied:

“If we are the only civilisation at our stage there will ever have been, then the equation remains true, although some of the possible implications become less striking … the probability that we are not in a simulation is increased if ours is the only civilisation that will have ever existed throughout the multiverse.”

That makes sense.

The fewer civilisations capable of eventually producing simulations, the fewer opportunities there are for simulated worlds to swamp the original one in sheer numbers.

The really peculiar bit

Imagine that, a few centuries from now, humanity develops the ability to create simulated worlds containing conscious beings. And we do it.

Perhaps we create thousands of them. The inhabitants look around their worlds and wonder whether they are living in base reality. 
At that point, why should we assume that we happen to be the special ones?

But surely there has to be a base reality somewhere — or at least it seems that there does.

Could ours be it?

Of course it could.

 But here’s another angle. What if somebody proved to us all tomorrow that we really are living in a simulation.

You wake up the next morning. You have breakfast. You meet the same people. Things still hurt. People still matter. Choices still have consequences. So what exactly would have changed?

Perhaps the strangest thing about discovering that our world isn’t ultimately real would be how real it would continue to feel. And how little might change!