My Simulation Theory

So in a departure from my usual heavy philosophy, I'm going to spend this short post going over an idea I had on the whole "do we live in a simulation?" debate. This idea is cooky to say the least and is something I don't believe to be true. It doesn't hold much philosophical water either.

Okay, so imagine a world so advanced from ours that they have harnessed the energy of stars to power their civilization. Maybe they've become interplanetary or intergalactic explorers. Either way, they're at the stage of their civilization where their internal threats have, for the most part, been squashed, and their external threats are under their control. Well, aside from one small thing.

For those unfamiliar, the predominant theory pertaining to the end of the universe is Heat Death. Essentially, scientists have observed that as the universe expands, it gets colder. The total energy in the universe will eventually become so dilute that it will asymptotically approach zero, and there will be no mechanism for energy transfer between matter. The homogenization of the universe will mean that entropy is maximized. Think of it like a dam in the middle of a lake. At the start of the universe, that dam sprung a leak, and it was possible for water to be transferred to the other side. However, eventually the water level in the once empty side will equilibrate with the water level on the once full side. Now, there may be a few ripples on either side during the equilibration, but eventually, all will be still.

This civilization may have conquered everything there is to conquer in the universe, but they cannot figure out a way to deal with this inevitability. Perhaps more worrying, the stars from which they siphon energy to propagate their kind are dying. Even sooner than the heat death, they will need new sources of energy to stay alive. These things terrify the organisms which inhabit our world, and let's just make them human-like for simplicity. These human-like beings fear that which they cannot control, much like us, and so they devise a plan to help them combat what will be the death of their kind.

Their computing power has grown so vast that they can, you guessed it, generate full worlds within a "simulation". The things which inhabit this world will have some sort of free will, but much of their decision-making will be centered around biological drivers. The human-like creatures code up an entire universe. Most of it is easy for them, but then they select one, or perhaps several, worlds to seed with "life". In order to give their organisms the best possible traits, they'll allow natural selection to evolve whatever creatures are the best fit for survival into the dominant species. They may throw an asteroid into the way if things get stale, but overall they're content with waiting it out. I should mention here that time moves exponentially faster in their simulation than it does in their real world.

So fast forward slightly, and the first creatures with "consciousness" arrive on the scene. Still, they're a long way from being able to solve the problem of heat death and infinite expansion. So, these human-like creatures make up new simulations to see if they can solve their problems faster, and that's where the multiverse theory comes in.

These human-like beings believe they may live in a multiverse, but any attempts they've made to test this hypothesis have yielded inconclusive results, so where better to see what a multiverse could mean for their future than in a series of interlinked simulations? They begin to make more and more simulations, each linked through bridges of code which take the form of black holes in the simulated universes.

And that's where we come in. We're one of the simulations, and maybe they're watching us and waiting to see what we do.

So what do we do? Is there anything useful that can come out of this information? To be totally honest, no. As explained by one of my favorite TV philosophers, the idea that this is all a simulation and that therefore our actions do not matter, in other words: solipsism, is rather juvenile. Obviously irrefutable, since its phenomenology is self-verifying. In essence, if you believe everyone around you is a simulated being, including yourself, then any arguments against that will be nullified by your own observations. Some people may use this as an excuse to, in philosophical terms, be a jerk. Yet most recognize that there is something beyond the structure and nature of our world which guides our actions.

Yeah, so... this theory should in no way influence anyone's actions. It was a late night thought which I discussed in excited tones with my friends in college. I said a while ago that the James Webb telescope would once again turn my gaze outward in the universe, and I think this is one way in which it's done that. Even something as loony as this simulation theory is an example of using a cosmic scale to "tackle" an ontological problem for which I'd previously only used classic philosophy. Zany, for sure.