You know how there is this idea that we are all living in a Simulation? Everyone from Elon Musk to Neil deGrasse Tyson has pontificated about this.

I’ve been wondering about this for years. First, and most importantly, is what does that mean? Are we in a deliberately designed piece of “software?” That sounds a lot like religion where we become important because we are deliberate creations of, in this case, a programmer god. Because if that’s true, then we would feel important in the same way that Genesis makes us feel important.

But if we’re a simulation, what does that say about the universe(?) that the simulation is running in? Do we take up more than a miniscule fraction of the computational bits in it? That seems unlikely. According to my brief search with The Google, the universe has 6*10^80 bits of information. All the information in the world today is about 10^24 bits. So if we took all the information processing in the world, the biggest thing we could deliberately simulate would be about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 the size of the current universe. Sorry if I got the number of zeros wrong 🙂

I find it hard to imaging that resources on that (large for us, tiny for everything else) scale would ever be brought to bear on creating a purpose-built universe. Maybe our god is a computer hobbyist in their parent’s basement? So make that tiny number in the previous paragraph even smaller. Sounds like a puny god to me. And there are probably more likely alternatives.

If we are a simulation, it’s got to be an accident. Maybe we’re a persistent pattern in weather simulation in that bigger universe. But just as likely, we could be a persistent pattern anywhere, like a whirlpool in a stream. At which point, we have to ask ourselves what does the idea of a simulation even mean? To me, it sounds more like we are emergent parts of a larger system, just like it seems we always have been.

This doesn’t mean that we couldn’t look for traces of the larger pattern that may contain our pattern. The way that information moves through our universe would say a lot about the containing universe. For example, I’ve written simulations for any number of things that have physics-based laws in them. But my “surrounding” universe can manipulate the smaller universe in ways that break its rules. I can influence anything, anywhere in the simulation immediately. For me, outside the simulation, the “speed of light” does not apply. Do we ever see examples of that sort of manipulation in our universe? If not, then why not? Artifacts from an enclosing universe should be detectable.

As you can see, this is an itch that I’ve been scratching at for many years. I’d love to see it get under your skin too.