What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your
life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very
elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick
Bostrom famously
considered this in his seminal paper “Are
you living in a computer simulation?” where he proposed that all of our
existence maybe just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations run
by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new
theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no
advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-stimulation that
generates itself from pure thought?
The physical
universe is a “strange loop” says the new paper titled “The Self-Simulation
Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” from the team at the Quantum Gravity
Research, a Los Angeles-based theoretical physics institute founded by the
scientist and entrepreneur Klee
Irwin. They take
Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, which maintains that all of reality
is an extremely detailed computer program, and asks, rather than relying on
advanced lifeforms to create the amazing technology necessary to compose
everything within our world, isn’t it more efficient to propose that the
universe itself is a “mental self-stimulation”? They tie this idea to quantum
mechanics, seeing the universe as one of many possible quantum gravity models.
One important
aspect that differentiates this view relates to the fact that Bostrom’s
original hypothesis is materialistic,
seeing the universe as inherently physical. To Bostrom, we could simply be part
of an ancestor
simulation, engineered by posthumans. Even the process of evolution itself
could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless
processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and
technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information
or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.
But where does
the physical reality that would generate the simulations comes from, wonder the
researchers? Their hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that
everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe
“self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a
rule they call “the
principle of efficient language.”
Under this
proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand
thought.” How would the simulation itself be originated? It was always there,
say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the
all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit
hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles. This is also where
the rule of efficient language comes in, suggesting that humans themselves are
such “emergent sub-thoughts” and they experience and find meaning in the world
through other sub-thoughts (called “code-steps or actions”) in the most
economical fashion.
In
correspondence with Big Think, physicist David
Chester elaborated:
“While many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum
mechanics may provide hints that our reality is a mental construct. Recent
advances in quantum gravity, such as seeing spacetime emergent via a hologram,
also is a hint that spacetime is not fundamental. This is also compatible with
ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy. In a sense, the mental construct of
reality creates spacetime to efficiently understand itself by creating a
network of subconscious entities that can interact and explore the totality of
possibilities.”
The scientists
link their hypothesis to panpsychism,
which sees everything as thought or consciousness. The authors think that their
“panpsychic self-simulation model” can even explain the origin of an
overarching panconsciousness at the foundational level of the
simulations, which “self-actualizes itself in a strange loop via
self-simulation.” This panconsciousness also has free will and its various
nested levels essentially have the ability to select what code to actualize,
while making syntax choices. The goal of this consciousness? To generate
meaning or information.
If all of this
is hard to grasp, the authors offer another interesting idea that may link your
everyday experience to these philosophical considerations. Think of your dreams
as your own personal self-simulations, postulates the team. While they are
rather primitive (by super-intelligent future AI standards), dreams tend to
provide better resolution than current computer modeling and are a great
example of the evolution of the human mind. As the scientists write,
“What is most remarkable is the ultra-high-fidelity resolution of these
mind-based simulations and the accuracy of the physics therein.” They point
especially to lucid dreams, where the dreamer is aware of being in a
dream, as instances of very accurate simulations created by your mind that may
be impossible to distinguish from any other reality. To that end, now that
you’re sitting here reading this article, how do you really know you’re not in
a dream? The experience seems very high in resolution but so do some dreams.
It’s not too much of a reach to imagine that an extremely powerful computer
that we may be able to make in the not-too-distant future could duplicate this
level of detail.
The team also
proposes that in the coming years we will be able to create designer consciousnesses for ourselves as advancements in gene
editing could allow us to make our own mind-simulations much more powerful. We
may also see minds emerging that do not require matter at all.
While some of
these ideas are certainly controversial in the mainstream science circles, Klee
and his team respond that “We
must critically think about consciousness and certain aspects of philosophy
that are uncomfortable subjects to some scientists.”
Want to know
more? You can read the full paper online in the journal Entropy.