“When they dropped the assumption, everything else became much simpler to understand.” “It was such a profound idea that it wasn’t even thought of as an assumption,” he said.īefore Copernicus, scientists had tried to explain the peculiar behaviour of the planets’ motion with complex mathematical models. Terrile believes that recognizing that we are probably living in a simulation is as game-changing as Copernicus realizing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “It’s also a lot of hubris to think we would be what ended up being simulated.” “I don’t see that there’s really an argument for it,” she said. Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall is even more skeptical. What I teach at MIT would be the simulated laws of physics,” he said. And if we are in a simulation then we have no clue what the laws of physics are. “In order to make the argument in the first place, we need to know what the fundamental laws of physics are where the simulations are being made. Are we probably in a simulation? I would say no,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT. “Is it logically possible that we are in a simulation? Yes. Not everyone is so convinced by the hypothesis. So who has created this simulation? “Our future selves,” said Terrile. “Quite frankly, if we are not living in a simulation, it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance,” he added. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like a pixelated video game. As Terrile puts it: “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?” If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.” Recognizing we live in a simulation is game-changing, like Copernicus realizing Earth was not the center of the universe “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.” And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality,” said Musk. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. “Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,” said Rich Terrile, a scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Īt the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them.Įlon Musk on simulation: ‘The odds we’re in base reality is one in billions’ – video If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. Quite frankly if we are not living in a simulation it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance Rich Terrile, scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory This argument is extrapolated from observing current trends in technology, including the rise of virtual reality and efforts to map the human brain. In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe. One popular argument for the simulation hypothesis, outside of acid trips, came from Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). But what does this mean? And what evidence is there that we are, in fact, living in The Matrix? If it sounds a lot like The Matrix, that’s because it is.Īccording to this week’s New Yorker profile of Y Combinator venture capitalist Sam Altman, there are two tech billionaires secretly engaging scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation. Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence.