BEYOND SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS
Please bear with me while I do a little bit of fictional storytelling. I am going somewhere with
all this, I promise, but if you're impatient, you can skip to the part where you're already 🤬ed off.
We are going to start with a concept with which most of us are familiar – specifically, a video
game. Allow us to imagine that I am going to create a new one. Personally, I'm fairly terrible at
thinking of new ideas, so I’m just going to steal some – mainly from Maxis. I'm going to blend elements of SimEarth (1990) with aspects of Spore (2008), into a modern, ultra-realistic simulation called SporeEarth. In the game, you can utilize and
modify an entire planet’s resources to create the most successful and intelligent species
possible. And I'll “borrow” the idea from SimEarth's Random Planet setting, which means you can opt to invoke the laws of chaos and then just sit back and watch what happens,
rather than actually interacting with the game. Fittingly, SporeEarth would fit squarely in a genre of gaming called god games.
Since this is my story, and I’m telling it, I’m going to seriously bend reality here: I totally
nailed it. Envision that I made a super-addictive video game that spanned the globe on multiple
gaming platforms, raking in a couple billion in sales. Sweet!
A few years roll by, and by that time I will have blown through all the money I made from
that game, mostly via defending myself against various pesky copyright lawsuits. After settling
out of court in such a manner that I retain rights to the work, I’ll borrow again – this time,
capital instead of only ideas. I’ll secure loans, hire Sierra Hotel developers and start my next
game. But this time, instead of simulating one boring planet, I’m going to scale this sucker up
and do an entire universe! For obvious reasons, and because outside certain compartments I am
pathetically unoriginal, I am going to call this game SporeUniverse. Now a player can wield the
resources of all known creation, starting from the big bang, multiplying the chances of creating successful life-forms and civilizations. You must shape
galaxies and planets, then kick off just the optimal number of supernova explosions that will seed
galaxies with the heavy elements required for complex life. Once life has begun, you must guide
that life through evolution. And yep - just like with SporeEarth, you can sit back and watch the fun
with the Random Universe setting, if you so desire.
Again, success! We collectively garner another couple billion in sales. This time, I get to keep
some of the money, and I become moderately wealthy after paying off what I borrowed (as well as
paying all my developers and subcontractors handsomely and fairly for their amazing work).
Some years later, I'll have decided I want to take aim at retirement, so the team gets called back
up for one last new version. Everyone has their own preferences and ideas but, personally, I tire
of single-player games rather quickly after I’ve played them through a few times. Much more
importantly, it’s now time for some recurring revenue with a subscription-based model. So, I
direct my team to make SporeUniverse 2, an online two-player
game. You now have an opponent, and your goal is to defeat them by having better or more successful
civilizations. You will still launch with the same finite resources of one universe. So, of course,
you must compete with your opponent over those resources (and then manage them properly) in order to
win.
Now, to make this game way more interesting: you can also use your moves destructively to
sabotage your opponent. Possible wrench-in-gear scenarios include:
- Inciting end-times scenarios such as war, genocide, or nuclear holocaust among your opponent’s sentient populations.
- Attempting modifications to the course of asteroids without your opponent noticing, triggering mass (or worldwide) extinction when the opposition’s planets are hit.
- Aiming a gamma ray burst at just the right spot so it squeegees a planet clean of life.
- Or the ultimate in destructive power; using your moves to accelerate supernovae (or hypernovae) explosions that sterilize regions of galaxies hundreds of light-years across, with their radiation racing outward at nearly the speed of light!
Given these amazing additions, all in-game purchases naturally, our company once again rakes in
lots of dough, making my development team multi-millionaires. I crack the .1%, and it’s now time
for me to hang it up and become a world-traveling philanthropist.
“What does this have to do with reality? How is this scientific at all? All you’ve done is
talk about video games and created a delusional scenario for yourself in which you make a
bunch of money.”
(Now, would you please go back and at least skim the part you skipped?)
Ouch. Well-played, you. Stepping back to (single-player) SporeUniverse’s Random Universe setting, this is basically what the simulation hypothesis suggests. That we, and our entire universe, are all part of a very
advanced civilization’s simulation. Given that they have been around for billions (or even trillions)
of years, they are very bored; ennui enough and more to wait around and watch what happens when they invest vast
amounts of energy and computing power to create random universes on virtual machines to see what might
happen. Regardless, if the hypothesis is correct, one of those beings could be God from our perspective,
since they literally created (or at least control) all we know to exist.
The same would be true for SporeUniverse 2, where
to us, both players would be gods. Now, imagine what happens if we were to strip away the game
construct, and imbue the two players with opposing anthropomorphic characteristics: pure love and pure
evil. From this standpoint, we can start to see how it would look like a religion from the perspective
of the beings inside that universe. One god is good, doing his best to create and grow life and civilizations.
By contrast, the other god is an evil jerk, who creates nothing and spends his time doing his best to
kick over metaphorical sandcastles out of hatred and spite.
Re-implementing the game concept, I would now like to make a final modification. At the start of
the game, you are granted your own observable universe (or OU). The big bang begins (click
"Start"!) and hurls an inconceivable amount of matter and energy (and therefore spacetime) into
existence for your use and disposal. But it’s symmetrical – your opponent also receives their own
OU and the same exact amount of matter and energy. Note that in this context, “observable” does not mean from one frame of reference, such as Earth’s. Rather, observable means you could move freely through every frame of reference throughout that entire universe, from a God’s-eye-view.
“All right, but if you are both playing in your own sandboxed OUs, how are you supposed to
sabotage your enemy now? Isn’t this the same as both players stepping back to the first SporeUniverse and comparing which universe is better to
see who wins?”
The “secret sauce” here is that both the OUs can interact. The matter and energy granted
to both players are quite literally two sides of the same coin. The big bang creates a
universe/anti-universe pair. The matter granted to each player’s universe becomes their
opponent’s anti-matter, and all of it is bound together through quantum fields, interactions, and entanglement. Both universes progress forward ("time’s arrow") from the big bang, but they progress in
opposite time directions relative to each other. Both OUs have their own 4-dimensional spacetime,
but they are sitting directly on top of one another, occupying the same physical space (analogous
to a hologram), separated only temporally. Because of the time differential, matter in each OU
cannot directly interact with matter in the other. The players, however, may, and do, observe both
OUs.
Now, the only way the players make any moves at all is through quantum interactions. In fact, to
the beings (and matter) inside both OUs, the quantum world becomes the base level of reality
itself. Quantum fields and particles, existing in superpositions of possible states, permeate each
OU. A move occurs when particles in your OU interact with other particles, thus initiating wave function collapse. At that instant, a query occurs, and a “path”, or an eigenstate, must be chosen. Particles might be entangled with others within the same OU, which means your
move might affect only your OU. But in instances when particles are entangled across both OUs, a
percentage of your move affects your OU, while another percentage affects your opponent’s.
Your goal is now to use these quantum interactions to slowly and deliberately shape your OU. When
you get the opportunity to use cross-OU-entangled moves, the objective is to simultaneously
benefit your OU while stifling your opponent’s progress through entropy, chaos and destruction.
When selecting eigenstates, you are working either with or against the probability available in
each wave function. You have a finite amount of “energy” in terms of the improbability you can
work against in a single move, meaning the amount of energy your move consumes is proportional to
how improbable your selections are.
Obviously, it would be completely impractical for this game to be played by humans. We would have
to make more decisions in a single second than we have nanoseconds in our entire
lifetimes, perhaps by hundreds of orders of magnitude. This would be a game for highly advanced
consciousnesses with incredibly vast amounts of processing power. For simplicity’s sake, I will
refer to them each as a godlike-consciousness (or GC). And, yes, this is exactly what I am
suggesting – that something similar to this construct could be the very foundation of our universe
and our existence. Two GCs, or players, or gods, or whatever-you-choose-to-call-them, are
competing to create the more-conscious universe.
We can call the OU we exist within the proverse, and we can call the OU that exists
outside ours the antiverse. Following suit, we can call the godlike-consciousness
controlling our universe the proverse GC (or PGC), while the GC controlling the
anti-universe becomes the antiverse GC (or AGC).
It is crucial to understand that these names are purely a matter of perspective. Because the two
OUs are perfectly symmetric, the labels reverse entirely when viewed from the other side. To the
AGC and every conscious being within the antiverse, their universe is the proverse and ours is the antiverse; their GC is the benevolent builder, and our PGC is the antiverse GC scheming to undo them. Neither side is objectively the “anti” one — each is simply
the other's mirror image, and each is convinced it is the one creating.
The Proverse/Antiverse Pair
“Wait, seriously? You’re trying to convince me that the entire universe is just part of some
game?”
Well, sort of. A competition of some sort is likely in play. Based on the nature of physics, a
game appears to be the most logical scenario. There are many possible reasons for the competition,
including:
- It could be compared to friendly game of digital chess – a way to pass the trillions and trillions of years of deep time available to such beings.
- It could be a game with a wager-style system, where each GC stands to gain something if they win (more energy or resources, perhaps?)
- It could be a game with incredibly high stakes; i.e., whoever ultimately loses is destroyed or is compelled to self-annihilate.
- Or... perhaps it is not a game at all. If you envision this reality without the game construct, the two GCs could somehow be actively engaging in real, physical combat, where one victor ultimately defeats or even kills the other.
Any of these reasons are a possibility, but unless there was a way for us to discover which, it is
irrelevant from our standpoint. And I know what you are thinking – that this can’t possibly
describe our actual reality. But I implore you to read on to understand how this is fundamentally
conceivable.
“Why is this a two-player game? Why not 4, 8, or an MMO?”
There could be more players. But there are several reasons I choose two players for now, including
that from what we currently know, matter and antimatter (and CPT symmetry – more on this later)
seem to be a duality, not a multiplicity. That said, there could be billions of GCs working
cooperatively in each OU. Again, though – from our standpoint, it does not really matter if there
are two masses of collective consciousnesses, or if there are singular GCs per OU. To us, the end
result is effectively the same.
“So, you’re implying there’s a parallel universe?”
That is correct. BDI predicts that a symmetric universe exists alongside ours, one that we cannot
visit or easily detect. However, it is important to distinguish this from the science fiction
version of a parallel universe, where if you were transported there from where you are now, you would be standing on a
different version of Earth. The antiverse would have the same physics as our universe, and would
have started out with the same amount of matter. As such, it would certainly have planets that
could (or would) sustain life, but due to the vast number of quantum interactions that occurred
directly subsequent to the big bang, it is vanishingly unlikely that any version of our Earth
would exist. And, due to the vast emptiness of space, if you were theoretically teleported to the same
relative place you occupy in our OU to theirs, you would almost certainly end up floating (and dying)
in deep space – even ignoring the fact that your body would be made of antimatter there, and all the
nastiness that could involve.
Next, using this framework, let’s make some predictions.