Philip K. Dick And The Matrix: Is Reality Real?

Is reality really real?

What if the universe is actually some sort of simulation? This may sound like the idle speculation of dorm-room stoners and fans of Philip K. Dick and The Matrix, but it has more modern philosophical and even scientific support than you might think.

The idea that reality is an illusion, something beyond human comprehension, has a long philosophical pedigree. It dates back at least as far as the pre-Socratic philosophers, and appears (in various forms) in ancient Hindu and Buddhist teachings. Descartes took it a step further, introducing the skeptical hypothesis to modern Western philosophy by postulating an omnipotent "evil demon" devoted to presenting a complete illusion of the external world.

Is God a computer

While the laws of physics appear continuous, quantum physics tells us that everything in space and time is quantized: granular at the smallest possible level. (So Democritus was partly right about atomic theory, but the indivisible bits he called atoms turned out to be much, much smaller than he could have imagined.) Since everything is made of quanta, the way a digital image is made of pixels or a software program is made of bits, in theory a large enough computer could calculate everything we experience, and create a simulation of the entire universe.

Hans Moravec and Nick Bostrom have both theorized about this, and Bostrom even considers it likely that our universe is a simulation run by other intelligences, possibly a future posthuman civilization. And if so, it's also possible that those intelligences are themselves living in a

However, there are still resource constraints which reveal that these are simply simulations. Using lattices is still a shortcut, and the spacing of a lattice imposes an upper limit on particle energy, as well as a lower limit on the possible size of anything.

Thus the thinking is that, if we are in a simulation, there would be an upper limit on the energy of cosmic rays… and there is: the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) limit. Interaction with the cosmic microwave background radiation is thought to explain this cut off, but if we are in a simulation, cosmic rays could reveal the existence and orientation of the lattice by preferentially traveling along the axes, meaning that we would not see cosmic rays coming from all directions equally. If we detect that, we'd be seeing a shortcut our simulators are using.

That is, unless this universal lattice is constructed in a different way than thought, or has a much smaller spacing, or these advanced minds have figured out a way to construct a simulation without using lattices at all. Then we wouldn't see any variation from what current physics expects, and simulation theory would remain