Is there any evidence our whole world is a hoax?
Of course the world is probably not a computer simulation created by some advanced, unknown super-civilization.
Still, we have to wonder: are there any suspicious, as yet unexplained anomalies, things that indicate society is not what it seems?
-There are many claims of 'paranormal' events, which could be seen as glitches in the simulation. Not a single one of them has held up under scientific investigation (they can usually be explained as common observation and perception errors). If they are common enough to be detected by unskilled observers, at least a few of them should also be verifiable by trained scientists. The only other explanation is that the simulation removes all evidence whenever experts are watching.
-The second best candidate may be superficial ignorance.
As mentioned in 'The Matrix', human behavior and society don't seem to serve a real purpose. They appear phony and contrived.
Many aspects of religion are quite inexplicable. There is no evidence or logical reason to believe any of them. The biggest absurdity of human existence is never mentioned by the mainstream media. Somehow the most important truths are not discussed.
-The human brain is suspiciously inefficient. Supposedly more powerful than every PC in Asia combined, but unable to remember a list of twenty simple words.
Other 'funny' facts:
-After almost four billion years of evolution, Earth contains only one type of molecule that can copy itself: RNA/DNA. Shouldn't there be millions of types of self-replicating molecules?
-There's a vast amount of 'useless', well-hidden complexity inside nature: Air molecules moving faster than the speed of sound, sextillions of electrons moving at nearly the speed of light, immense empty spaces between atoms . . .
This does not indicate our world is a simulation. It may be something much stranger.
Rebutting the Simulation Argument
The Ancestor Simulation theory seems deceptively plausible - assuming the future is infinite, and mankind's descendants will exist forever while continuing to improve themselves.
In an endless future, our descendants will eventually carry out infinitely many computer simulations of their past and our present.
These simulations will include countless copies of our minds and our deepest thoughts.
There can be only one 'real' version. We are much more likely to be one of the uncountable future simulations, than the original reality the simulation is based upon, since there are infinitely more 'fake' versions.
If we accept the notion of an endless future, we must also doubt our current existence.
Or should we?
At least two rebuttals extend the argument to a higher level.
1) The Doomsday Simulation argument (can be read at philsci-archive, and at anthropic-principle.com)
This paper uses Bayesian recursion to create an endless chain of simulations of simulations.
It goes a little something like this:
Primitive ancestor simulations evolve into more advanced simulated societies, which themselves create ancestor simulations, and so on. An interesting trend emerges.
Each lower simulation can be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with many higher ones that evolve from it. The math is a little dodgy. In the same way, it can be proven there are just as many natural numbers as there are even numbers (or multiples of say 944).
As time goes by, an ever shrinking fraction are simulations of the lowest, simplest levels.
Almost all simulations are of advanced future civilizations we couldn't even imagine.
Extrapolating this trend, the probabilities that we are 'real' or a simulation converge: both seem equally unlikely.
After a while, there would also be no need to repeat the simplest simulations. All possible results will have been extracted. Simply feed the results of an earlier trial to the next highest level.
In some software systems, it takes less effort to remember the results of very common calculations (2+2=?) than to keep recalculating them.
To put it another way, if we are indeed average minds, why does our simulation happen to be at the very start of an endless future? Any random simulation should already be infinitely advanced itself.
2) Universe Multiplication
The second rebuttal speculates that new universes are constantly 'sprouting off' from existing ones. They start as random quantum fluctuations that rapidly expand to cosmic size, leaving no trace in the original universe:
http://www.mail-archive.com/singularity@v2.listbox.com/msg00419.html
This happens so often that almost every universe exists at a very early stage of its evolution.
In fact, most are much younger than our own. For every simulated universe, thousands of real ones spring into existence every instant.
No matter how long we continue to exist, this argument is likely to hold. A mere second-order derivative, no computer can be powerful enough to out-calculate nature itself.
It looks like we might be real after all.
Whatever the reason, some unknown but powerful force seems to generate infinitely more 'small minds' (finite observers like us) than larger minds. Infinite minds may not even be possible for all we know.
There are of course many, many other possible solutions to the paradox.
----------------------------------------------
From over 50KB of comments made by readers at KurzweilAI:
What is the best evidence our world is a hoax?
-Selfishness seems a likely suspect.
(gawell)
-Highly redshifted quasars, physically connected to low-redshifted galaxies.
-Patterns in the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background.
-The surface brightness (apparent luminosity divided by apparent surface area) of distant galaxies is the same as that of nearby ones.
(Extropia)
-Algorithm information theory says that there is enough randomness in the universe that any simulation of the universe would have to be exactly the same size as the universe itself.
Truth cannot be 'compressed' into a complete system, so there is no reason to believe in an all powerful God which can be compressed into any one religion or belief system.
The universe exists beyond our puny brains to comprehend completely.
(doojie)
- As you approach speed of light, time slows down. A nice solution to slow down the simulation of objects moving too fast.
- Gravity fields (clusters of mass) slow down time. In a distributed computing environment, a convenient solution would be to simulate dense environments at a lower rate (to maintain simulation integrity), while allowing everything else to update at normal speed.
(strong_ai)
-only 3 dimensions
-locality
(/:setAI)
-
Three large spatial dimensions makes sense, according to String Theory.
Bounded locality is cheap to simulate.
A complex world with a decillion decillion decillion elements but only 3 degrees of freedom and a single timelike dimension for one dimensional entropy is cheap to compute linearly in most types of possible universes.
(Extropia)
-I think the best evidence for us being in a 'simulated' reality (as opposed to the 'real' reality), is that we don't know anything.
If our reality was 'real,' one might assume we'd 'know' how/why it was created, what came before it, the meaning of life, etc.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Buy the book
Read the chapters