No, We Don’t Live in a Simulation
By Byron Reese, author and entrepreneur, and Brett Hurt, CEO and Co-founder of data.world
With the massive funding scale of the Stargate Project and DeepSeek’s achievements in the news as the latest major challenger to Large Language Models (LLMs), the nature of our reality and consciousness is being questioned more than ever before as we approach the creation of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
What stood out most at TED2024, back in April, was Demis Hassabis on the nature of reality. Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, arguably Google’s most important AI, and now the head of all AI at Google and a Nobel laureate. He was being interviewed by Chris Anderson, the head of TED, and replied:
“Once AGI is built, what I’d like to use it for is to try and use it to understand the fundamental nature of reality. So, do experiments at the Planck scale. You know, the smallest possible scale, theoretical scale, which is almost like the resolution of reality.”
Fast forward to 11 days ago and Tom Campbell was on the Joe Rogan Experience theorizing that we are living in a quantum virtual reality game. Campbell has a physicist background and wrote a trilogy titled My Big TOE: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics: Awakening, Discovery, Inner Workings that he graciously gave away for free on Google Books or you can buy on Amazon. TOE stands for a “Theory Of Everything”. Tom was also on Buddha at the Gas Pump shortly after his trilogy came out for an interesting deep dive with Rick Archer. Campbell challenges today’s materialists with the oddities of quantum physics like the infamous double-slit experiment.
There are other interesting (and largely scientifically unexplored) theories about the nature of reality and consciousness, including Mark Gober’s books and his podcast, Where Is My Mind?. Gober believes we’ve been thinking about it upside down and that our brains receive consciousness. His rough but helpful analogy is with the iPhone, to which some might ascribe complex properties that are in actuality residing in the cloud.
We are meant to explore and deeply inquire into the nature of the universe. That drive led Galileo to famously discover that we were not, in fact, the center of the cosmos, building on Copernicus’ work. But how about us living in a simulation? Is is some version of The Matrix our true reality? Both Campbell and Gober agree that whatever our universe is, consciousness is love-centered — our goal here on Earth is to maximize love and in Campbell’s telling, that will reduce entropy, which he believes consciousness wants, meaning it aims to become more organized, efficient, and coherent over time. Byron’s own book, We Are Agora: How Humanity Functions as a Single Superorganism That Shapes Our World and Our Future, is also a love-centered theory of our reality. As the Beatles sang in 1967, “Love is all you need.”
As the virtual worlds in our modern computer simulations and video games grow ever more realistic, the idea that the “real world” around us might also be such an artifice is perhaps understandable. Most of us, though, are disabused of this notion the instant we stub our toe on our bedstead and have a very real experience of pain.
However, more than a few people don’t find such evidence to be persuasive and believe that the simulation hypothesis — the formal name for the idea that we all exist in a virtual world — is the best explanation for the nature of reality. However, such a view isn’t simply untrue; we believe it can be morally toxic as well.
The reasoning behind the hypothesis is, admittedly, tempting, especially given our incredibly accelerated pace with AI and quantum computing. In our near-infinitely large universe, billions of years old, there must have been countless civilizations with intelligent life that preceded us. Some of those must have been able to create computer simulations so real they are indistinguishable from reality. Since digital technology can be endlessly duplicated, those aliens could have made trillions of copies of those simulations, each as tiny as a BB, and shot them into the cosmos or tucked them away in the core of an icy planet adrift in the eternal darkness of space. If this is all true, that there is one reality with trillions of copies of it, then the odds that you live in the actual reality are vanishingly small.
Why would aliens go to all that trouble? Who knows? Perhaps they just want to multiply the aggregate life in the universe, or possibly they might be conducting scientific experiments, or maybe it’s some elaborate way for them to mine Bitcoin.
This hypothesis would explain a lot. The Fermi Paradox — why don’t we see evidence of aliens everywhere given the vastness of our universe (with an estimated multiple sextillion, 10²¹ or more, planets) — is solved because there are no aliens, at least not in our little BB-sized simulation. The law-like behavior of physics is also explained, and Campbell certainly did his best to do just that (with 800 pages and 35 years of work to show for it). We are a computer program, and those are the parameters that have been set in the code. The great mysteries we grapple with — the origin and destiny of the universe, for instance — disappear because these questions themselves aren’t even real, just constructs within the constrained programming of the simulation.
There are, however, two big problems with all of this.
The first is that if we are in a machine, then consciousness is just another computational process. You don’t ever really experience anything, and when you stub your toe, you aren’t actually feeling pain; it’s just a subroutine in the code that tells you that you feel pain. As absurd as that is on its face, it gets worse: The inescapable implication is that Pac-Man may be as conscious as you are, and that when you play a first-person-shooter video game you are committing a genocide that is literally as real as any that you can read about in our history books.
But according to the hypothesis, those history books themselves and all they report are also just part of a simulation and never really happened. This sort of nihilism has no end, and thus we must conclude that nothing is actually knowable, and thus, the entire setup about aliens, BBs, simulations and icy planets are just part of the program as well. In other words, if we are in the program, then all of our reasoning about life outside the program is just part of the program. It’s all so contrived and circular.
The second objection is a bit more subtle. There’s an ancient story about the myth that the Earth travels through space on the back of a giant turtle. When a young boy asked a priest, “What is the turtle standing on?”, the priest replied, “On the back of another turtle.” The boy then asked what that turtle was standing on. The priest replied, “Another turtle. It’s turtles all the way down.”
The simulation hypothesis is a variant of this. Go back to the setup: There is one species that lives in reality and made the simulation, which was copied countless times. But by the same logic, that one species must itself also be in a simulation, one of trillions made by an entirely different species that believed itself to be the prime species. Of course, that species is almost certainly a simulation, created by yet a different prime species, which in turn must be a simulation created by another species, which thinks its reality is real. But guess what: It, too, is a simulation. So, just as it’s turtles all the way down, it’s simulations all the way up.
In addition to being incorrect, the simulation hypothesis can be morally corrosive. If nothing around us is real, then that includes the pain and misery of others. In the video game world, an NPC is a non-player character, that is, a computer-generated bystander who can be gunned down or run over without any moral qualms. More than once, we have heard otherwise well-meaning people dismissively refer to other human beings, especially the nameless multitudes suffering in distant lands, as NPCs. In the mindset of the simulation hypothesis, they aren’t even real people, just computer-generated background detail.
This sort of thinking, the logical conclusion of the simulation hypothesis, doesn’t merely release us from the obligation to help others; it could make doing so seem a ridiculous waste of time and effort. If nothing is real, then nothing actually matters. While those who are overwhelmed by the misery of today’s world might take comfort in the view that it’s all a digital illusion, we cannot in good conscience indulge in such escapism, for the world around us is real and has real problems that need us all to work together to solve.
As we advance the trifecta of AI, quantum computing, and robotics, let’s remember to treat each other with genuine human kindness and advance together with deep intentionality. This exponential technology trifecta will lead us to understand the nature of our reality more than we can imagine, and we believe that we will indeed find out what makes us most human.
P.S., You can find the last article that Byron Reese and I wrote together also here on Medium: The 4 Billion-Year History of AI’s Large Language Models.
