The Simulation Hypothesis

“Now,” I said as I finished scribbling on the board, “have you heard of the simulation hypothesis?” I turned around to face Zac, who was tapping away on his phone. “Are you even listening to me, or am I boring you?”

“Oh, I’m paying attention,” Zac assured me. “But reverse-engineering the universe does sound like a big deal, so I’ve ordered something delicious for us to celebrate. Oh, and also because I have forgotten to eat all day and now I am hungry. A giant cookie is currently en-route to this very room!” He sighed. “Nikki, there has never been a better time to be alive.”

I agreed. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my mind on fire with magic and possibility. There had never been a better time to be alive.

“Did you ever play Pong?” I asked once the cookie had been summoned.

“I’m thirty-one, not sixty. I’m a child of the GameBoy era-”

“Oh!” I interjected. “Did I tell you about that time I did an interview for some woman’s magazine, and the writer asked me what my proudest achievement was? I told her point-blank it was finishing Pokemon Blue on GameBoy when I was eight. She thought it was a joke, but I was actually quite serious!”

Zac snickered. “Mmm yeah. A lot of dedication and hard work is required to catch ’em all. I feel you. Good on you for providing inspiration to so many women who are struggling with the same goals, the same aspirations…”

“Thank you, Zachary. I felt it was an important message about focus, vision, and perseverance. Young girls can achieve anything they put their minds to! Anyway,” I continued, “back to Pong. Forty-five years ago, games were pretty basic. Kind of like you, actually. Just not much to them. Pong was just a ball and two sticks-”

“I have two balls and one stick, though.”

“Thanks for clarifying that important detail.”

“Well,” Zac said, “you accused me of being as basic as Pong, and I just want to assure you I’ve got all the bells and whistles.”

“The only thing that pongs around here is that awful stench wafting from your filthy mind. Here, put this on.” I scooped my perfume off the dressing table and doused him in a sweet, feminine scent as he gagged in protest.

“Now,” I said, “let’s continue our intellectual adventure without further mention of your genitalia.”

I cleared my throat and launched back into it. “Not that long ago, we had basic games like Pong. Forty-five years later, we have hyper-realistic CGI renderings. Now think about it… forty-five years is nothing in the evolutionary scale. If we assume any rate of progress at all — even slow progress — games will eventually become indistinguishable from reality.”

“Are you suggesting that we’re literally living in a game?” Zac asked.

“I’m not suggesting it, actually. An Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom is. Or rather, he suggested it back in 2003 when he proposed the simulation hypothesis. He laid out a trilemma, and it goes like this: Given n years — infinite years, even — games will eventually become indistinguishable from reality. The only thing that would stop that happening is if all civilizations were to blow themselves up or die out before they were advanced enough to run ancestor simulations.”

“What are ancestor simulations?” Zac asked.

“They’re simulations that simulate a civilization’s history. Like, you’ve got these little AI bots running around in a computer world doing things, and stuff happens. Then the civilization that created the simulation can sit outside the simulation eating hot buttered popcorn as they watch their creations go mad, and everything go to shit. They’re just sitting there, laughing away-”

“Okay, I get it.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s the first part of the trilemma. All civilizations cease to exist before they are capable of running ancestor simulations. Or those capable of running ancestor simulations choose not to run them for ethical reasons.”

“Fat chance of that happening,” Zac smirked as he grabbed my laptop and started typing. “Have I shown you the types of simulations you can find on Steam? Humans will simulate anything that moves.” He pulled up a video on the screen and pressed play. “Behold: Farming Simulator 19.”

“Or,” he began typing again, “how about coming home from a long day at work, then getting behind the wheel with American Truck Simulator.”

“Oh actually, this is my favorite one: Goat Simulator.”

“It’s beautiful,” I sighed. “The pinnacle of human ingenuity, right there.”

We both paused in reverence for what we’d just witnessed.

“Okay. Let’s move on.” I cleared my throat again. “Let’s say a civilization is capable of making an ancestor simulation. We’ve already established that the chance of them not running the simulation is basically zero. If they can do it, they will do it. And if that’s the case, we are almost certainly living in a simulation.”

“How’d you get to that conclusion?” Zac asked.

“Well, let’s say you’ve got all these civilizations who choose to run ancestor simulations. There would be gazillions of simulations for every base reality; simulations within simulations within simulations. Now throw a dart and try to hit the place where our consciousness is located. If there is one base reality to billions of simulations, then the probability that we are in base reality is one in billions.”

“I love it!” Zac exclaimed. “We’re in The Matrix!”

“Basically, it all comes down to this: either something terrible has happened, or we are almost certainly living in a simulation. And what are reality and consciousness in a simulation?” I looked at Zac expectantly.

“Err…?”

“The same thing! If we are almost certainly living in a simulation, then, to the same degree, reality and consciousness are almost certainly the same thing. In a simulation, the observer is the observed. It’s all an illusion.”

“Fuuuuuuuuck…” Zac’s eyes widened. He looked around the room and fixed his gaze on my closet, as if Morpheus was going to emerge from its shadows and hand him a red pill.

At that moment, a loud payphone began to ring. It’s shrill sound reverberated down the hallway, bouncing off the walls and tumbling into my room. We both jumped and slowly looked at each other, mouths gaping open in shock.

“Oh, wait! That’s just the intercom,” I laughed. “Our giant cookie has arrived! I’ll get it.”

I started heading towards the door. Zac pushed me out of the way. “Like hell, you will!” He ran towards the intercom. “That cookie contains chocolate. You’ll inhale it before it’s even within my eyesight.”

“Me?! Jesus Christ, Zac! You have a goddamn private chef who can bake you cookies whenever you want, and you still order them to your room in the middle of the night. If anyone’s going to inhale that thing, it’s you.”

I skipped off to the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with two wine glasses full of iced coffee. Zac was sitting on my bed with crumbs in his lap and an oversized cookie in his hand, looking very content.

“Shall we continue?” I broke off a chunk of cookie and dunked it in my drink.

“Mmgrbem,” Zac nodded in agreement.