What if we lived in a simulation aimed at deceiving our senses and our consciousness that another type of higher intelligence could take advantage of? This is the theory that the senior editor of the journal Nature Energy, Fouad Khan, puts forward in an article published in the journal Scientific American.
Is the world around us real?
This is not a new question . Not many years ago, the very CEO of SpaceX, Tesla or Neuralink, Elon Musk or astrophysicist and popularizer Neil Degrasse Tyson and raised the possibility that we could be living in a virtual simulation to the style of “The Matrix.” Out of In this environment, the scientific debate has nothing fictitious . “Most likely we are in a simulation,” said Musk. Degrasse Tyson, granted, for his part, “a probability greater than 50-50” that the hypothesis of the simulation was correct.
This all dates back to 2003, when a philosopher from the University of Oxford, Nick Bostrom, established a compelling logic: “if there are technological civilizations in the universe, and if they run computer simulations, there must be a lot of simulated realities with inhabitants artificial intelligence that may be living inside a game, inhabitants like us, perhaps. These beings could imagine themselves real but they would have no physical form, existing only within the simulation ”.
How to test the simulation hypothesis?
According to Fouad Khan, there are consistent indications that confirm this possibility. Thus, if we consider that the universe is really a simulation in a virtual world, it would need a power source, a titanic-sized processor that would represent not only the power or strength of that scenario, but also the only element that would reside outside of the simulation, the only real thing.
And there would be a way to detect it. Thanks to the speed of light. A processor with such computing power could work with the information at the rate of one operation per second, something that would occupy an equally large area of 300,000 kilometers long and that, therefore, that “information chamber” could be traced . “The speed of light is a hardware artifact that shows that we live in a simulated universe and space is to our universe what numbers are to simulated reality on any computer,” the expert writes.
So how do we perceive life as real?
Khan argues that this is due to a subjective projection of certain variables within the software in which we live immersed; so we would not really be the masters and masters of our actions, but rather the algorithms would control the environmental variables and also the characters within the simulation, that is, ourselves.
To all this, it would be added, in addition, according to Khan’s vision, that not even what we live in the virtual simulation would benefit the protagonists, us, but that they would serve some supposed external spectators who would be watching the movie of our lives .
So if all that we live and have is thanks to a superior intelligence, “all we can do is accept the reality of the simulation and make of it what we can,” concludes Khan.
What do you think? Do you agree with this reasoning?
Referencia: Space confirmed! We live in a simulation. Fouad Khan, Scientific American, April 1, 2021. Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50. Anil Ananthaswamy. Scientific American, October 13, 2020.
