The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics & Eastern Mystics Agree We Are In A Video Game

By Rizwan Virk

The Simulation Hypothesis, by best-selling author, renowned MIT computer scientist and Silicon Valley video game designer Rizwan Virk, is the first serious book to explain one of the most daring and consequential theories of our time.  Riz is the Executive Director of Play Labs @ MIT, a video game startup incubator at the MIT Game Lab.

Drawing from research and concepts from computer science, artificial intelligence, video games, quantum physics, and referencing both speculative fiction and ancient eastern spiritual texts, Virk shows how all of these traditions come together to point to the idea that we may be inside a simulated reality like the Matrix.

The Simulation Hypothesis is the idea that our physical reality, far from being a solid physical universe, is part of an increasingly sophisticated video game-like simulation, where we all have multiple lives, consisting of pixels with its own internal clock run by some giant Artificial Intelligence.  Simulation theory explains some of the biggest mysteries of quantum and relativistic physics, such as quantum indeterminacy, parallel universes, and the integral nature of the speed of light.

Recently, the idea that we may be living in a giant video game has received a lot of attention:

"The chances that we not in a simualtion is one in billions."  -Elon Musk

"I find it hard to argue we are not in a simulation." -Neil deGrasse Tyson

"We are living in computer generated reality." -Philip K. Dick

Video game technology has developed from basic arcade and text adventures to MMORPGs.  Video game designer Riz Virk shows how these games may continue to evolve in the future, including virtual reality, augmented reality, Artificial Intelligence, and quantum computing. This book shows how this evolution could lead us to the point of being able to develop all encompassing virtual worlds like the Oasis in Ready Player One, or the simulated reality in the Matrix. 

While the idea sounds like science fiction, many scientists, engineers, and professors have given the Simulation Hypothesis serious consideration. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has popularized the idea of downloading our consciousness into a silicon based device, which would mean we are just digital information after all. Some, like Oxford lecturer Nick Bostrom, goes further and thinks we may in fact be artificially intelligent consciousness inside such a simulation already!  

But the Simulation Hypothesis is not just a modern idea.  Philosophers like Plato have been telling us that we live in a "cave" and can only see shadows of the real world. Mystics of all traditions have long contended that we are living in some kind of "illusion "and that there are other realities which we can access with our minds. While even Judeo-Christian traditions have this idea, Eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism make this idea part of their core tradition — that we are inside a dream world ("Maya" or illusion, or Vishnu's Dream), and we have "multiple lives" playing different characters when one dies, continuing to gain experience and "level up" after completing certain challenges.  Sounds a lot like a video game!

Whether you are a computer scientist, a fan of science fiction like the Matrix movies, a video game enthusiast, or a spiritual seeker, The Simulation Hypothesis touches on all these areas, and you will never look at the world the same way again!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rizwan Virk
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393303152

Book preview

Overview

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

—Albert Einstein

Know that all phenomena

Are like reflections appearing

In a very clear mirror;

Devoid of inherent existence

—Buddha

Introduction

The Simulation Hypothesis

We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.

—Philip K. Dick, Metz Sci-Fi Convention, 1977

As a kid growing up in the Midwest in the early 1980s, I loved video games. You could say I grew up with them. My friends and I would go to D&B Pizza to watch the older kids (who had more quarters than we did) playing the arcade games there. These games, now classics, included Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and even Dragon’s Lair, which confounded and delighted us because we couldn’t decide if it was an animated cartoon or a video game!

When my family finally got an Atari video game console (or VCS) at home, my friends often came over to my house to play the latest cartridge-based games. During this time, as I watched my friends play, I became intrigued not just by the gameplay itself but by the illusion that there was a self-contained world in there, inside the video game that was being displayed on our TV set. I don’t know exactly where or when this notion of a self-contained world first emerged in my mind, but it happened particularly in games that were trying to be realistic.

When playing a racing game, for example, while the car was going around the track, my eyes would be drawn to members of the virtual audience sitting in the bleachers. Beyond the bleachers, there was a sky with clouds and a city or country landscape that was only partly visible. I found myself wondering how far this simulated world extended in all directions beyond the track. What happened when no one was playing the video game? Did the characters and the buildings still exist, or did they simply cease to exist?

Although I learned to program rudimentary video games myself shortly thereafter when my parents bought my brother and I a Commodore 64 (and later, an Apple II), it would be many years before I understood video game development well enough to answer these types of questions.

The first game I ever created was Tic Tac Toe, basically putting blocky lines on the screen and then figuring out how to get the computer to draw Xs and Os on the squares selected by the players. My brother and I would play each other, but after he got bored I figured I could play against the computer. I began conceiving subroutines that could determine where to place the best move on the screen at any given point.

Years later in the 1990s while I was a computer science student at MIT, I would learn all about AI and game playing algorithms, which allowed the computer to play more competitively. At the same time, I watched as video game fidelity improved, moving from 8-bit to 16-bit games, and the world in there started to look more and more realistic.

More than a decade after that, I moved to Silicon Valley at the start of the mobile gaming revolution. I designed a number of different games, including Tap Fish—one of the most popular games of its type (a resource management game, also called a simulation game), having reached more than 30 million downloads in the early days of the Apple iPhone. Later, I designed multiplayer competitive games based on popular TV shows like Penny Dreadful and Grimm and became an advisor to and investor in many video game companies.

During these years, games evolved from simple adventure and arcade games to fully 3D massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as Ultima Online and World of Warcraft. Some games were actually virtual worlds, such as Second Life and The Sims, in which the goal was more about simulating life and less about fighting monsters.

These developments only amplified the questions that had been lurking at the back of my mind since I first started playing with the Atari:

What happened when no one was playing the game? Were the simulated characters still there? Did the landscape change and evolve? If multiple users were playing the same game online, did it mean they were part of a shared world that existed independent of their computers? If so, where was it—was it on a server, or was it in some other metaphysical landscape in cyberspace?  Or did the world only exist when it was rendered on someone’s local computer?

Do We All Live Inside a Video Game?

Over the last decade, these basic questions about video game worlds have formed the basis of a much larger debate that has been raging among scientists, tech entrepreneurs, computer programmers, philosophers, and science-fiction writers, not to mention among the general public. This debate is not just about video game technology, but about the nature of our reality and how the world out here might actually be more like the world in there than we previously thought.

The idea that what we call reality is actually a super-sophisticated video game is popularly referred to as the Simulation Hypothesis. The fundamental question raised by the simulation hypothesis is this: Are we all actually characters living inside some kind of giant, massively multiplayer online video game, a simulated reality that is so well rendered that we cannot distinguish it from physical reality? 

Although Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom coined the term the Simulation Argument in a landmark paper in 2003, the idea of living in a simulated reality has been around for a long time in science, religion and fiction.

The reality of the world around us is something that philosophers have debated for some time. Thousands of years ago in The Republic, Plato described his analogy of the cave. In this cave, the residents are chained to a wall so they can’t see the world outside; the best they can perceive are shadows of the real world, reflected on the wall of the cave by some light outside. The residents of the cave construct an elaborate idea about what reality is, and Plato surmised that we are like the residents of this cave, seeing only shadows of the real world.

Many of the world’s religious traditions tell us that the world around us is an illusion created for our benefit. This is particularly true in the Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, which explicitly tell us that the world we see is maya, or illusion, and that there is another world out there beyond the illusion. Even the Western religions have a similar concept of this world (the here) and the other, eternal world (the hereafter).

Psychiatrists like Carl Jung have probed the question of mental projection, where each of us is perceiving the world slightly differently based upon what is going on inside our minds. In this view, most of what we think of as being out there—the physical world—is actually in here, meaning in our heads, like a dream, there being no objective physical reality.

More recently, Elon Musk, world-famous entrepreneur and founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has put forth this idea as being very likely. In fact, he estimates the chances that we are in a simulation at a billion to one. His remarks have ignited serious debate.

There are good reasons for Musk to put forth this argument at this point in time. A few years ago, I started the Play Labs accelerator at MIT for startups using the latest video game technology. There, I saw firsthand the high fidelity that today’s virtual and augmented reality can achieve.

If this pace of improvement of video games continues into the future, what kinds of sophisticated video games will we be able to produce? Will we eventually be able to produce a game with such high resolution that it will be indistinguishable from reality? And if so, could we already be inside such a video game?

This realization led me to explore the simulation hypothesis in detail. What I discovered is that its implications go well beyond the fields of computer science and video games to strike at the heart of all of our various paths of searching for truth.

The goal of what we call science is to understand the nature of reality. If we are in fact inside a video game, then science becomes a matter of discovering the rules of this video game. I found that many renowned physicists believe a computer-generated simulated world would explain some of the strangest findings of quantum physics.

It turns out that, before science, this search for truth was the domain of religions and philosophers. The more I delved into their cosmological models of how the universe works, particularly the Eastern mystics, the more clearly I saw how the simulation hypothesis explains the ancient teachings in a scientific way.

Science Fiction—How the Simulation Hypothesis Went Mainstream

Let’s back up a little bit. It wasn’t just playing and creating video games but watching and reading (what my parents might say was too much) science fiction that put me on this path of speculation about the simulation hypothesis.

The first time I personally considered the idea that we were all living in a simulated reality was during an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when a holodeck character realized that he was in a simulation and that some of the people in the simulation existed out there. The holodeck was a super sophisticated room that could simulate any environment, and it allowed the crew of the Enterprise to experience any real or fictional environment. In this episode, the crew were simulating a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and the character who realized that he was in a simulation was Professor Moriarty, based on Holmes’s most famous nemesis.

In this case, out there meant outside the holodeck, which was the rest of the spaceship Enterprise! I wondered: Is it possible that we are in a holodeck-like space and there is another world out there?

It was not a coincidence that my first encounter with the simulation hypothesis was through a TV show. The concept of the simulation hypothesis is so tied into the science fiction of our recent past that it would be difficult to talk about it coherently without making science fiction references. In fact, the idea that we are living in a simulated reality first entered Western popular consciousness through science fiction.

No other piece of science fiction was more influential in bringing the simulation hypothesis into the popular consciousness than the movie The Matrix, released in 1999. In the film, Keanu Reeves plays a character (Mr. Anderson) who lives in a world that seems a lot like ours, but at night he’s a hacker (called Neo) who explores different places on the net, only to find enigmatic references to something called the Matrix. He stumbles onto a team of hackers who turn his worldview upside down.

In a now famous scene, Neo is given the choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill by a character called Morpheus (named after the Greek god of dreams and sleep, played by Laurence Fishburne). The red pill will wake Neo up, while the blue pill will allow him to continue living his existence in the dream world that is the Matrix.

By taking the red pill, Neo wakes up to realize that what he thought was reality was actually a computer simulation. He finds that in the real world, all humans live in pods, plugged into the Matrix—a high-fidelity video game–like simulation that the characters have lived in their whole lives. In the sequels to The Matrix, the audience learns that this simulated reality was created to keep human minds preoccupied by a race of super-intelligent machines, who were using the small amount of electricity generated by each human’s brain for their own nefarious purposes.

While The Matrix is probably the most popular fictional rendering of the simulation hypothesis, its creators, the Wachowskis, were far from the first science fiction writers to suggest this idea. The Wachowskis claimed to be inspired by noted sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, whose novels of alternate realities have become remarkably popular in the years since his death.

While writing this book, I spoke with Dick’s wife (he passed away in 1982), Leslie Tessa B. Dick, and she pointed out that this was a recurring theme across many of his novels, only some of which have been made into movies. The question of what is real and what is fake— whether about our physical reality or about our humanity—were central in many of Dick’s highly imaginative works.

In Dick’s short story The Adjustment Team (which the 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau is based upon), the main character, Ed Fletcher, is late for work one day and finds that his whole building, including the people within it, is being adjusted. During adjustment, everything is de-energized, a process which freezes everyone in place while changes are being made to the building and to the people by the adjustment team.  It’s kind of like hitting the pause button on a movie or a video game and freezing the scene.

The people who are adjusted, including Fletcher’s co-workers and boss, only have the new memories once the adjustment is done. Fletcher, on the other hand, remembers the pre-adjusted world; he was not supposed to have caught a peek behind the curtain of reality, since he should have been in the office already and should have been adjusted along with everyone else.

These notions of pulling the curtain back on reality, fake memories, and different timelines were hallmarks of Philip K. Dick’s work. In The Man in the High Castle, a novel that won Dick the prestigious Hugo Award and is the basis of the Amazon TV series, we see an alternate timeline in which the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, won World War II. They now rule the United States, having divided it between them. Only by perceiving another reality is one of the main characters able to see an alternate world where the Allies won the war—which is our current world!

Sometimes Dick’s stories dealt with artificial intelligence and fake memories more directly, both of which play a significant role in the simulation hypothesis. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which inspired the classic movie Blade Runner (starring Harrison Ford and directed by Ridley Scott), brings up the idea of false memories implanted in artificially created robots who look and act human. In fact, these androids may not even know they are artificial beings. This work raises serious questions about what it means to be human versus simulated or artificial consciousness, a topic we will explore in this book.

Tessa went much further than the novels, saying that Dick actually had experiences in life that convinced him that we were all inside some kind of simulation. Dick claimed that there were entities or people who could change the variables of the simulation, thus altering our timeline. Like some of his characters, Dick claimed to have remembered some of the original timeline before it was adjusted! This theme would be familiar to his readers. Dick expressed his view in a now-famous speech at a science fiction convention in Metz, France, in 1977. Dick said that we were inside a computer-generated reality that could be paused or backed up to change the variables, and then rerun forward. These changed variables were the only way, according to Dick, that we could realize we were in such a simulation!

Quantum Physics and the Idea of a Subjective Reality

Today, given the pace of technological progress in video games and computers since Dick’s time, science fiction writers are not alone in believing that we are all living in a simulation. Many prominent scholars and renowned physicists are voicing their beliefs that we live in a sophisticated simulation. The celebrated physicist and author of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, speculated that we have a 50 percent chance of being in a simulated reality. He’s not the only well-known physicist to think so. Host of the new Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson, has said that he thinks it’s very likely that the universe is a simulation. The assertions of such well-known scientists are notable and led me to explore what quantum physics might reveal about the simulation hypothesis.

What I learned as I delved into these areas is that quantum physics provides significant clues that we are in some kind of simulated reality. The basis for quantum physics is that the universe is not continuous but exists as a set of quanta, or discrete, values. This is true for subatomic particles, such as electrons, that seem to jump from one state to another without going through the values in between, a phenomenon known as a quantum leap. This is also true for computer simulations, which are based on discrete particles called pixels.

One of the most famous and troubling aspects of quantum physics is that we may not be living in a physical universe after all, but in a universe of probabilities. The idea is that a subatomic particle exists as a wave of probabilities—what’s called the quantum probability wave—until the probability wave collapses into a single reality. You might compare it to a theater that has a number of seats in it, and the wave is the probability that you (the particle) might be sitting in any one of these seats.

The best explanation that quantum physicists have been able to give for how the probability wave collapses is that consciousness, through the act of observation, plays a central role. In fact, some, like Fred Alan Wolf, a theoretical physicist, believe consciousness plays the critical role in the collapse of the probability wave: it is the act of observation that behaves much like a cosmic usher, ushering you to a specific seat in the theater.

This is startling. Generally speaking, since the time of French philosopher, mathematician and scientist René Descartes, science has subscribed to a materialistic worldview, where physical reality and consciousness are wholly separate and don’t interact with one another. The idea of a separate observer and observed universe doesn’t exist in quantum physics. Not only does quantum physics disrupt the whole idea of subject-object separation, but it opens a door that many physicists are uncomfortable with: we may not be living in an objective reality after all! In fact, our consciousness is so interconnected with reality that we may be living in a set of interconnected subjective realities.

This phenomenon, referred to as quantum indeterminacy, is one of the biggest mysteries in physics (and all of science), and it raises some serious questions about the nature of reality.

Some of these questions are strikingly similar to the ones that I have been asking about video games my whole life: Do all these probable realities actually exist, or are they just probabilities? Is there an actual shared reality, or is it rendered on separate observation devices? Is there in fact an objective world when no one is watching, or does it come in to existence only when someone is watching it – i.e., only when someone is logged in? 

And of course, the biggest question of all: Why would we be in a probabilistic world where making a choice (or having an observation) collapses a probability wave to a single timeline or probability?

As I began to explore this last question in some depth, it brought back my early experiences with Tic Tac Toe and with more sophisticated video game algorithms. As video game designers, we have to map out the possible futures—paths that might be taken inside the game. Most simple AI in games simulates moves of possible futures and then picks the best possible move based on those possible futures.

These possible futures are similar to the idea of a probability wave. In fact, the whole field of probability was originally created for gaming. Rather than referring to potential outcomes as probabilities, they were first called possible futures in rolling dice. A single die might have one of six possible futures, each one equally likely (assuming a uniform die). Two dice might have 6 x 6 = 36 possible futures. Thus was born statistics—presenting a way to talk about possible futures in games.

In quantum physics, this collapse of a probability wave into a single future seems to happen based on conscious observation or measurement. In a video game, the path that any player follows depends on the conscious choice and subsequent rendering of that choice on the player’s own computer (which can be thought of as his or her machine of consciousness).

The computer renders only the part of the world that is relevant to that single player, based on their choices when they are logged in to the virtual world. There is no shared rendering, since the rendering is done on each player’s individual computer, which brings up the idea that each of us might be experiencing a slightly different version of reality, based upon our observations of the world around us.

Even relativity, which Einstein described independently of his work on quantum physics, tells us that there is no simultaneity between events that are happening at different places. This reminds me of a network of computers connected by light speed (electromagnetic pulses), where players are making moves in their own inertial frame, and the computer is doing its best to give the illusion of both simultaneity and order.

Many of the findings of relativity and quantum physics make no sense in the materialist worldview—that we are living in an immutable physical universe.

When I was at MIT, we were taught that most of science is coming up with models for how the world works, and if a better model is found, it will explain aspects of the world that seemed unexplainable in previous models. For example, Newton’s classical physics explained the world better than what came before; then Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, and it explained light and travel at high speeds much better than Newton’s model, so it was adopted. Similarly, with quantum physics, its model of the microscopic world of probabilities explained the observed results much better than Bohr’s previous model of the atom, which was the planetary model (i.e., electrons revolve around the nucleus like planets revolve around the sun). While all of these ideas were looked at suspiciously by the scientific establishment initially, they all came to be adopted by modern science because they were better models.

It turns out that the simulation hypothesis and the model of the world it is describing, of a sophisticated multiplayer video game with characters operating within a rendered world, answers two big questions about the physical world that physicists are afraid to ask: Why does it work this way, and how does it work, exactly?

Eastern Mysticism and the Western Afterlife

At the same time that I was exploring the connections between quantum physics and simulated reality during my adventures as an entrepreneur and technologist, I had also started to travel a parallel path exploring different states of consciousness.

It began as a simple search for techniques like meditation that would help me become a more focused programmer and a more successful startup founder. Eventually, it led me to explore the ancient Eastern traditions, particularly the Yogic traditions and Buddhist philosophy, and convinced me there was more going in our physical world than science gave credit to. I wrote about some of these experiences in my first book, Zen Entrepreneurship.

As I continued to study the ancient Buddhist and Hindu texts and philosophies, I found they were much more in alignment with the simulation hypothesis than a materialistic worldview. The Eastern traditions are built on the idea that the world around us is not the real world. In fact, they believe it is a world created by our minds as we make choices in the world. We are so engrossed in this world, like players addicted to a video game, that we get lost in this world of maya, this world of illusion.

Karma, which most of us in the West think of as a cosmic game of what goes around, comes around, is actually more subtle and more rule-based than it appears. In fact, karma can be modeled as a list of tasks and outcomes that we have to fulfill. Whenever we create karma, a new task gets created on a virtual manifest, stored somewhere outside the material world. When we incarnate in the future, we can choose which particular tasks of our past karma we should tackle in our new life. Buddha’s endless Wheel of Life tells of the purpose of reincarnation: The reason we keep incarnating in future lives is to fulfill the missions created in our present and past lives.

To a video game designer like myself, the twin concepts of karma and reincarnation sound a lot like video games in which a player has multiple lives and an on-going list of quests and achievements. The accomplishment of one task (or quest) unlocks new quests that get added to the list. This is a lot like the process of creating new karma described in Buddhism. As I thought about it, I realized that the architecture of a sophisticated video game played out over many lives mirrors the idea of Buddha’s endless wheel of reincarnation.

Furthermore, many Buddhist techniques for achieving enlightenment are all about learning to recognize the illusion of the world around us. One Tibetan technique is called Dream Yoga, in which practitioners are trained to recognize the world around us is like a dream. They learn this in a similar manner to the more modern techniques of lucid dreaming, which train adherents to recognize during a sleeping dream that we are only dreaming and the images we see are not real. During dreams, which seem real, our bodies are in bed asleep. The purpose of dream yoga is to ask if there is another part of us, outside of the illusion of the physical world, outside the collective dream.

The metaphor of the world being a dream is intertwined with the idea of the simulation hypothesis. Our night-time dreams are basically like the simulation hypothesis on a smaller scale.

But it’s not just the Eastern religious or spiritual traditions that support the idea that we are living in a simulation. In the Western Abrahamic line of religions (namely, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the implication that