Scientific Proof We Live In A Simulation

Back in June 2009, I wrote an article titled “Proof That We’re Living a Life of Illusion” (http://thelaymansanswerstoeverything.com/?p=515). In it, I provided what I felt was overwhelming evidence that we all live in some kind of computer simulation. I also offered some simple explanations as to why I thought we did. At the time, the people who are open to believing in such fantastical theories excitedly agreed with the premise, while those who rely on hard-core scientific proof, did not. Well, a funny thing’s happened in the years since I wrote that article. Scientists are beginning to see the evidence that the non-believers require. The question now is, whether those skeptics will decide to take the blue pill or the red pill?

Even before I’d seen The Matrix back in 1999, I was of the belief that the world we lived in was illusionary. When the carpeting in the basement of my childhood home was ripped up several years ago to make room for new carpeting, my parents discovered the signatures of my brother and I from years earlier inscribed in the concrete underneath. The signatures dated back to the mid-1980s, when the concrete was poured to fix a gap at the bottom of the stairs. Next to my signature, and the date, was written the words: “Nothing Is Real.” Besides just quoting my favorite Beatles song, I guess I was hoping that by the time we (or whomever) had rediscovered what I’d written, the illusionary nature of our world would have already been proven correct. Well, I may not have been too far off.

As I wrote in the “Life of Illusion” post, even after seeing The Matrix, I didn’t take the simulation concept literally, but more as a metaphor for the illusionary aspects of our material existence—an existence where we believe ourselves to be separate individuals who are at the mercy of events and circumstances that happen by chance in the world. My belief was that, in truth, we were all one energy that, consciously and subconsciously, created the events that we experienced in our individual and collective lives.

This was the perspective I had as I wrote the Layman trilogy. In fact, of the over half-million words in the manuscripts for those novels, the word, “simulation,” doesn’t appear once. Of course, those novels are themselves a metaphor for what I believe the real world is and what the future holds so the omission doesn’t affect their message at all. The point though, is that there was a time—quite recently—that I myself didn’t think the world was actually a simulation. But then I started to uncover a lot of convincing information that opened my eyes—and my mind to the possibility.

It was around the time when I was writing The Myth of Lost. The book uses the simulation concept to both explain the many mysteries of Lost and reveal hidden wisdom that could directly be plugged into our lives. My research while writing the book (into such topics as the Panopticon prison) combined with movies I discovered (like eXistenZ) and various events that happened in the world and my life soon provided enough evidence to convince me that life wasn’t just an illusion, but a computer simulation. I quickly began to see how the world-as-simulation model made complete sense, whereas our presumption that we lived in the very first reality seemed as ridiculous as us being the only life forms in the universe.

In the “Life of Illusion” article, I point out that most technology-savvy people agree that in the not-too-distant-future, we will have evolved our interactive virtual-worlds games like The Sims or Second Life to the point where the game and reality will be indistinguishable. Since we experience life through our senses, we actually aren’t too far away from artificially controlling the stimuli that we sense as reality—causing us to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch things that are merely electronic impulses sent to our brain.

Once you accept that belief, your next question is whether or not we are already living in such a world now. Logically, if such technology appears after a relatively brief span of intelligent evolution (around 10,000 years compared with a universe that’s 13.8 billion years old), isn’t it highly unlikely that we just-so-happen to live in the original reality? Isn’t it much more probable that we too, and those who created our world, and those who created that world also all live in simulations?

The argument of those skeptical types who preach only provable science and atheism is that such a belief just confuses things; it goes against the Occam’s Razor principle that the simplest hypothesis is usually the correct one, and that such a theory just delays the inevitable question: who created the original world?

I can see why any simulation theory seems like an unnecessary obstacle to truth, but sometimes the simplest theory only appears more complicated from one’s perspective. For starters, the concept of time may only be a part of our current simulation and may not even exist in any of the other realities beyond this one. In those realms, every possibility that could exist is actually all created at the same time. In fact, most theoretical physicists belief this to be true about our world as well—that time is illusionary and much like a game, everything has already been coded and only our experience makes us feel like we are moving through time.

Even within the concept of time, the idea that there must be an origination point in our past is also a flawed concept based only on our subjective experience. The reality is that formulas for the flow of time work equally well in either direction. So maybe our universe will be created in the future. These are just a couple examples of how our assumptions about reality are limited by our perceptions, which may or may not be correct.

Looking at this another way, imagine two mice in a clear plastic cage debating about what exists outside their world. The first mouse believes there is a world outside their cage indicated by a room, and in that room he sees a window that opens into yet another world, and in the upper corner of that window he can see bright specs at night that he believes consist of other worlds. The second mouse scoffs at this, saying that the first mouse is only needlessly complicating things. Clearly theirs is the only world, because he can see it all from where they are—it is flat against the edge of their living space—like a picture. And if so many worlds existed, how would the first mouse be able to see them through the first flat world?

From our perspective, it’s easy to see the flaw in the second mouse’s argument, but we can also see why he thinks the first mouse has a more complicated theory whereas he really does. The same analogy can be made with the simulation theory. Multi-levels of reality may not be making reality more complicated, it may be the very nature of what reality is. And while, like the first mouse, the simulation theory may have the specific details wrong (the first mouse wasn’t really seeing another world directly outside his cage), it’s general premise about other existences outside of our own, and outside of that one, and so on, is essentially correct.

We just assume that time, and points of origination exist because that is our experience. But our experience is very limited and has already been proven to be wrong based on what quantum physicists already know about the workings of our world (see last paragraph of “The Answer to Everything”). Our experience of life is based on what we sense. But those who deal in subatomic molecules know that our world is much, much more bizarre. Yet, since most of us can’t grasp that, we just return to what we understand.

For all we know, a universe with simulations within simulations could be how everything originated, and who’s to say that we, in this version of reality, aren’t the ones who created it that way? So any argument that simulations can’t be right because they needlessly complicate the mystery of where we come from is flawed for its assumption that things must work based on what we already think we know. Like the second mouse, everything we think we know could be wrong. The universe could exist on the back of a turtle, standing on the back of another turtle with turtles all the way down. While I think most would agree that a simulation is more probable than that, it’s interesting to note how the age-old turtles on turtles theory is an excellent analogy to simulations within simulations for mice and men who didn’t yet understand what a simulation was.

What’s amazing to me is that everything we don’t consciously understand about the workings of our world seems to be fully absorbed by us subconsciously from the many movies, TV shows, and other stories that explore illusionary themes. How is it that most artists, musicians, and storytellers are all on the same page about this stuff? So many stories, especially lately (Avatar, Inception, The Source Code, The Adjustment Bureau, Limitless, Sucker Punch, Awake, Touch, Lost, The Cabin In The Woods, Tron: Legacy), all deal with themes about illusionary worlds and/or how we are all connected.

It’s almost as though these writers are all getting similar downloads or picking up on some collective conscious truth that most of us aren’t sensitive enough to hear. As I’ve written about many times, these artists and storytellers are modern day shaman and their tales make up our mythology that contain hidden truths about how our world really works. As we begin to have a clearer understanding of the physics of our world, these stories are able to get closer and closer to being literally true. So The Matrix is closer than Total Recall, which is closer than Tron, which is closer than The Wizard of Oz. And soon, there will be a movie that gets it even closer than The Matrix. (In many ways, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, and Inception have already done this for depicting worlds within worlds.)

After the “Life of Illusion post,” I wrote others that explained why a simulated world made complete sense. In “The Golden Path,” I compared the idea of a destiny to what’s known in the gaming world as a “golden path”—the path that programmers design so players feel as though they are guiding their characters whereas their experience has actually been pre-programmed for the most exciting game play possible. As with games, sometimes our lives feel like they are being nudged in certain directions because there are specific things we’re meant to experience in order to get to the next level—a level that needs to challenge us a bit more since we have grown from what we’ve already overcome. This also explains why life is hard. Challenging games are more fulfilling, more likely to keep us occupied, and more likely to stimulate growth. That’s why Atari’s Combat had no sequels released, whereas Nintendo’s Donkey Kong spawned an entire empire.

In another recent post titled, “Have You Seen The Honeycombs?” I wrote about how hexagons and honeycomb shapes are popping up all over in moves, TV shows, and recent design patterns. I compared these shapes to being like the infrastructure of our reality. When you break down any videogame or computer screen to its basics you get geometric shapes—pixels that make up what we see as a whole. If our universe is a simulation, it must be made up of tiny repeating shapes as well. We know about atoms, electrons, quarks, and the vibrating strings of string theory. Perhaps, at the smallest level, there is a web of hexagons as the basic building blocks of this illusionary world. And maybe, the modern day shaman of our times are beginning to pick up on that much like the other truths they pick up on and translate into stories and images we can comprehend—even if only subconsciously.

While all of this seems magical or spiritual, it is very possible that it’s simply science that we don’t yet understand. What spiritualists call sacred geometry can really just be the geometrical building blocks of our reality. The reason why so many of the shapes of nature form a certain pattern (known as “the golden ratio”) is likely because it’s based on the mathematical formulations of the program that created our world.

Up until now, this is really all we’ve had to go on: comparing certain correlations between simulations and our world. What is beginning to change however, is that scientists are now beginning to take the simulation possibility seriously and are actually testing to see whether elements that only show up in simulations show up in our world as well.

One caveat: if you believe that ignorance is bliss and would prefer to live in a world that is actually real and the idea of living in a simulation would disturb or even terrify you, I suggest you stop reading here. I do not make judgments on such a preference and completely understand the benefits of just living life within our perceived reality without wanting to dig deeper to discover how it all works. If anything, my insistence on uncovering the mechanisms of all this seems far less logical. But I guess that’s just how I was programmed.

To read the rest of this article and find out the scientific evidence that we live in a simulation and how to update your less-than-perfect avatar, click below:
http://thelaymansanswerstoeverything.com/?p=2144