Are we all AIs living in a simulation? Elon recently […]

Are we all AIs living in a simulation?

Elon recently shared publicly that he has thought about this a lot, and concludes that there only a 1 in a billion change that we are not, and actually exist in a base reality.

I remember getting into these exact topics with him in 2012, on a bus, in Texas, on our way to the local Dairy Queen. Truth is stranger than simulation. =) He brought up the speed of light, and I brought up the Planck-length limit, the complexity bounds for a digital world. I posted a reply back then on a discussion the “Light-man” was having on the same topic, where he referenced coincidences as a starting point .

In short, I argued that the inaccessibility of most of the universe may offer the gamer-physicist mind a clue that we live in a simulation. If the universe is simulation, the distant stars and solar systems can be rendered with simple algorithms, much like immersive worlds in the games we play today; the horizon is always out of reach. In our universe, it all results from the peculiar and apparently arbitrary limit of the speed of light. As we look farther out, the view becomes degraded and eventually collapses to a singular big bang event as we look back in time. And we can’t go past that. It’s beyond reach, and that seems just so convenient. Much like the Planck length limit to the voxels of our world — the Minecraft cubes of inner space.

More on this: Bostrom’s http://www.simulation-argument.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

And then an interesting paper came out just after that 2012 post: Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation with the concluding teaser: “in principle there always remains the possibility for the simulated to discover the simulators.” (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.1847v1.pdf)

These simulation limits, for inner and outer space, remind me of the old question of why it gets dark at night? If our universe of galaxies extends out infinitely in space, and it they existed for an infinitely long history, then the sky would be brighter than the sun in all directions, day and night. So the universe cannot have an infinite number of stars and have existed forever.