Rizwan Virk on the Big Picture

Chapter 15

THE GREAT SIMULATION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

This chapter brings together the various strands that we’ve explored in this book—those of computer science, quantum physics, and Eastern (as well as Western) mystics to look at some of the bigger questions that relate to the Great Simulation, such as who is running the simulation and what it means for our collective species.

We also want to revisit one of the big debates among the adherents of this new theory: whether we are simulated or actual consciousness (or in video game terms, whether we are player characters, or PCs, or AI-based non-player characters, NPCs). Finally, we’ll end with a discussion of how the simulation hypothesis may provide the first plausible bridge between two of the most important searches for truth in humanity’s history: those of the scientific community and the mystics who are responsible for the world’s religions.

First, before we wrap up on these bigger notes, let’s revisit one of the oldest recorded references to the simulation hypothesis in the Western philosophical tradition.

PLATO’S ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE AND THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS

In his classic work The Republic, Plato recites the allegory of the cave, which I mentioned briefly in the introduction. Inside this cave, prisoners are chained to a wall with a clear view of a blank wall that is just opposite the entrance. As forms move in front of the mouth of the cave, the prisoners can see those forms on the wall as shadows. The chained prisoners don’t know if the light that is generating the shadows is coming from a fire, the sun, the moon, or something else.

Plato, who wrote the allegory as a dialog between his teacher, Socrates, and Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, makes the point that the human condition is just like the prisoners who are chained to the wall. The best we can do is to observe shadows of the real world because we cannot perceive it directly. The prisoners are able to talk to each other and agree on what the shadows are and give them names, such as a person or a book or a horse. In this way, they are able to create a full description (with its associated vocabulary) of the world—or reality—from their perspective. However, the prisoners are wrong about the real nature of what they are seeing; they are giving words and descriptions to shadows of the real world. Should a prisoner break his chains and go outside the cave, he would be able to perceive the real people and objects outside, rather than mere shadows.

Plato continues by postulating that it’s not easy for those of us who have been “chained up” our entire lives to make our way out and look on what is now a new reality—even the sun and the moon would be entirely new concepts to us. In fact, Plato makes the point that seeing the sunlight for the first time would be eminently painful because our eyes are not accustomed to the light, having lived inside the cave all our lives. Furthermore, if you read the original story, after one person (called a philosopher by Plato) breaks free of the chains and perceives the real world, he then comes back into the cave to try to persuade everyone that what they thought was reality was in fact just “shadows on the wall.” The people, who have spent their whole lives chained to the wall, are, to put it mildly, skeptical.

Although this is perhaps the best-known and oldest reference in Western philosophy to the idea that reality isn’t what it may seem, I’ve left it until now so we can consider the big picture of what the Great Simulation is and what it might mean.

If we were living in a video game–like simulation, the prison (i.e., cave) and the shadows on the wall are the renderings of pixels as they are visible to those of us inside the simulation. What is lighting the shadows? In a video game, the rendered world is a set of pixels that are illuminated based on some electromagnetic charge. Without having ever left the rendered world, it is very difficult to conceive of a projector or a source of light that makes everything we see visible to us, yet it is there nonetheless. If one were to leave the rendered world and come back into it, one would have reactions similar to how many in the scientific community today react to the visions of mystics who claim to have been “outside the world.” They might also react in the same way that many today have initially reacted to the simulation hypothesis—that it can’t possibly be true!

If Plato’s prisoners were able to examine the shadows from a higher perspective, the entire affair would make more sense. Basically, they would have found a model for their reality that fit better than the old model. This is exactly what mystics have been telling us for thousands of years—that the world around us is a kind of illusion, and there is a reality beyond what we can see.

The same is true of the mysteries of quantum mechanics: They seem to be telling us that that world isn’t quite the material world we are used to thinking of it as—that what we think of as a single solid reality is also a kind of illusion. As Ken Wilber said in Quantum Questions, physicists have always been looking at shadows on the wall, but the quantum theory forced them to acknowledge this fact. And yet, scientists today still cling to a purely materialistic view of the world around us, in a sense ignoring the big question of whether the physical world is real, as they dive into figuring out exactly how our physics engine works.

As I’ve shown in previous chapters, the evolution of computer science, our understanding of how simulations in the form of video games are built, the central mysteries of quantum physics, the messages of ancient Eastern philosophies, the descriptions given to us by Western religions, and unexplained paranormal phenomena all suggest that we are indeed living in a simulation, like Plato’s prisoners in the cave. If that is the case, let’s look at the bigger questions about this Great Simulation that we live in.

WHAT IS THE GREAT SIMULATION AND WHO RUNS IT?

In short, the Great Simulation is a hyperrealistic simulation or video game that we are in—essentially it is our version of the Matrix. As long as we are inside the simulation, we are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is part of the simulation. This doesn’t mean the simulation isn’t real from our perspective, just like video games that we play are real to our avatars and to NPCs while we are playing them.

In the same way that we can’t say for sure what is outside the simulation, we can’t say for sure how many simulations there are. If we were running in one of a hundred thousand simulations, then we might not be in the Great Simulation at all, but simply a simulation running for what appears from our perspective to be billions of years, but may be the blink of an eye from the point of view of whoever runs the simulation.

If the world around us is a simulation, this naturally leads us to ask who (or what) is outside the rendered world. Who is participating in it? Who created it? And who (or what) is still even now running the simulation? And why did they create it?

We can’t know the answers for certain, but here are some of the more popular possibilities.

Other Simulations

If we are living inside a simulation, then any simulations we create, including our sophisticated MMORPGs and video games, would be considered simulations within simulations.

If we as a civilization were able to get to the simulation point, then presumably we could create simulations that are indistinguishable from our physical reality. Could this go on forever? Perhaps it is like the anecdote about the turtle: A woman told the famous psychologist William James that a turtle was holding up the Earth. When James asked her what was holding up the turtle, she told him that obviously it was “turtles all the way down!”

The difficulty here, like an infinite recursion, is that an infinite number of simulations would require almost infinite computing power. Without some base, a recursive algorithm goes on forever without returning any results (each layer is waiting for the layer beneath it to give a result). However, in a practical, finite computing environment, even a recursive algorithm cannot go on forever; it eventually runs out of memory or suffers some resource error. Bostrom, in his original paper, says that one way to prevent this might be to impose restrictions on what can and cannot be simulated within a simulation.

At one level, this idea of restricting what a simulated civilization can accomplish might give credence to the skeptics’ arguments that we cannot be in a simulation because simulating the known universe would require too many computing resources. Contrary to being an argument against a simulation, it might actually be turned into an argument that we are in a simulation but that we (being inside the simulation) have restrictions imposed on what we can simulate with the finite resources we have at our disposal.

Of course, the resource argument breaks down when we consider different and more sophisticated types of computing, such as quantum computing—and even with more conventional computing, it underscores the necessity of optimization techniques. Presumably, even if what exists outside our simulation is another simulation, there must be, at some point, a top of the stack—the base reality. So, this possibility, while intriguing, doesn’t really answer the question fully.

Humans/Ancestors

Another possibility is that whoever is running the simulation is just like us —human! While our video games started with very simple, stylized nonhuman characters (Pac-Man, Space Invaders), they evolved to create characters (or avatars) that are more humanlike; we can choose their gender or body type using what’s become a common “avatar editor” model.

If we are inside an ancestor simulation, it’s a pretty good bet that the creators made us look like them in some way—at least humanoid. The whole idea of an ancestor simulation is to simulate one’s ancestors, which means that they would have similar DNA to the creators—the beings who created the simulation. It’s possible they created us with as much fidelity as they knew about themselves, encoding similar DNA, for example. Or it’s possible that they created a subset of what they know. It’s possible that what we think of as humans are simplified avatars of the “protohumans” who exist at the base reality above our simulation.

Ancestor simulations also raise the specter that we might all be NPCs, and the simulators are running our sim just to figure out what might happen if they change variables. In a sense, our world could be a complex or chaotic process and the only way to find out what might happen, because of computational irreducibility, is to just let the simulation run.

Time Travelers from the Future

In another scenario that sounds like science fiction, it is possible that our descendants (from many millions of years in the future) are watching our history through the simulation.

In fact, this is close to what Philip K. Dick believed: that our history is being watched and adjusted based upon where the timeline is going. In Dick’s Man in the High Castle, for example, he depicts a timeline or world where the Axis powers won World War II, and the Nazis and Empire of Japan split the United States between them to rule it. Dick, according to his own words and those of his wife, Tessa, actually believed this was a real timeline and that he had memories of it. Someone, most likely beings from the future, did not believe this timeline led to optimal results and so they changed it—so that the Allies would win the war.

In that vein, he believed he was receiving communication from beings outside of time (and possibly from the future) who did something similar with the assassination of JFK—they went back and adjusted it many times so that he wasn’t assassinated in Dallas in 1963, but in each of the alternate timelines, either he was assassinated somewhere else or the timeline led to undesirable results, namely a nuclear war. Therefore, they took our simulation back to the assassination of JFK in Dallas.

Nonhuman Earth-Based Life-Forms

In the popular science fiction book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the Earth was actually an experiment run by hyperintelligent mice. The mice on Earth were here to monitor us, the humans, as the experiment proceeded. While this is an unlikely scenario, it’s possible that some life-form that exists here on Earth is based upon the creators of our simulation, and it prefers to be in the simulation using an avatar of its original form! Of course, because we don’t know of any other technologically intelligent species on Earth, if it were, say, closely related to the chimpanzee or dolphin, then the versions of these species we see in our world are likely to be simplified versions of the proto-chimps or protodolphins that created or are monitoring our simulation. This would give the creators a way to monitor what was happening here from the inside.

In the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, upon returning to Earth, the crew of the Enterprise finds an advanced alien ship that is visiting the planet and awaiting signals from the only intelligent species it knows on Earth—humpback whales (which, we are told, have become extinct). This prompts Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and their crew to go back in time to pick up a pair of humpback whales, who are then able to communicate with the alien probe in the future, thus saving the Earth.

Aliens

This brings us to a likely possibility that has been proposed by everyone from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking: that the creators are some form of alien species. Of course, if they weren’t human but were intelligent, that pretty much describes how we think of alien species. Extraterrestrial is a term that describes beings from another planet, outside the Earth—but you could easily apply it to beings that came from another dimension of reality.

Today, the most popular conception of extraterrestrial aliens is “the grays”—the image that has been presented in science fiction and UFO lore for decades, ranging from The X-Files to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s possible that an alien species will not be humanoid or even close to how we see ourselves.

If the creators of the simulation are some species of alien life, then why would they create us as humans? This question isn’t answerable with any level of confidence, but we can speculate. Just as we create fantasy races in World of Warcraft, which are based on our literature and imagination, humans would have to have played some role in their society, whether real or imagined. Or, looking at the reports of many who claim to have been abducted and taken aboard an alien spaceship, one common aspect of their stories is that the aliens seem to be harvesting our genetic material in some way. Is it possible the whole point of the simulation is to evolve our DNA to a point where it is compatible with or helpful to the aliens in some way?

Superintelligent Machines

A very popular theory is that machines could be the overlords running our simulation. This is, in fact, the premise of The Matrix.

Artificial intelligence is a thread that runs through the simulation hypothesis. NPCs are basically AIs that exist within video games that we create. We are just now getting AI to the point where we can create intelligent agents that can help us with various tasks in our world—whether it’s dialing numbers or finding specific information on the web for us. According to some experts, we could actually be the AI inside a simulation, which isn’t quite the same as the simulation being created by intelligent machines, though anyone who creates a simulation of this complexity is likely to have been assisted by AI, as we discussed in Parts II and III.

A popular topic in both science fiction and science speculation has been that if the machines we create become intelligent enough, they will decide that for their survival they no longer need us. Or if they do need us, they need to keep us humans occupied with something, which is also what happened in The Matrix. This killer-AI scenario is concerning to a lot of scientists as our technology becomes more intelligent. We are just reaching the point where a machine can pass the Turing Test, and AI is already starting to create virtual worlds and sophisticated simulations. However, given the rate of advances to machine learning and AI, the ability of AI to create fully realistic 3D simulations, with other AI beings that can pass the Metaverse Turing Test, is not very far off (as of the writing of this second edition).

God or Gods…and Heaven

Finally, we come to the mystical explanation—that the Great Simulation was in fact created as a test playground for conscious beings. Both Eastern and Western mystical traditions share the idea that the world around us is not the real world but a training or testing ground. In the Eastern traditions, there is typically a soul that goes through multiple lives (playing multiple characters). In Western traditions, there is a God and angels (including our guardian angels), and an eternal heaven and hell. In both cases, there is the shared concept that our actions in this world determine what happens to us when we leave it.

It’s important to note that these different possibilities are not necessarily exclusive. For example, the idea that there are gods or angels may not be separate from the idea that outside the simulation is superintelligent AI or aliens who appear to us as gods or angels, or that AI was used to create the Great Simulation.

For example, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew meets an alien species that is as close to omnipotent as we could imagine it—known as the Q Continuum. The Q could control time and space, plucking the Enterprise from one part of the physical universe and moving it to another, creating new beings, and manipulating heavenly bodies with ease. They could make themselves appear as one of us in order to communicate with us. What look like gods to us could in fact be aliens or just beings outside the simulation who are superusers and have the power to manipulate the simulation.

Regardless of who or what is outside the simulation, we now have a good understanding of what the simulation looks like. While we cannot know the purpose of the Great Simulation until and unless one of us steps outside it, we can understand its basic elements, which we uncovered in this book, and how it relates to various theories about the nature of the physical world.

WHAT ARE THE MAIN ELEMENTS OF THE GREAT SIMULATION?

Much of this book has gone over the various reasons computer science, quantum (and relativistic) physics, and Eastern (and some Western) mystics all seem to be describing a world that is better explained by the simulation hypothesis.

Using information and trends in how video games have developed thus far, we can project well into the future of our own technological trends to see how such a simulation—a giant video game with billions (and perhaps trillions) of players—might be built to be indistinguishable from physical reality.

What are the core elements that make up our Great Simulation? Let’s review them.

High-Resolution Pixelated World

Video games and computer graphics have evolved from crude simulations rendered with 8-bit pixels in arcade games to much more sophisticated computer graphics showing millions of colors and 4K+ resolution. In fact, the resolution of computer-generated objects and characters has gotten so good that both video games and special effects in films rely on the same computer-modeling and texture-rendering techniques.

Looking at how realistic today’s games are compared with only a decade or two ago, how will our ability to render realistic worlds and characters evolve over not only the coming years but the coming decades? This points to computers being able to generate hyperrealistic characters. With the advent of virtual reality, or VR, we see how a single world rendered in a way that works with our eyes and our minds can have the illusion of depth and realism, and with augmented reality, or mixed reality, the boundary between what is physical and what is computer-generated starts to fade. With generative AI, the realism and breadth and scope of these illusory worlds will grow quickly to resemble infinite worlds.

The logical conclusion is that we as a civilization will be able to render worlds that are indistinguishable from physical reality in a few decades. The likelihood that there is an advanced civilization that is way ahead of us, that evolved in the billions of years of the galaxy’s existence to date and which has already done this, is very high.

A Massively Multiplayer Online Game

Our video games have also evolved from single-player games running (and rendered) on a single computer screen to shared experiences that allow initially a few, then dozens, and today millions of players to be logged in. While our server technology does not yet scale to billions of players simultaneously, there is no reason it couldn’t in the near future, considering we already have websites and apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X with over a billion users.

In a multiplayer game, there is a game state, and there are individual characters controlled by different players. There is no single rendering of the game; there is only information that exists “in the cloud.” Each computer renders the graphics locally as needed, transmitting information to each of the others playing the game. This provides a powerful analogy for how each of us interacts with this seemingly physical shared world. Just like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, the simulation hypothesis puts forth that we are each controlling our characters and the game is shared and rendered based on perceptions in our own minds.

A Seemingly Infinite Algorithmically Generated World

Video games evolved from bitmapped images (called raster images), in which every pixel of the world is stored in the game definition, to algorithmically generated worlds, in which we render only part of the world at a time. The rest of the world is there, but we see it only if we can “travel” there in the game, and it’s rendered only when necessary. In video games that have large universes, the “rest of the world” beyond a certain point is also algorithmically generated. This makes it possible to have an arbitrarily large number of planets or worlds to visit, each of which gets generated as it is observed in the short term via procedural generation and in the long term by generative AI. The only limit is the storage capability, and even that can be optimized.

In our world, there are at our best estimate (as of 2024) between two hundred billion and two trillion galaxies, with many trillions of stars and countless planets. Each of these is a world that we might someday visit if we are ever able to traverse the distance of interstellar space. Unlike in video games, we may never be able to visit many of these planets, which raises the questions of how they are created and whether they actually exist or are like some simulation—signals sent to us as we observe farther and farther out into the world. This also brings up the idea that whatever physical processes we think build the world around us, they may have computation-like characteristics. Fractal geometry, based on simple recursive fractal algorithms, has been remarkably effective at simulating aspects of the natural world, including treelike structures, leaves, and the landscape of planets. It’s possible that the reason we won’t be able to visit all of these worlds is that they don’t really exist, but are procedurally generated to make it seem to us we live in an almost infinite universe.

Player Characters, Non-Player Characters, and AI

In video games, as discussed, there are PCs (player characters, or avatars) and NPCs (non-player characters), artificial characters that are controlled by the game and by algorithms. As AI gets more sophisticated, many believe we have already passed the Turing Test. While we haven’t, as I write this second edition of the book, passed the Metaverse Turing Test, the pace at which AI is developing makes it seem like we are probably only years away (and definitely within a decade). If our computer technology will let us create simulated artificial intelligence (SAI), which can be put into android-type bodies, the questions of intelligence and consciousness start to blur with concepts of computer science and what is “alive.” As with Star Trek and other science fiction, once this important point is reached, who is to say that we aren’t, in fact, some kind of AI ourselves?

In Nick Bostrom’s original simulation argument, he postulates that we are not only part of a simulation but are likely to be simulated consciousness rather than real beings. While this is at odds with the models put forth by mystics of a consciousness or soul that goes in and out of the rendered world, both remain possibilities and cannot be ruled out.

Downloadable Consciousness

Today’s scientists believe that if they can capture the trillions of neural interactions in a person’s brain they can simulate that person’s consciousness and ways of thinking after the person’s death. While this goal of downloadable consciousness remains out of our grasp at the moment, some do think it is mere decades away. Mystics argue that downloading was how we got into this body in the first place: At birth our consciousness, which comes from a soul, is downloaded into our body. Downloading consciousness raises interesting questions about whether we are real beings or just information, and it has been hinted at in most religious and mystical traditions.

A Quantized, Pixelated Reality

Quantum physics arises from the idea that instead of living in a solid physical world of macro objects, we actually live in a world that is made up of smaller objects. There seems to be a practical limit to how small the building blocks of matter can be—beyond which it is impossible to measure. The idea is that physical reality is not continuous but quantized. The quanta originally were levels of energy, and in fact, at the atomic level, most of what we think of as physical objects are actually empty space. The quantized nature of space and the fixed nature of the speed of light lend to the idea of “quantized time” as being part of our physical reality as well.

This means that rather than being analog, our physical reality is better expressed as a digital reality of discrete pieces of information—just like the pixels in a computer game or the bits stored in digital information. The bits are more like qubits, or quantum bits, than simple digital ones or zeros in this model. Still, the fact that we live in a quantized reality is reminiscent of a world rendered with pixels. The fact that it appears three-dimensional, which would have been an argument against a simulation in the past, just means that our pixels are not on a two-dimensional screen. Threedimensional printers have shown us that even 3D objects can be rendered using 3D models and pixels that are built using some minimum pixel or “object.”

A Rendering Engine Based on Quantum Indeterminacy

Most video games (and other computer programs) require optimization of computing resources. They only render what needs to be rendered from the observational point of view of the player. This directly relates to the modern idea of quantum indeterminism, which suggests that the physical world may exist only when someone observes it. Quantum indeterminism, then, becomes an optimization technique. Just as in video games, where there is no single rendered world (it is rendered on everyone’s hardware), it’s possible that in the Great Simulation our hardware is our consciousness, and while there is a shared reality, we are all seeing only the parts of it that are needed. This would explain the modern idea of quantum indeterminism.

A Physics Engine Based on Classical and Quantum Physics

All modern video games that have a virtual world have a physics engine, which determines the rules of physics within the virtual world. This may or may not define the rules outside the virtual world.

In our physics engine, the speed of light has been found to be a constant in physical space-time. If space-time is pixelated, then we can use the constant speed to get a quantized time, a clock speed of the simulation. In video games, too, there are restrictions on how long it takes to move from point A to point B unless you teleport from one part of the world to another. Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes, show a way to accomplish this in our simulated space-time reality. Moreover, quantum entanglement and non-locality show that there may be ways to transfer information between different parts of the system at faster than the speed of light—or, rather, instantaneously.

If this is the case, then there must be ways to transmit information that does not pass through normal space-time constraints. This all suggests that there is something outside normal space-time, which means space-time is a construct, not unlike a simulation. Quantum entanglement seems to show proof that information can be at least shared instantly, and this is more explainable via the simulation hypothesis than by our current understanding of physics.

All of these elements bring together ideas from modern video games in a way that can be applied to a shared billion-plus multiplayer online roleplaying game. Not only can they be applied, but as we’ve seen throughout this book, the nature of the physical world around us, as found by physics and modeled by computer science, points to the simulation hypothesis as a very likely scenario.

CONSCIOUS BEINGS OR UNCONSCIOUS SIMULATIONS—PCS VS. NPCS

One of the debates within the community of simulation hypothesis speculators is whether we are all just simulated beings, or NPCs inside a simulation. Bostrom’s original simulation argument would imply this.

However, the reason I have chosen to use the metaphor of the video game, the RPG version of the simulation hypothesis, is that it opens up the possibility that we are actually players outside the game who control or inhabit our character inside the video game. I chose this metaphor deliberately because I believe that the Eastern mystics may be closer to the nature of the Great Simulation than many of our scientists, although the simulation hypothesis bridges this gap really well. This doesn’t mean that the Great Simulation is not technologically based. In fact, one of the critical stages on the road to the simulation point is stage 10, downloadable consciousness.

You’ll recall arguments we explored in Part III about how the simulation hypothesis not only parallels but provides a scientific basis for the mystics who claim to have “peeked outside the simulation”—sages like Buddha and the mysterious rishis who wrote the Vedas (not to mention the founders of the Western religions, including Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and others in the Abrahamic line of prophets).

Dreamlike Nature of Reality

Mystics of all traditions have told us that what we perceive as reality is actually more like a dream. This is particularly strong in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In the Hindu Vedas, there is the idea of the lila, the grand play that we get caught up in, which is the maya or illusion that formed the basis for Buddhism. In certain forms of Tantric Buddhism, there are whole schools of training related to dream yoga—which is learning to recognize that you are inside a dream. In a dream, we are unaware that there is another part of us asleep in bed, and the elements within the dream seem real while we are in it. In fact, we saw how dreams pretty much already exhibit all the technology we have laid out in the road to the simulation point. Souls,

Reincarnation, Karma, and Quests

Building on the modern idea of downloadable consciousness, the Eastern religious traditions teach us that we are either a soul or consciousness that gets downloaded into a physical body for the duration of the dreamlike state, which we call life. This happens multiple times, and we end up with multiple lives, not unlike what happens in video games.

In these traditions, there is some part of us that is outside the simulation, and there is an accounting of everything that happens to us as we play our characters, just like we keep track of XP (experience points), levels, and quests inside video games. This builds on the concept of karma, the law of cause and effect. Karma is, in fact, like an endless quest engine in video games, keeping track of our achievements and our goals, and creating situations with other players that we need in order to resolve previous karma. In Buddhism, the endless wheel of karma is what drives us to keep coming back—like an ongoing manifest of quests. We create new quests for ourselves through our actions.

Where are these quests stored? As in a multiplayer video game, they are stored outside the rendered world, and whatever logic is being used to keep track of them keeps us going. What kind of being or entity could keep track of billions of individual items of karma and experience? Some kind of computer or AI is the most likely option, and suddenly we do not need the metaphorical Lords of Karma.

A Godlike AI, Angels, and the Afterlife

In the Western religious traditions, we typically pray to God, and God sends angels who keep track of your deeds (the recording angels who are writing the scroll of deeds defined in Islam or the book of life described in the Bible). This might point to the existence of some kind of godlike entity outside the Great Simulation that could keep track of billions of people or players and their actions.

The descriptions in the Western religions of angels and judgment of the eternal soul based on the actions in the physical world are also consistent with the simulation hypothesis. Just like in a video game, our actions are recorded (by recording or guardian angels) and then used to keep score of our actions.

Thus, the religious and mystical traditions, as they try to explain the nature of reality, are referring to the physical world around us as a place we are “downloaded to,” and where our actions are recorded, and we return to some place outside the physical world. In modern computer science terminology, the Great Simulation explains this perfectly, and if we had computers and video games in ancient times, it’s very possible that our religious traditions might have used similar terminology to that used in this book.

THE BIG PICTURE: INFORMATION AND COMPUTATION UNDERLIE THE OTHER SCIENCES

As a video game designer myself, I have been amazed at how quickly video games have evolved from the very simple 8-bit arcade-style games that I played in my youth into very complex multiplayer online role-playing games with seemingly endless possibilities and endless worlds to explore.

When I first heard about the simulation hypothesis, I, like many others, was skeptical. As I delved more deeply into it using my own training in computer science, I saw that it was consistent with where our technology is going and brought together many different threads of the search for knowledge or ultimate truth, which is not just restricted to science but includes philosophy and religion.

Moreover, it seems that with each passing year, information science is expanding beyond our simple understanding of computing. Software is not just running the world. To paraphrase Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, who once said that software was “eating the world,” we might say that information science is eating up the other sciences, including physics and chemistry and biology.

We see this everywhere in today’s world. Communications technology, for example, which started off transmitting physical signals over wires—in devices such as the telegraph and telephone—today is a digital field consisting of bits of information that are bundled and transmitted in layers of algorithms. The entertainment world, which started off with physical frames of film, is now just information that can be transmitted in packets or over the air, moving away from the traditional TV broadcast to an entirely digital world.

The information of the world is being digitized, and as we move into 3D printing, it’s becoming apparent that physical objects can be constructed easily, using computer models and machines that turn information into physical pixels in the 3D world around us. While this may have started with CAD (computer-aided design), it is now becoming apparent that physical objects and processes are much better represented as information, and more intelligent digital machines can turn this information into physical objects much more efficiently than traditional machines of the industrial revolution.

Even the biological world, which is thought of as a very separate field from computer science, is slowly starting to overlap with information science. The biological world, it turns out, is also based on information, though, of course, of a different type—one that creates cells based on instructions in DNA through various biological processes. Within computer science and AI, biological processes have shown that they can be utilized to get much smarter and more unique results—most of today’s machine learning is based on the conditioning of neural networks, which are based on biological algorithms. While there is still some way to go, the burgeoning field of bioinformatics and modeling of biological processes has made information and computation an integral part of the organic world!

Most importantly, the physical world, which was thought of in classical physics as a set of physical objects moving in continuous paths around the heavens, has been updated. As quantum physics reveals that there is no such thing as a physical object, that most objects consist of empty space and electrons, we start to get into metaphysical questions about what is real in the world. Quantized space and quantized time start to look much more like digital pixels and digital clock speed—which we invented for modern computers—at a much more finite scale. The information or “state” of a particle, which is being used in quantum computing, may be the only real way to define a particle, and again, information and computation are taking on more important roles in physics.

Even legendary physicist John Wheeler, who has played such a role in many of the concepts we’ve discussed from quantum physics, ultimately came to the conclusion that most of physics is based on information. He coined the phrase “it from bit.” In his autobiography, Wheeler summarized three phases of his long career in physics: “Everything Is Particles” evolved to “Everything Is Fields,” which eventually evolved to “Everything Is Information.” The “it” is the physical world. The “bit” is the information (note that when he wrote this, quantum computers were not yet practical, but he referenced the idea of information in the spin of particles, which later became the basis for qubits in quantum computers).

The whole field of digital physics seems to epitomize this change in perspective. According to the well-known philosophy site PhilPapers:

The phrase “digital physics” is sometimes used to express the controversial idea that the proper subject matter of physics (in particular, quantum physics) is information, sometimes to express the even more controversial idea that fundamental physical reality just is information.

The future of almost all fields of science, which started as a path to explore the mysteries of the physical world, it seems, evolves to be all about computation and information. At MIT, one of the premier institutions of science and technology in the world, which had only five colleges until recently, a new college has just been created in recognition of the idea that computation and AI are affecting all fields of human endeavor. With a billion-dollar endowment, the Schwarzman College of Computing was created in 2020 and specifically dedicated to the idea that computer science in general, and AI in particular, rather than being the province of a group of computer scientists, will impact every other science and industry.

In the past, the simulation hypothesis was thought of by most scientists as science fiction—better material for a Philip K. Dick novel than for serious study. That is no longer the case. One of the reasons why the simulation hypothesis is taken more seriously now is the evolution of video games, and more importantly, information science, computation, and artificial intelligence. We are increasingly seeing that, in fact, rather than being distinct fields, the other sciences may be joined together by a layer of information and computation. This means that just like mathematics, computer science may be a fundamental building block of the universe around us. This trend is only accelerating, and we will see more scientists taking the simulation hypothesis more seriously in the years and decades to come.

PARTING THOUGHTS: BRIDGING THE GREAT DIVIDE

One of the great debates over the past five hundred years has been the dichotomy of the physical nature of reality argued by science and the spiritual (a euphemism for nonphysical) nature of reality argued by religion and mysticism. While the religious views dominated for much of our history, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became the dominant way to describe the world around us, and religion was relegated to a secondary branch of reality concerned with morality and spirituality, forever removed from the serious study of the physical world.

Einstein once said, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” You might say he rejected the idea that there is a conflict. As the twenty-first century has advanced, many scientists, however, do reject the idea that religion is scientific in any way, or that what the mystics may be telling us could be quite literally true. The study of consciousness is thus reduced to chemicals, and the study of religion and spiritual experiences is reduced to a social science that studies what people believe. As a result, most academics have given up trying to create scientific models that might be consistent with the mystical worldview—which tells us that the physical reality around us is not all there is and consciousness is important. Physics giant Max Planck once wrote, “I regard consciousness as fundamental,” a worldview that has been abandoned by most of our mainstream scientists, with a few courageous exceptions.

The development and evolution of computation and information science has, in fact, provided us with another model and a way to bridge the gap between all of science, consciousness, and many religious concepts. As Werner Heisenberg, another of the Nobel Prize–winning pioneers of quantum physics, tells us in the quote from the beginning of this part of the book, when two different lines of thought pulled from different cultures and context meet, then “one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.”

The simulation hypothesis is one of those new and interesting developments. It may just be the answer that provides a single framework, a coherent model that brings together science and religion so that we don’t have to be slaves to just one way of knowing the true nature of reality.

Einstein also once said, “God is a mystery. But a comprehensible mystery.” We may now be in a position to understand, explain, and soon, with the development of simulation technology, reconstruct many elements of that mystery ourselves.

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