The possibility of digital creation enabled by advanced technology has allowed us to formulate an interesting guess at the story of our own beginnings: As we design, so, perhaps, were we designed.
Nevertheless, the theory has spread more rapidly-and far beyond specialized academic communities-since the advent of computers. Plato was just one of the philosophers who argued that our reality was at least somewhat illusory, and while most of us are now familiar with some variant of the concept through movies like The Truman Show or The Matrix, it’s a topic that has persisted in philosophical circles throughout modern history, and even has scientific support in fields like quantum mechanics. In fact, it’s very, very old-at least as old as the ancient Greeks. “But it is outside physics, so I would rather not comment on it.The idea that life is not “real,” in the way we understand it as human beings, is not new. “This is an interesting philosophical question,” Kovrizhin acknowledged. If we are indeed trapped in a cosmic computer simulation, isn’t it possible that the advanced civilization programmed this very discovery into the system, as a way to throw us off the scent?
LIFE IS A SIMULATION FULL
If you speak math, you can peruse the full text of the open-access journal article here.įrom a strictly pop philosophy point of view, an obvious question still remains. The specifics of the proof get a lot more complicated, of course. In other words, when you factor in the complexity of the quantum world - a surreal level of reality that we can observe and can prove exists - then any kind of traditional computer simulation model would quickly fail. “If one tries to extrapolate this to few hundreds of spins, then building a computer with such a memory would require more atoms than there are in the universe.” “Storage of such a matrix for 20 spins would require a terabyte of RAM,” he said. Due to the nature of quantum physics, the computational resources required to simulate such a system would grow rapidly and exponentially. “In order to simulate a quantum mechanical system one would have to diagonalize this matrix on a computer, which is a computationally difficult task when the size of the matrix becomes large.”Īs an example, Kovrizhin described the mathematics required to simulate just a few particles spinning in a particular quantum state. “In quantum mechanics, which is our basis for understanding of nature, a system of particles is described by a Hamiltonian, an object which can be written as a matrix,” Kovrizhin wrote in an email to Seeker. Kovrizhin, co-author of the research, said that the team was simulating certain quantum phenomena occurring in metals when they ran into a subatomic brick wall. RELATED: Mind-Blowing Computer Simulation Recreates Our Universe Getting back to the hard math, the authors of the new research paper actually stumbled across their evidence while trying to develop a computer simulation of their own. Physicists and metaphysicists both have built some genuinely persuasive arguments for the idea, citing various mathematical and logic anomalies that suggest we’re in a cosmic computer simulation. It’s worth reading up on the simulation hypothesis, if for no other reason than it keeps your speculative synapses limber. If future computers can spit out limitless simulated universes, then the likelihood of our current reality being the “base reality” are virtually zero. In fact, if we accept the idea that future computing power will be practically limitless, then it’s actually probable that we’re already living in some kind of cosmic hard drive. These sims would be so powerful that individual characters within the simulation - you and I - would essentially be conscious entities. It goes like this, according to proponents: Assuming that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future, then it’s likely that future generations will use these computers to run detailed simulations on the history of the species. The details get rather complicated - more on that in a bit - but to fully appreciate the development, it’s helpful to know more about the simulation hypothesis.
0 kommentar(er)
