Hack & Slash

where we learn why we are definitely living in a computer game

A few months ago I read a book called The Simulation Hypothesis by a guy named Rizwan Virk. Rizwan Virk is an incredibly clever man who works at MIT making crazy systems that no-one understands. He also produced a movie named Knights of Badassdom, starring Peter Dinklage. It’s about L.A.R.Pers who accidentally release a demon. It’s fair to say Rizwan has his sticky fingers in many honey pots.

But the book is great. As I tend to do on this Substack, I will now present a meandering look at why he (and many others) think we are living in a computer system. Sort of.

To fully understand why we are just bashing about in some far-future version of Elden Ring, it’s important to understand just how far computer technology – and specifically game technology – has come in the last few decades.

(Disclaimer – I don’t play video-games but that doesn’t stop me being nerdy about the technology)

Here is an image from a game called E.T which was released in 1982. There were games before it but this game is 40 years old so it gives us a nice round number.

It looks like hot shit. Now here is a screenshot of a game called Mafia. It’s pretty recent (2020) and shows just how far computer graphics have come. It’s still obviously a video-game, but that’s besides the point for this topic.

Because here’s the thing. If that is the leap between 1982 and 2020, then what are video-games going to look like in 2060? or 2090? (doom-mongers (of which I am one myself) will say ‘we will not be around to see 2090 and science has a lovely catch-all for that sort of thing which I will touch on later).

The answer is they are going to look incredible.

The way we play video-games is also changing. More and more games nowadays are controlled by the body not the hand. Virtual Reality has taken off properly, headsets and walking pads have made it easy to slip comfortably into another world. And again, it’s obvious these are video-games in 2022. But 2022 isn't what we are focusing on.

Processing power has also increased somewhat. The chart below maps out the processing power of the worlds supercomputers. It’s a few years old now but pretty self-explanatory.

Two things on this chart are crucial to Simulation Theory. Firstly, the line keeps going up. Secondly, we are mere years away from having a computer with the same processing power as a human brain. I might get into quantum computing at some point but now isn’t the best time. But let’s just say that when we can simulate a brain properly, shit is going to get wild.

So we have all this computer power, graphics, immersion – and it’s all going up and up.

We can assume that computer power doesn’t hit a glass ceiling and just stop. We have not harnessed a fraction of the computing power that is available to us. Quantum computers are just around the corner and they will make the things we have nowadays seem laughably obsolete. So eventually, we will get to the point where we can replicate the world we live in, and everyone in it (here is another important point – the computer won’t have to replicate the brains of billions of people. It will only have to replicate the number of brains that you meet. On average, we will meet about 0.000125% of the worlds population in our life. So if we are the main character (let’s assume we aren’t an NPC) then we actually need to simulate the brains of 10000 people. As the chart above showed, we can almost do one brain. And when Quantum computers come, we will be able to do 10000 in the blink of an eye.)

Phew. Exhausting possibilities. Let’s take a jump to something even harder to understand. Let’s say we get to the point where we can simulate a world. Would we do it? Almost certainly yes. So we have our real world in 2090 or whenever we get to the point. And now we have our simulated world. Two worlds. One real, one simulated. OK. Now, what if we simulated another world? It’s fairly clear that if we can simulate one world we would be able to simulate many. So now we have three worlds. One real, two simulated. OK. Now. What if the simulated worlds got to the point where they could simulate worlds themselves?

Science Bit:- the anthropic principle is that sexy catch-all I mentioned earlier. It says that we are here, therefore it must have happened. It’s used all the time in astronomy and physics, especially to explain why there is life on this planet. There is life on this planet because I am here telling you that there is life on this planet. We live in a simulation because computer power must have got to the point where we could run a simulation of our world. So the above question isn’t a question at all. It has already happened.

If we apply another complicated theory – that of fractals – to this one, we can easily see how these worlds would spiral out of control. Every simulated world would make more simulated worlds. Those worlds would make worlds themselves. Pretty soon you would have worlds everywhere. And just like bunnies, these worlds would reproduce constantly, at every level.

A few weeks ago I talked about Multiverse Theory, and as if by magic (but actually completely accidental) the Simulation Theory ties in nicely to the Multiverse Theory. Because if you have all these worlds, you automatically have a multiverse. And each world would change ever so slightly. Simulated World 9,384627 would simulate a world that was pretty different than Simulated World 6. If you know the concept of Chinese Whispers, it’s basically the same. You are making a world based on what you know, and each time that changes slightly, it gives off a ripple effect. Pretty soon, the world you created looks nothing like the ones being created by the people in the simulations.

But how does any of this confirm that we are in a simulation ourselves?

It comes down to math again. Just like Boltzmann Brains, it’s a probabilistic near-certainty that we are in a simulation and it’s super-simple to understand. We know computer power is ever-rising. We know that when it gets to the point where we can simulate a brain (a few years time) then things are going to accelerate incredibly quickly after that. We know that when we get to the ability to simulate a world, we will. It’s human nature that we will. For all our flaws, we are enterprising, curious and wonderful. We know, beyond all this, that the simulated worlds will, themselves, simulate worlds. And as we saw a bit further up the page, these worlds will just multiply exponentially until there are countless worlds.

But for this last bit of math, lets say there are one billion worlds.

Are we more likely to be living on the original world, or one of the billion other worlds?

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It’s my birthday tomorrow and I will be 2 years clean of drugs and alcohol.