There is this hypothesis called the “simulation hypothesis” that I’m sure you must have read about or at least heard about, in light of the fact that it has soared in popularity in recent years.
In search for an answer to one of the biggest questions we have, “What is the origin of the universe; how did it all start?”, we have come across several possible answers but we haven’t been able to definitively say for sure, though “the Big Bang theory” is pretty much the consensus right now.
The simulation theory is another one of those theories that tries to explain it all, going one step beyond even the big bang theory, but it is quite a weird one and something that sounds straight out of science fiction, but when you think about it, it sounds very plausible.
The Simulation Hypothesis
In simple words, this hypothesis states that the whole of reality, is nothing but a simulation likely running on some kind of computer of a highly intelligent being, somewhere outside of our realm.
If true, this has huge implications for us and our search for meaning and origin of life and reality itself. We might be just code/program running in some super powerful computer and all of this might just be an experiment for a higher intelligent being.
Some of you may think that this renders everything totally meaningless because it’s a fake reality conjured up in a computer that might be terminated at anytime. The rest of you may think that despite this being a simulation, it is as real as it gets for us and it doesn’t matter if it is real or just computer code.
Regardless, I think the real question is, who is the creator of this simulation and more importantly, did they leave a backdoor out of here?
Who Could Be The Architect?
When I think about who the creator of our simulated reality could be, three possibilities come to mind. God, aliens and our future selves.
In my opinion, god is not the answer, at least not in this particular scenario. I fail to see why an all powerful being would need to create a simulation, the purpose of which is mostly to test things out. An all knowing god would not need to ‘test’ anything and so, I think that if our reality is indeed a simulation, god might not be it’s creator.
A super intelligent race of alien beings is one of the likely answers. There could be many reasons why aliens would want to create a virtual reality universe. Maybe it’s just a part of a massive multiplayer online game for them, or maybe they want to see how things progress in a universe with different parameters (laws) into play or maybe it’s just a science project of an alien teenager and we all exist on his pen drive!
Another likely answer is our future selves. Our computing prowess is increasing day by day and soon we might be equipped with the power of a quantum computer. In the future, we might be able to create the most complicated simulations easily on a personal computer. So, in that case, maybe we are a result of our future selves creating a copy of their universe in their computer through which they are trying to study everything that happens from the very beginning. It is not too far-fetched to imagine something like this happening in our own future.
Could There Be A Backdoor?
One of the things that people ask when they learn about this theory is whether there could be a backdoor here in this reality so that we can escape into the ‘real’ world through it.
I gave it some thought and I think that would not be possible. Just think about it. We create games in which we control the characters. Even if the characters in our games had consciousness and free will, they just couldn’t come out of the game and into our world even if there was a ‘backdoor’ of any kind.
Similarly, if we are in a simulated universe, our whole existence would be a subset of the larger set which is the simulated universe itself. So, I don’t think any such thing would be possible. Being able to communicate with them though, would be a different matter. They could do it if they wished to and we could do it if we found a way to.
In any case, if we ever find an evidence proving this theory to be right, our lives would never be the same again. Or at least that’s what I think!