Philosophy in Progress: Wrestling with Big Questions, No Easy Answers

The philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper in 2003 arguing that at least one of three things must be true. One: civilizations go extinct before they can run simulations of their ancestors. Two: they have no desire to run these simulations. Or three: we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. And that third one is the kicker. Because if you assume any species that gets to our level of technology will eventually want to create simulated worlds—and that they'll create billions of them—then the number of simulated people will vastly outnumber the people in the one, single "base reality." So simple statistics say we're probably not the originals.

It’s a chilling thought, and it throws our whole conversation about free will from last time into a completely different light. If our world is coded, are our choices just part of the program? That's the question. And it’s not just philosophy anymore. Some physicists and computer scientists are taking it seriously. Okay, so what’s the argument for it, beyond Bostrom's statistical one? What makes a physicist look at the sky and think, "this could be a render"? Look at the progress of video games. In fifty years we went from Pong—two rectangles and a dot—to photorealistic open worlds. Project that forward a thousand years, or a million. The simulations would be indistinguishable from reality to the people inside them.

Sure, but that's just an analogy. It is, but then you look at physics. The universe seems to have a resolution. You can't zoom in forever. At a certain point, you hit the Planck length, which is the smallest possible unit of space. Things get discrete, pixelated. It behaves like a computed system. Wait—like the universe has a frame rate? In a way. And the physicist James Gates found what looks like error-correcting code—the kind you find in computer programs—buried in the equations for supersymmetry. He says he was completely shocked. Okay, so if that's the evidence for... what's the case against? It feels like something we should have more proof of if it were true.

The biggest argument against it is that it's unfalsifiable. You can't design an experiment to prove you're not in a simulation. Any weird result, any glitch you find, could just be a feature of the simulation's physics. It’s a philosophical dead end. Let's just go there, though. Let's assume it's true. We're in The Matrix, more or less. What actually changes for us, sitting here right now? On a practical level? Nothing. The sun still rises. Your coffee still tastes like coffee. The rules of this reality, whether they're fundamental laws of physics or lines of code, are the ones we have to live by. I don't know... I think everything changes. My purpose, my suffering, my joy—it all suddenly feels like it might be for the benefit of some outside observer.

Are we a science experiment? A historical reenactment? A game? That's what I can't shake. And that reframes our search for meaning, doesn't it? It forces us to decide if purpose has to be handed down from a creator—or a programmer—or if we can build it for ourselves, even inside a construct. Is the love you feel for your child less real just because it might be a product of code? The feeling itself is authentic to you. It feels like discovering a beautiful painting you've loved your whole life is actually a perfect forgery. The experience of looking at it was real, but the new context changes its value completely. It feels... diminished. Or maybe it just pushes the question up a level.

If we're a simulation, who's to say our programmers aren't in a simulation themselves? It could be a stack of realities, one on top of the other. So we're left with an unprovable idea that changes nothing and everything all at once. It's the ultimate conspiracy theory, in a way. But it's also a powerful thought experiment. Whether you call it God, or the laws of nature, or The Programmer... we're all just trying to make sense of the system we find ourselves in. And maybe the point isn't to figure out who wrote the code. Maybe it's just to learn how to live a good life within it.