Indeed, there are good reasons to believe it’s not possible. The best attempt to date is that by Xiao-Gang Wen and collaborators, but they are still far away from getting back general relativity.
Įven from qubits, however, nobody’s been able to recover the presently accepted fundamental theories – general relativity and the standard model of particle physics. You either have to overthrow quantum mechanics (good luck), or you have to use qubits. This might be somebody’s universe, maybe, but not ours.
If you try to build the universe from classical bits, you won’t get quantum effects, so forget about this – it doesn’t work. Good - but already we’re deep in the realm of physics. It’s also a meaningless statement.Ī stricter way to speak of the computational universe is to make more precise what is meant by ‘computing.’ You could say, for example, that the universe is made of bits and an algorithm encodes an ordered time-series which is executed on these bits. Then it’s tautologically true that we live in a computer simulation. It’s a bold claim about the laws of nature that however doesn’t pay any attention to what we know about the laws of nature.įirst, to get it out of the way, there’s a trivial way in which the simulation hypothesis is correct: You could just interpret the presently accepted theories to mean that our universe computes the laws of nature. The simulation hypothesis annoys me because it intrudes on the terrain of physicists. Proclaiming that “the programmer did it” doesn’t only not explain anything - it teleports us back to the age of mythology. After all, finding consistent explanations is what we get paid to do. Unfortunately it primarily speaks for their lacking knowledge of physics.Īmong physicists, the simulation hypothesis is not popular and that’s for a good reason – we know that it is difficult to find consistent explanations for our observations. The simulation hypothesis, as it’s called, enjoys a certain popularity among people who like to think of themselves as intellectual, believing it speaks for their mental flexibility. And one of our biggest existential risks is that the superintelligence running our simulation shuts it down.
WE LIVE IN A SIMULATION PC
“And those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions,” he added.According to Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute, it is likely that we live in a computer simulation. Musk continued that given the rate of advancement, 10,000 years in future, “which is nothing in the evolutionary scale,” we are already on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality. He added, “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality”. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year and soon we will have virtual reality or augmented reality”. Musk said, “The strongest argument for us being in a simulation is the following - that 40 years ago we had pong like two rectangles and a dot.
WE LIVE IN A SIMULATION CODE
Speaking at Code Conference 2016, the billionaire responded to a question and shared his thoughts on whether we already live in a ‘Matrix’ type of pseudo existence. In an unearthed video clip, Musk explained how in future the world may not be able to tell reality apart from video games. SpaceX and Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has proposed his “strongest argument” on whether humanity is living inside a simulation.