Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?: An Introduction to the Mind-Boggling “Simulation Argument”

The idea that we are liv­ing in a vast com­put­er sim­u­la­tion as hyper-sophis­ti­cat­ed sim­u­lat­ed char­ac­ters with lim­it­ed self-aware­ness sounds like the kind of thing that issues forth from stoned phi­los­o­phy majors in late night dorm room ses­sions. And no doubt it has, thou­sands of times over, espe­cial­ly after 1999, when The Matrix debuted and turned an amal­gam of Pla­to, Descartes, Berke­ley, and oth­er meta­physi­cians into a then-cut­ting-edge sci-fi kung fu flick.

But is it a ridicu­lous idea? The obvi­ous objec­tion that first aris­es is: how could we pos­si­bly ever know? Com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed char­ac­ters, after all, have no abil­i­ty to step beyond the con­fines of the worlds designed for them by pro­gram­mers, a lim­i­ta­tion illus­trat­ed when one reach­es a dead-end in a game and finds that, while there may be the image of a for­est or a field, the game design­ers have seen no need to actu­al­ly cre­ate the envi­ron­ment. Our char­ac­ter bumps up against the game’s edge stu­pid­ly, until we tog­gle the con­trols and move it back into the pre­scribed field of play.

But (fire up your bongs), does the char­ac­ter know it’s reached a dead end? And if the uni­verse is a sim­u­la­tion, who’s run­ning the damned thing? And why? Wel­come to “the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment,” a the­o­ry endorsed by philoso­pher and futur­ol­o­gist Nick Bostrom, Tes­la and Space X founder Elon Musk, and quite a few oth­er non-dorm-dwelling thinkers. “Many peo­ple have imag­ined this sce­nario over the years,” writes Joshua Roth­man at The New York­er, “usu­al­ly while high. But recent­ly, a num­ber of philoso­phers, futur­ists, sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers, and technologists—people who share a near-reli­gious faith in tech­no­log­i­cal progress—have come to believe that the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment is not just plau­si­ble, but inescapable.”

Giv­en their qua­si-reli­gious bent, are these tech­nol­o­gists and futur­ists sim­ply replac­ing a cre­ator-god with a cre­ator-coder to flat­ter them­selves? Judge for your­self, first­ly per­haps by lis­ten­ing to Musk explain the con­cept in brief at a Recode Con­fer­ence above. (If you find your­self com­fort­ed by his answer, you may just be a game design­er.) Then, for a more sprawl­ing, pop-cul­tur­al dive into the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment, spend an hour with The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis at the top of the post, a doc­u­men­tary that—depending on the laws of your cur­rent place of residence—may or may not be enhanced by an edi­ble.

We might also ref­er­ence Bostrom’s 2003 arti­cle—or watch him describe his posi­tion in the video below. Bostrom spec­u­lates that we might be liv­ing in an “ances­tor sim­u­la­tion” run by an incred­i­bly advanced civ­i­liza­tion thou­sands of years in our future. Like Musk, writes Roth­man, he con­cludes that “we are far more like­ly to be liv­ing inside a sim­u­la­tion right now than to be liv­ing out­side of one.” The pos­si­bil­i­ty rais­es all sorts of dis­turb­ing ques­tions about the real­i­ty of choice, the moral mean­ing of our actions, and the nature of human iden­ti­ty. These are ques­tions philoso­phers (and Philip K. Dick) have always asked, but until recent­ly, they had lit­tle recourse to inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of their hypothe­ses. Now, as you’ll dis­cov­er in The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis, physi­cists have begun to dis­cov­er that “our uni­verse isn’t an objec­tive real­i­ty.”

It is indeed per­fect­ly plau­si­ble, giv­en the expo­nen­tial speed with which tech­nol­o­gy advances, that we will be able to run sim­u­la­tions with the same lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion as our real­i­ty in a mat­ter of a few gen­er­a­tions or less… pro­vid­ed we don’t destroy our­selves first or com­plete­ly lose inter­est. Which answers the ques­tion of who might be run­ning the pro­gram. As with the high­er beings in Inter­stel­lar who reach back to give the dying human species a hand, “there is,” writes Roth­man, “no sanc­ti­ty or holi­ness in the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment. The peo­ple out­side the sim­u­la­tion aren’t gods,” or even aliens, “they’re us.” Or some suf­fi­cient­ly evolved ver­sion, that is, whose tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments would like­ly seem to us like mag­ic.

The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

What Do Most Philoso­phers Believe? A Wide-Rang­ing Sur­vey Project Gives Us Some Idea

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness