Time and the simulated world

I originally wrote this in April 2018 but never published it, instead sending it to a few friends and discussing it privately. I suspect that if I ever reach a stage in life where this topic doesn't make my mind boggle, I will have gone very wrong somewhere along the way.

I keep thinking about the popular theory that we are in a simulation – that video games, VR etc will take us to a point that is so indistinguishable from “real” reality that we won’t know we’re in it, and that actually we are already there – merely characters in some kind of computer simulation, rather than living a real physical existence.



That concept seems to rely on the idea that the simulation is a boundaried, if vast and even growing, thing that we are enclosed in, much as we feel ourselves to be enclosed in the Earth’s atmosphere or in the tedious requirements of our lives. That we are players in it, or even just characters imagined (by whom or what?)

What brings me to this, in a roundabout way, is this: I’m reading Carlo Rovelli’s thoughts on time at the moment. Particularly interesting is the exploration of the idea that the passing of time, of things having happened before other things, is an essentially human concept, that all the Things in the world which act or are acted upon are not at all elementary items, but mere swarms of relational events. Elementary quanta popping in and out of existence in a probability cloud, millions and millions of times over, until the buzzing swarm, seen at a macro level, seems to still and solidify and become the familiar Thing we are used to deciphering with the tools we have, our bodies and senses and brains. The swarm, when you step back far enough, looks like a chair or a person or a suspension bridge, but is still just a vast collection of molecular happenings as quanta appear and disappear and bash into each other to confirm their place in spacetime – as if each quanta looks at its companion and shouts, “Ha! Seen you!”, sticking it to its spot. It also seems to have a “performative” element – its position only being determinable once seen through our eyes. I’m reminded of the startling fact that cats only bother to miaow for human benefit – they have no need of this particular vocalisation among their own kind. Further, everything happens on its own hyper-local timescales, undulating and stretching as needed with the curves of spacetime, not on one great timeline of existence, so it is fruitless to say that this set of quanta in this corner of space met each other before that set of quanta met millions of light years away.

Rovelli has interesting parallel thoughts too on music, echoing Augustine's observation that music is something we specifically experience in time, internally – stop the forwardness of time, stop the tape and we stop the music. You can't hear music in a vacuum - there is nothing for the quanta that form its waves, over time, to bump into and thus make a noise. Although we are never ever in the past or future, always in the present, crucially we have memories (events that came to a stop; flying rocks that left craters etched in the ground; ink that dried on a page; experiences that left information in our minds). These tell us there was a past now gone, to enable us to use residual past information to predict the future. Without memories there would be no melody because we wouldn't remember the notes that preceded the one we hear right now. Music only makes sense to us when we hear a note surrounded by others; it is the relations between the notes that is the event, that catches our interest, not each single plain note on its own. String these events together, the event of one note meeting another, and that meeting yet another, and trace the line drawn in time as the baton is passed. A story, which is of course a collection of incidents, is told. Such are things; collections of relations and events; of tiny, tiny items meeting en masse. Such is music; collections of relations and events; of sound waves meeting in plural and sequence.

Is that why music hits us so primally? Because its fundamental nature echoes the absolutely fundamental process underpinning everything in existence; a collection of sonic events that take a shape which moves us? Perhaps music is shorthand for the machinations of the world. Perhaps that’s why Johannes Kepler couldn’t let go of the idea of music and the heavenly bodies inextricably linked causally, the harmonies of one explaining the cycles of the other.

So I think about all of that, about how much of existence is just a collection of probabilistic events, and how everything we are aware of is merely our interpretation of the information we perceive, filtered and constructed through our own biological equipment. This is the biggest mind-boggler to me – that every single thing we will ever know or experience comes to us through the biased filter of our senses. What does another organism “know”? Colour isn’t a physical property as we seem to experience it – it’s just how we and other animals interpret different frequencies of energy. Some animals can't see or conceptualise colour. They don't need to, in order to take the information they need from those energy frequencies. Perhaps even the empirical mathematics we have built so much upon on is a uniquely human experience, and a sufficiently different lifeform would be baffled by our reliance on such strange arts. Perhaps they might have their own. Could we use or even conceptualise them?

And then I think about the popular idea that we might just be 0s and 1s in someone or something’s simulation.

The familiar questions come back. Why would there be a simulation? How could anything have the processing power to run a sim as vast as our uncharted universe, unless you believe in God (and if one believes in God, why would God need to invent the processing power of a computer to run a simulation when God is already God, according to our omnipotent definition of God? Simulation is modelling; why simulate something in the first place if you have absolute power and understanding of everything? Here we come back to the human ideas about what constitutes a deity in the first place. Could "God" be something not omnipotent?) What would be the point of inventing us? Does the shakiness of our perceptions reinforce the idea that we are digital entities in someone else’s world, or blow that idea out of the water? Quantum ideas shake the popular, omnipotent idea of “God”, because they insist upon discrete, not infinite, quantities and scales.

I think about Rovelli’s points about entropy, why we are so fixed on the idea that our existence represents order, and the dust of the universe represents disorder. Entropy, of course, is just what happens when energy decays into heat, which then passes from one concentrated place to a wider area, cooling as it spreads out. I think about his assertion that acknowledging we have a Point Of View is essential to examining our own understanding of the universe. We are not dispassionate observers with all possible tools available to us. We are finitely sized, finitely equipped, and we think a great deal about ourselves and the stuff around us – it is our defining quality. I consider our obsession with not being the only ones out there, either through dependence on God, or the need to find some companions to compare and contrast ourselves with, or through self-effacing insistence that we cannot be the only example of life forming such complex, advanced patterns.

And then I think about Rovelli’s point that we see chaos and order where we choose to; we order a pack of cards in numerical order, or red-black-red-black, approve of the pattern, shuffle it and observe increasing disorder. If we chose to really examine every possible property of those cards beyond the recognisable markings that we’re familiar with, we might find other patterns and combinations, and find a different sort of order. Different eyes might see different patterns. (Here again I’m reminded of our reliable mathematics – reliable for us, at least!). I think about that in relation to how we see universal complexity. We are looking for what we call life; could not other, far more sophisticated forms of “order” than chaotic, messy, entropy-seeking life be out there to discover (or not)?

I think there must be a link between these ideas about entropy and this need to explain the universe as a theory – a simulation. I think the simulation idea is merely a new form of godhead; a way to attribute something, comfortingly, to Someone In Charge, as has always been our species’ habit. The human concept of God is an ordering mechanism, a way to build a roof over our heads in the face of the terrifying, vast, seemingly inexplicable and unpredictable universe around us. Is sketching the whole of existence as a deliberately designed, ordered landscape in some digital superbrain somewhere just an attempt to make highly entropied things seem ordered and deliberate? An attempt to gamify our progress as a species? “Congratulations, you have passed Level 7 and sent a rover to Mars. Press any key to enter Level 8.” Are we simply unable to accept that we, our living planet, our many species, the vast swarm of swarms of swarms of quanta, are at their heart an unspeakably complex collection of incidental meetings in a probability cloud - possibility soup? Or that the probability clouds across the universe popped out all sorts of combinations, and we, and all we see, simply happen to be one of those, rather than the pinnacle of order as far as a human mind is concerned? We may have already seen things we dismissed as disordered, which represent an order we just can't read.

It's a deeply internal, intuitive and human thing to construct a religious narrative, to fill the gaps in our knowledge with the superior, as yet unrevealed knowledge of a Boss somewhere, someone in charge. It’s comforting to feel we’re not the most capable combination of quanta we’ll ever have any contact with; that something better at life than us, more skilled and powerful, is steering the boat. Perhaps that’s why it also matters so much to so many of us to believe there is more life out there. I think it’s certainly why we are susceptible to cults of personality. We like the idea that the political icon, the iron ruler, the tech genius, the actor with the UN ambassador role, the benevolent billionaire, the rockstar philosopher, has got it all figured out. We read the books they recommend, and loyally adopt their alliances and enmities. We buy their products, spread their hashtags, quote their catchphrases, tick the boxes next to their names and hand them power over our lives. We trust that they have our best interests at heart, because we really want to believe we’ve found the entity that will look after us. We are still children searching for the ultimate, permanent parent.

I tend to think of religion, psychologically, as the human search for the best part of our individual selves; the ideal, “when I grow up” version of ourselves with perfect judgment that won’t screw up, that everyone will like, that will only ever do the right thing. Here, God is the me I would like to be, and the me that possesses the power that I don’t. When we worship something we are idealising ourselves and aspiring to a level of perfection and agency we know we can’t reach in mortal terms. People rarely worship an entity if the idea of being just like it is repugnant to them. Post-Western-religion – and probably at the apex of its societal power as well – see the old “victory or death” adherence to kings, military leaders, prophets: big personalities – we pin these hopes on fellow humans as much as on formless god-entities. In our individualism we are attracted to different displays of arrogance or certainty, whether it’s Donald Trump’s DGAF nouveau riche “I’m just saying what you’re all thinking” amiritefolks Regular Guy/Fascist, the bigoted and cynical, red-pill, rabbit-hole lifestyle preaching of Jordan Peterson or Milo Yiannopoulos, or Elon Musk’s billionaire, well-intentioned but abrasive and often blinkered ubermensch persona - frontman for industrial achievement and pundit on the future of humanity. (As a side note, it’s interesting that in our economically ordered, still somewhat paternalistic society, to observe that nearly all of our personality cult leaders are wealthy white men… Jeremy Corbyn at least being a relative economic exception.)

Whichever direction our own interests, characters and life circumstances point us in, we are a social species that still seems to need to form a pack and follow those who claim they know what's up, and these days we call it fandom. The simulation theory seems to me to be the ultimate extrapolation of fandom.

The gamification of society continues apace – from the central success of narrative games as a cultural art form to the gamification of education, romance, etc. I think in no small part this theory is a natural result of the prevalence of gamer psychology – to picture the universe as a designed terrain, and call the theory logical because we have described it as a digital construct, not the sweep of the hand of God. But this idea feels like a tremendous abdication of human responsibility. It’s like a sudden panic spasm from a class of people who otherwise credit themselves with logical, deductive thinking abilities, and whose pioneering mastery of the technological frontiers of human ability sits strangely with this need to hand over the ultimate explanation for existence to a neat, fictional narrative; to reduce ourselves to secondary creatures, subjects in a fanfiction for something we can’t even name, whose decisions are not our fault. (That's an instinct we also see politically, as people swear their allegiance to leaders who we can see, even without hindsight, do not have their best interests at heart.) My feeling is there isn’t an ultimate, single explanation for existence. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that there isn’t one single experience of existence.

As Rovelli and others point out, human existence and all that follows from it is the result of trillions and trillions of quantum events that were the outcomes of trillions upon trillions of possibilities and probabilities. Elsewhere in the universe these possibilities brought forth different star clusters, black holes, planets, or spaces holding none of the above, and in many of them, including our neighbouring planets, the as-yet unconfirmed outcome of life not occurring. Our experience is deeply subjective, measured with the limited biological apparatus we have and the tools we have built, and what is being described as a giant simulation from our perspective might be absolutely nothing of the sort from the non-human vantage point of absolutely any other corner of the universe. Perhaps, to look at it in quantum terms, whether life systems occur elsewhere will not be physically determined until we see it for ourselves (if we even could). Quantum behaviour at a macro level: Schrodinger’s Species. Perhaps this idea could even lead us to a solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Perhaps the only simulation we inhabit is a solipsistic one; the map our own minds construct of the universe, and what the screens of our eyes tell us we see out there, a world made and felt inside our heads and, connectively, through the interface of our nervous system, eyes and fingers, because it is the only way we can experience whatever is outside us. The successful and convincing simulation we experience is not a thing orchestrated by an external entity, but the convincing and self-sustaining illusion that we swarms of quantum events are forms solid enough to build and operate the construct we call society. Our own most elementary units are the ones running the simulation and allowing us the indulgence of imagining that we think, therefore we are. That seems as reasonable an explanation as the theory that we are characters in a vast, real sim of life.