Elon Musk Lives in a Simulation…

In this article, you’ll find a personal and introspective journey through the intricate maze of simulation theory. Drawing from philosophical thought, scientific inquiry, and my own moments of realization. The narrative isn’t just academic discourse of simulated existence – it leads to a personal theory on simulation that might alter your perception of reality itself.  

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Simulated Certainty

A little while ago, on the first full day of the 2024 new year to be precise, I woke up absolutely convinced that Elon Musk lives in a simulation, that I live in a simulation, and that you – if indeed there really are any “you” – also live in a simulation.

While others have hedged their bets and claimed that through things like “simulation theory” that there might be at least three or so possible divergent possibilities that might indicate whether there’s the potential that we live in a simulation, because of what happened on New Year’s Eve, I can now say with absolute certainty that I do live in a simulation.

The only real questions that remain are if “you” also live in the exact same simulation as me, and what will happen to “our” existence when everyone else also comes to fully know with certainty that we do?

Bigger yet, does knowing the truth even really matter to the “life” that I’m currently living, or that any of “us” are living because we are all in a very real sense captive to this reality?

The Illusion of Choice

Because I choose not to be lonely (if in fact I can even make that choice), let me roll you back a little while to show you how I came to this conclusion, but please understand that as I go through all of this with you, that because I now know that all of this is an illusion, that I know that to function within it I’m still going to have to play by the rules of the world that “we” live within and that things such as gravity, or night and day, or even “feelings” like hunger or happiness, and even being able to type “words” on a computer screen have to all be considered to be accepted standards and the terms of conditions that I have to accept to function within the boundaries of this simulated world.

So far, and no matter how much I try, I still haven’t been able to mentally levitate my coffee cup off of the kitchen table or otherwise escape this simulation, but I’ll keep trying every once in a while, or maybe I might just try something “lighter” like a feather in case I’m ever able to accidentally catch a glimpse a hidden opening.

Now, just because I’m awake to the realities of the world within which I live, it doesn’t mean that I’ve discovered the keys to walking out of it and into any of the other simulated worlds within which this one resides, or of the many more that reside within those other worlds within which many other worlds also exist, only that I’ve answered for myself the question about whether I presently now live in one of these simulations.

In fact, because “you” might not actually exist as I’ve long imagined you to, this may all actually be no more than an exercise in self-gratification designed just to get my own mind off and to try to keep the avatar of what I imagine to be myself stable. Besides, if I’m stuck here, I may as well find something to do within the confines of the space that I’ve been given to play within, because it would seem that there’s only one known way out of this simulation as far as I can tell, and even in death I can’t be sure that I simply wouldn’t be re-booted right back into this same simulation or any one of a hundred billion infinities worth of other illusions similar or even completely different to this one, but that will also be exactly the same to any of my future (or simultaneous) iterations in that they too will also be illusions.

Alternatively, my sense of self, if and when I ever get out of this simulation, may well just simply turn off and all that I was, or thought myself to be – if I can really even have thoughts or a true sense of self – will just dissolve into the emptiness of nothingness (if there can be such a thing as nothingness).

It’s a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole within an endless series of rabbit holes, and whoever created it or why it was created I can’t yet determine or really be even able to partially comprehend. All that I believe that I now know is that this is not “base reality”.

And this awareness all came about through a simple observation presented to me by an eight-year-old…

I had spent the week prior to the new year at a chalet with a bunch of friends of mine in ski country. It’s come to be an annual thing and something that I earnestly look forward to and that always lets me explore a whole new world of thoughts and discussions along with good food and beautiful views in a wintery wonderland.

This year I also got to spend some time with the young son of my friends near the edge of a mountain where we had a spectacular view of the fireworks that were being set off. It was not too long after sunset and they filled the skies with sparkling colour and magnificence as they exploded in artistically choreographed patterns to tell an interpretive story through elaborate pyrotechnics that danced through the dark and star-filled sky.

Calculations in the Cosmos

As a few of the explosions went off in the distance, my attention was drawn away from them and towards the young person standing beside me and noticed that he was calculating something with his fingers as he maintained a very serious expression.

“What are you counting,” I asked?

“I’m seeing how many seconds it takes for the sound to reach us after I see the one of the fireworks explode.”

I smiled and thought, smart kid.

“And what have you concluded,” I asked?

He replied that it took about six seconds for the sound to get to where we were after we saw an explosion. He then told me that he’d remembered that someone told him last year that sound moving through the air travels at about 1100 feet per second and that as near as he could figure we were a little more than a mile away from the source of the explosions.

An an engineer, I couldn’t help but smile as I recognized the multiple layers of his inquisitiveness and intelligence at work, and it was all the more amazing because he wasn’t using a smartphone or any other device but had managed to figure it out in his head.

“There might be hope for the planet after all”, I thought.

When we eventually walked back to the chalet where everyone had gathered to celebrate the potentials of the New Year and to remember the lives of the people that we had known and lost the year before, I mentioned to his parents that I was impressed by how smart their son was as I told them about his ingenuity.

“Not too bad,” his father replied. “But did you ask him if he factored in the rate of the speed of light as well?”

I looked over at the young burgeoning prodigy and he replied that, “Because light travels at 671 million miles per hour in a vacuum, and that we were way too close for it to make any discernible difference, that the insignificant variable meant that for a rough estimation of how far away the fireworks were from us that that bit of information really didn’t provide a useful factor in our approximation.”

Aside from thinking that I was looking at a real-life version of Young Sheldon, I smiled as he tossed the speed of light suggestion away about as nonchalantly as water running off of a duck’s back and then asked his parents, “Is it okay if I go play Minecraft for a while?”

His mom smiled and said yes, and the young whiz kid hurried out to his room to spend some time in his self-created world for a while.

But that was when a light bulb went off for me that rattled around in my brain all night and then percolated through my sleep until I woke up with the definitive realization that I was living in a simulation.

Are We Living in a Simulation?

So let me take you through the process that led me here…

It all really starts with the same age-old question that, even though it’s been updated throughout history as our species evolves, is pretty much the same one that everyone at least once in their lives asks, with the newest iteration being,

“Are we living in a simulation?”

It’s an interesting question that all of us, if we actually fully stopped for a moment and glanced up through the veil of illusions, hallucinations, distractions, and deceptions that we bathe in daily might want to take a moment or two to ask.

After all, it’s one that’s been around since the days of the ancient Greek thinkers and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – although in truth it probably stems all the way back to the very first days of humanity when a purely hungry and otherwise oblivious cave dweller searching for berries and bunnies got suddenly taken down by a ravenous tiger that ripped open his guts and gnawed at his intestines while he succumbed and eventually dispassionately watched once the shock and horror subsided and then some glimmer of his being asked the questions that we still ponder to this day as the light faded from his eyes; “Who created all of this?”, “How in the world did I get here?”, “What’s it all about?”, “Is this really the end of all of it?”, and “Is this even real?”

And, in this way, our ancestor being snacked on by a tiger probably spent more time in his truncated human coil thinking about “Life, the Universe and Everything” more than do the vast majority of the rest of us on the planet, as people today just seemingly mindlessly shift into auto pilot as they go about their daily routines never thinking much more about anything other than getting up, going to school or getting to work on time, pushing through the daily grind, and dreaming of the weekend where all sorts of good stuff like partying – check that – I mean taking a nap, doing the laundry, watching Netflix, grocery shopping, cleaning our space, napping again, and getting reset for the next week ahead mostly takes place.

That upcoming week will consist of seemingly endless classes or meetings and often times be mostly made up of “meaningful productivity” taking place that apparently is supposed to make our lives totally fulfilled until we become old enough to retire, essentially turn invisible to those around us, and then age out and become too out of shape and fatigued to do all the things that we dreamed of doing and aspired to when we were younger but put off for decades and decades until nightly Jeopardy becomes a thing and a bedtime debate about whether it’s actually safe to take a cruise to the other side of the world as pandemic fears still rage on and as the World Health Organization now warns us about the arrival of their anticipated “Disease X” that will also surely put us all in an early grave.

Caught between fear and trepidation, eventually, most will become immobile and simply die in failing bodies with medications filling their systems as machines beep off their failing heart rates until they eventually slip into darkness but not before asking themselves; “How in the world did I get here?”, “What’s it all about?”, “Is this really the end of all of it?”, and “Is this even real?”

We’ve evolved thousands and thousands of years, gone through countless civilizations, experienced unimagined technological advances, and all of us, if we consider any thread of the thought about how we all got here, eventually get to a point where we’re forced to ask, “Are we any more than the construct of some form of external electrical brain impulses leading us to believe in our own existence?”

Does everything I see and smell and taste even exist?

Do I really even share any part of this reality that I perceive with anyone else?

Is this all a construct? And if it is, for what purpose?

Do I even have a body or anything else that I regard as “self”?

Do I even really have a brain? And if I do, what is it and how does it work?

Or is this all a figment of imagination?

In one of my favorite books, “Illusions”, by Richard Bach – the same man who wrote “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” – he writes about a disillusioned writer and barnstorming bi-plane pilot who believes that life is as undeniably solid and as real as a full tank of gas and as dependable and consistent as the ping of the cylinders firing in his Fleet. That is until he meets a teacher, a fellow pilot, a modern-day messiah, who shows him that the world that we live in is illusory, as well as everything behind it and all that powers it.

It’s an easy, gentle, and moving story from 1977 with profound messages that withstand the test of time and even plays to today’s social media driven culture, and really is just another way of proposing that we live in a simulation, potentially of our own design.

It’s by no means the first time that stories like it have pointed us in this direction.

Plato’s Allegory of The Cave

Plato, sometime around 380 BCE, had his, “Allegory of The Cave”, one of the most well-known philosophical concepts in history and one that Keanu Reeves often likes to point to. In it, Plato postulates on how humans perceive reality and whether there is any higher truth to existence.

What he’s describing in his paper in many ways seeks to answer the big question, along with a few smaller other socially driven things of his time, about whether we’re living in an altered reality and simulation, and he uses the technologies available to him at the time to illustrate his point.

His thoughts go a little like this… There are captured prisoners who have lived their entire lives since their birth chained inside a cave. They are unable to move their heads in any direction except for looking straight ahead. Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying puppets or other objects. These objects cast shadows on the wall directly in front of the prisoners. They watch these shadows, believing this to be the entirety of their reality as they know nothing else.

Plato maintains that if one prisoner broke free, that he would see his surroundings and the fire and realize that the shadows are fake, and that the world that he believed in was an illusion.

This prisoner would then escape the cave and discover that there’s a whole other world outside, filled with sights and sounds and colors and tastes that he’d never before imagined, and so very different from the truth of the totality of the reality that he thought he knew.

But having never seen the bright intensity of the daylight, that he’d be partially blinded and so much so that when he returned to the cave to tell his other captives about the wonders that were outside, that because he wouldn’t be able to again adjust to the darkness and be able to see what they were seeing, that they would think that he was mad and that they too would be blinded if they tried to escape the cave and that to protect themselves that they had to kill regardless of how hard and valiantly he tried to persuade them to leave what they thought that they knew behind.

The thought that Plato contended was that these prisoners would sooner remain confined to the harsh reality that they knew then risk the dangers of the unknown. But in truth, the reality that they knew was in and of itself no more than a forced construct for someone else’s purpose.

If you’d like to see a more recent example of the “Allegory of The Cave” on film, watch “Us” by Jordan Peele, especially the scene where the tethered family stands in front of a fireplace that casts shadows on the walls of the room for their prisoners to view.

Plato’s allegory also pops up again in movies like, “The Truman Show”, “The Matrix”, “Dark City”, “The Game”, and “Cube”, to name just a few. It’s a few thousand years old, so it’s shaped a lot of the things we’ve all read and watched, but this link will take you to a translation of the original story.

Descartes: Cogito, Ergo Sum

Interestingly, sometime around 300 BCE, there was a Chinese philosopher who awoke from a dream and often related the following:

“Once upon a time, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

He explained this story as the transformation of things.

Skipping along in history a little bit to between 1596 and 1650 we encounter a philosopher by the name of René Descartes. For those of you who may be a little familiar with the name but not pulling it to the forefront, perhaps you might be familiar with his most famously quoted statement,

“cogito, ergo sum” – “I think, therefore I am.”

– published in his paper, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences” in 1641.

This awareness was either deductive syllogism or else it stemmed from an intuitive supposition on Descartes’ part, but it helped lead to his paper on his First Meditation where he introduced the concept of a very powerful being that he called the “Evil Genius”, a malevolent presence that was intentionally deceiving him into believing falsehoods about his place in reality.

He was questioning the existence that he lived in, and he proposed that there was an Evil Genius using all of its power to create a reality designed to deceive him. Today we might think of this as an alien programmer running a simulated matrix that’s focused exclusively on creating an illusion for each of us while we lie in a pod somewhere, but at the time it was a novel and dangerous thought experiment.

Why would this Evil Genius care to create a false reality? Descartes couldn’t explain it and didn’t bother to worry about it, he just stated that this manipulative force was clever, deceptive, exceedingly powerful, and bent on making him believe in the falsehood of his own life and that he truly couldn’t reason why there’d be anything in it for this being other than amusement and play.

All Descartes imagined was that this Evil Genius was trying to deceive him into believing that the sky and the air and the earth, and all of the exterior things that he saw, the external world as a whole, was nothing more than an illusion, hallucination, or a deception being intentionally and mysteriously put into his mind.

He further reasoned that it didn’t mean that there wasn’t a world, but neither could he say definitively that there was a world.

A lot of Descartes’ ideas can be found in the movie, “The Matrix”. Take for example the scene when Neo is first given slop to eat aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, the hovercraft that he awakens in once he’s removed from his pod in the matrix. In the “tasty wheat” scene, the character, Mouse, considers that no one really knows what tasty wheat tastes like especially if it’s a construct of the matrix and that that’s why chicken tastes like everything else. The Matrix’s creator simply didn’t bother to assign it a particular flavor.

In Descartes original thoughts in Meditation 1 and Meditation 2, he also talks about the ranges of our perceptions that could be turned into no more than figments of our imagination. For example, colours might be real or they might be constructs. The same could be said of figures or of sounds. Maybe, not only are there no colors, but maybe there are no shapes like squares or triangles or circles. In fact, maybe none of anything that we take for granted exists.

Then Descartes goes on to say that the Evil Genius also tried to deceive him into thinking that he had a body, and so instead of going along he imagined that in reality he actually didn’t really have any hands, or eyes, or flesh, and that he didn’t have any blood or any senses, but that instead he was being tricked into believing these things. Maybe, he further reasoned, he truly had no perception of what pain was, maybe he truly had no sense of his place as an object in a space or in his environment, maybe none of what he thought was real even existed at all…

This was all pretty heady and powerful thinking for a time when many in the Catholic Church still maintained that the earth was the centre of the universe and anyone who suggested otherwise was considered a heretic and subject to many of the exquisitely painful ways of torture and death that the members of the College of Cardinals and their inquisition could enact.

As a quick aside, despite heliocentrism – the notion that the Earth revolves around the sun – being around since the time of Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek scientist in 270 BCE, and Nicolaus Copernicus further detailing the radical theory in 1543 AD, and then Galileo using the newly invented telescope to support his work; “The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, published in 1632, that proved that the earth revolved around the sun along with the movements of the other planets in the solar system – an assertion that got him placed under house arrest in 1633 until his death in 1642, it wasn’t until 1822 that the College of Cardinals conceded that there was some scientific evidence to support his claim when they said, “publication of works treating of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted.” Remarkably though, it wasn’t until 1992 that Pope John Paul II officially conceded that the Earth isn’t stationary in the Heavens, and yet it was still fully 8 years later that he apologized for the way that the Catholic Church had treated Galileo.

I’m not so sure that an apology coming to a person 358 years after their death really has any meaning to the victim or to any vestigial portions of their lineage that might still exist, but given the glacial pace of Ecumenical proclamations, I suppose it made its way through the Papacy at their relative speed of light.

Now, because the church was so powerful in the 1600’s and beyond, Descartes also had to be extra cautious about how he phrased things, and that was why he created the Evil Genius persona, to have someone to blame for his construct that was able to answer some fundamental questions about the nature of existence but cleverly dodging around the acceptable and permissible tolerances of the Church.

But he also risked punishment when he talked in Meditation 1 about being a slave or a servant who is having pleasant dreams and that doesn’t want to wake up from them, even though he realizes that they’re dreams and illusions, because he knows that his waking life will be terrible.

In Meditation 2 he begins by writing that through these thoughts he was now like a person who had fallen into a very deep body of water but was surprised that he had no ability to touch the bottom and had lost the ability to swim. Essentially, he was saying that with this new awareness, that everything around him was not real, and that he now found himself lost with no touchstones to ground himself on.

He also concluded that maybe if there is an evil Genius, that no matter how hard we tried, that we could never arrive at the truth anyways.

This quandary remained as the centuries wore on, and if Descartes’ simulation speculation was possible, how would anyone ever be able to truly tell the “real” from the illusion or even be able to break free from it?

Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis

As we move a bit further into our present world, and after the time of the first “Matrix” movie in 1999 and about the time of its first sequel in 2003, we encounter Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher from Oxford University who proposed an argument on simulation and suggested a hypothesis that postulates that it’s highly probable that we’re all actually living in a simulation, only he does it using a more scientific method that he calls the Simulation Hypothesis.

His work essentially maintains one of three propositions:

The first is that almost all civilizations at our stage of technological development go extinct before they reach technological maturity.

The second possibility is that there’s a very strong convergence amongst all technologically advanced and mature civilizations so that they lose interest in creating “ancestor” simulations – very detailed computer simulations about people like their historical forebearers, detailed enough that the people in these simulations would be conscious – but that the civilization just loses interest in doing them because they consider it to be ethically and morally wrong or perhaps just eventually become bored with it and so doesn’t bother to pursue it.

And the third possibility is that we are almost definitely living in a simulation.

Bostrom’s argument is that one of these three is almost certainly true, and while it involves some probability theory, he maintains that the basic ideas are relatively simple to understand.

He begins by saying that that if we assume that the first scenario does not come to pass, and that some civilizations at our stage eventually reach technological maturity, and that the second stage also doesn’t come to pass in that some civilizations still want to use their resources to engage in ancestor simulations, that you can then posit that some mature civilizations that devoted the resources to it would eventually create an astronomically large amount of ancestor simulations.

So, if the first two points don’t come to pass, then there will be many, many more simulated people just like us rather than the possibility of there being any non-simulated people that are like us.

In other words, almost all people with our kinds of experiences would most likely be living inside simulations rather than outside of them if the first two points prove to be false, and that the chances of us not being in a simulation if this is the case, and of our actually being the “base civilization” are therefore relatively small to infinitesimal.

His argument also goes on to say that if you simply reject the first two points, then the third has to be true.

Going deeper, in the Pandora’s box of thought, he further suggests that when the simulated civilizations go on to create their own simulated civilizations that what you wind up with is a nesting doll type of situation with one simulation residing within another simulation over and over again until an infinite number of simulated civilizations exist.

Elon Musk on Simulation

So this thought is probably why Elon Musk said in 2016 that,

“There’s a one in a billions chance that we’re living in a base civilization and are most probably in a simulation.”

He expanded on that by saying that in 1972 we had the video game, “Pong”, comprised of two rectangles and a dot, then in 2016, only some 40 years later, we had photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and that game play is getting exponentially better every year.

So, thinking about this for a moment, if we were to go out into the future, even a few hundred years, the capabilities of our computers will be virtually unimaginable by today’s standards unless there’s some sort of a hard ceiling that exists that prevents our civilization from further advancing, like some sort of calamitous event that automatically kicks in and erases our civilization such as out of control AI, climate disaster, asteroids, a super volcano, disease, or something not even yet considered.

When Musk was asked about our being in a simulation again in 2021 at CodeCon, he replied that,

“My heart says no and my brain says yes.”

And if you’re wondering how it might be possible for a simulation to run all of the elements needed to operate an entire world and universe for everyone at the same time, you really don’t have to go much further than today’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games, also known as MMORPGs to be able to see the roots of the answer to that question.

In these games, while the base construct of the gaming universe is offered, it’s neither detailed or exceptionally specific until a player starts to bear down on different elements of it. And even then, things like buildings or what’s inside of them are not fully rendered or really anything more than shells until a player further decides to enter one, in which case the outside world is no longer relevant and is subsequently abandoned while the details inside the building become more refined as a player moves through an individual aspect of them.

In “real life” you can think about this in terms of considering taking a vacation to an exotic tropical island. As we think about it, the island is no more than a few glimmers of thought in our brains and has no real programming expenditure to support it other than what might be needed to provide a website or brochure about it, but that once we actually physically go, then the programming output needed to create the illusion of the place ramps up, while subsequently the code needed to maintain our home environment ratchets down.

The thought here is that the simulation moves with us like some form of localized bubble that surrounds us and expends only the computing needed to sustain each of our own local and immediate illusions rather than trying to support the entirety of every aspect of the entire universe all at once.

It’s the very definition of the conservation of energy theory in that it’s neither created nor destroyed, but simply transforms from one shape to another.

Peering Beyond the Veil

But again, as computing grows more and more powerful, and component parts shrink to become even smaller and smaller, constraining the simulation to what’s immediately around us might not even be necessary. We might one day each be living in our own complete and fully functioning universe all of the time, with every bit working on its own also all of the time.

After all, it’s only our own tendency to put ourselves at the apex of everything that doesn’t allow ourselves to consider that other parts of our universe like plants or animals or stars might even also be alive and “living” in this reality that we now find ourselves in.

Aside from the computing required, the next question becomes how would a civilization draw the needed energy requirements to fully maintain a simulation, especially if it’s happening to all of us, everywhere, all at once?

Harnessing a Star’s Energy

One of the answers to this was first offered in 1960 by physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson when he proposed the use of orbiting solar collectors to accomplish this mind-boggling possibility.

Although his concept began as a thought experiment that led to a paper he published called, “The Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation”, Dyson first imagined that there might be solar-system-sized, power-collection structures present as a technology that would be inevitable and highly needed for advanced civilizations in the universe.

He even went so far as to suggest that searching for evidence of the existence of such structures might lead to the discovery of intelligent life in the galaxy.

Today, we call these megastructures Dyson Spheres and current iterations consider a Russian nesting doll type of scenario where a series of concentric shells are built around a star with each additional layer built further out and around an existing shell to further collect more and more energy until every possible form of energy is extracted by the sphere.

In recent years, astronomers explored a true-to-life possibility of a Dyson sphere involving a bizarre star labeled as KIC 8462852, more popularly known as Tabby’s Star, named after its discoverer, Tabetha Boyajian.

What made this star a candidate for a Dyson sphere was the highly unusual and strange behaviour of the light emanating from it with sudden and abrupt dimmings that lead a few astronomers to speculate that it might indicate a Dyson sphere.

New research into it, including the possibility of a nearby melting moon have cooled people to the Dyson sphere potential, but with the search for radio signals proving to be fruitless in the search for extraterrestrial life, many are switching their search parameters to consider the potential of finding Dyson spheres, and in terms of meeting the future needs of a simulation’s energy requirements, some envision building a Dyson sphere around Earth’s own sun will be needed to provide a viable resource for all our future energy needs.

As thoughts into simulated realities continue, other theories have come to light to fill in parts of the equations.

Condensed-Matter Physics

Starting in 2014, Dr. Melvin M. Vopson began looking at a field of study that he called, condensed-matter physics. He based some of his early research on the work of Claude Shannon’s, “Information Theory”, developed in the 1940’s. (Shannon is widely considered one of the fathers of digital computing and termed a unit of information a “bit”.)

Vopson also based a lot of his research on the findings of Rolf Landauer, a German-American physicist who made important contributions in areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. In 1961, Rolf also conceived, “Landauer’s Principle”, that states that in any logically irreversible operation that manipulates information, such as erasing a bit of memory, entropy increases and an associated amount of energy is dissipated as heat.

Basically Landauer concluded that in thermodynamics, there’s a needed principle that shows that any irreversible process has to be dissipative. In other words, if you have something that takes place irreversibly that energy will be dispelled and dispersed in the process.

Information: The 5th State of Matter

Moving forward from this, Vopson, in 2019, developed the “Mass-Energy-Information Equivalence Principle” – or the 5^th state of matter – where he proposed that information is not just a physical form of energy but that it also has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.

Basically he said that if a “bit” of information is physical, it therefore has an energy associated with it, and that this energy can be detected when it’s erased. He also defined where that information is going when the bit is at equilibrium and exists as stored information. He then surmised that energy can’t exist on its own, that it needs to be in some form.

And one way of containing energy is to condense it into matter. In other words, and in line with Einstein’s theories of relativity as well as the E=mc² equations, it means that information acquires mass, or put another way, energy is mass.

He goes on to say that information can change between these states depending on what the state the information is in. For example, if information is at equilibrium, simply stored, then this stored information – this bit – has a small mass. If you erase it, that mass gets converted into energy dissipation.

From this he developed a concept of, “Matter DNA”. 

It works on the same principle as what’s going on in living organisms. In the same way that a living cell contains all the information about itself in itself – all the data about the organism is stored within its own individual cells – he wondered if it was possible that matter operated in the same way, so that maybe there’s a DNA of Matter that’s stored within the matter itself, and that would be characteristic of elementary particles.

He went on to consider that if you look at electrons or protons, all across the universe, and separated from each other in most cases by very large distances, but all operating in the same manner, how is it that they all know about each other unless their operating information is embedded within themselves and containing their own informational DNA?

Vopson then started to look at how much information we’re all creating on a planetary scale – how many bits of information and what it looks like in terms of its mass – and in terms of his mass energy information equivalence theory also in terms of energy balance because we need to consume energy to create information and to store it.

Vopson’s Information Catastrophe

So, in 2020, he came up with another theory called the “Information Catastrophe”.  

In this theory he states that currently in a year we create 10 to the power of 21 bits of information. He continues that our entire planet has 10 to the power of 50 atoms. This includes everything that makes up our planet from the oceans to the biosphere to the atmosphere, everything.

So he called his theory the Information Catastrophe because the growth rate of our information creation is increasing by 33% year-on-year.

So, even if we only had a 20% growth rate in information yearly, we’re going to make more bits of information in 240 years than there are all of the atoms on the planet. Put another way, we’ll overtake the atoms on the planet with digital bits.

If our information grows yearly by 50%, it’ll only take about 150 years.

He then asks if we’re ever going to reach that point and he concludes that we can’t because there’s a theoretical endpoint and something will have to give – that there is a line that won’t be able to be crossed.

And this thought led him to his simulation hypothesis.

If we’re making 10 to the power of 21 bits of information today, and we’ve been doing this since the 1970’s, we’ve been creating bits with mass for over half a century already, and if that’s the case we’re already looking at astronomical numbers of bits created. And so, if all the atoms on the planet are 10 to the power of 50, and we’re going to reach that number in bits within less than the next 150 years, could it already prove that we’re already in some sort of digital, virtual reality world?

He reasons that if you look at the timescale of life on the planet, of hundreds of thousands or billions of years, and then look at what we’ve done in even the last few decades in terms of creating these digital entities – the digital state and the associated technologies – then what will we look like in 1,000 years especially if this is what we’ve done in 50?

So, as he conceives it, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that an advanced civilization, even a past civilization, or even ourselves, will reach a technological level where we can simulate our own world and even the entire universe so that it’s indistinguishable from reality.

So how can we know, Vopson asks?

First, he says that an easy way would be to physically measure the mass of information. Basically, you take a device containing a given volume of information, you measure the mass, record it, and then you erase everything and measure the device again. If there’s a mass change, a mass reduction after its erased, that would prove that information indeed has mass.

You could also use facilities such as CERN and collide some electrons and protons together – that should have stored information about themselves contained within – and then add some infrared detectors to detect what information has dissipated from the collision once erasure of the original electrons and protons disappear.

These won’t conclusively determine one way or the other if we’re living in a simulation, but it will allow for empirical data sets to be collected and a possibility or two to be confirmed.

It’s an interesting thought process in helping to get us closer to understanding if we’re in an actual simulation, but all of this still wasn’t the evidence that I needed to be able to say that, yes, I am living in a simulation.

How I Know I’m in a Simulation

Nope, what that took was the James Web telescope, a new dating of the universe at 26.7 billion years old, and a reminder of the elements of the calculations that were being used by the 8-year-old that I was watching fireworks with.

That, and a fair bit of background in computer science including the recent advances in AI.

When you take on part of a puzzle all on its own, it’s easy to miss the larger image. Take for example an actual jigsaw puzzle where you have only one piece in your hand taken from some random spot in the upper left corner and you have to then guess what the entire image might be from just that one piece, and you don’t have the box cover to guide you. It’s an impossible task. But if I were to gradually hand you more and more pieces, even if they were from random parts of the jigsaw and not even associated with the others, you’d eventually be able to start to put an image together.

As I proposed a solution to being able to put safeguards on the progress and evolution of AI, I was also aware that all computing processing in the form of both hardware and software leaves an artifact of its existence within the confines of the world that it’s creating.

The most obvious of these is the processing speed.

So, if we’re simulations living within a computer, then the only real proof of our being in a simulation would invariably be defined by the limitations imposed on us by the limitations of the processing speed.

All the other rules of the simulation would be the ones that were implemented by the programming.

In other words, if we were playing a game within an MMORPG for example, then all the rules of the game, like the boundaries of the game’s universe and its conditions such as gravity or enemies or power supplies, would be determined by the programming, but anything that we ultimately did as players would be constrained by the actual processing speed available in our hardware.

No matter how exact and down to the minutia that a simulation might appear, we would be subject to the ability of the computer we’re playing on to process this information.

For an example of this, just recall the last time that you got a new computer. With the new processing power at your fingertips, all the tasks that your old computer used to take minutes to grind away at are now done almost instantaneously.

Players within the game have no frame for quantifying their processing speed versus their opponents except and until it presents itself as an upper limit.

So, if we live in a simulation, our “universe” should also have such an artifact, a limitation, an upper limit on what it can do.

But this limitation won’t be obvious, it’ll need to be placed within the simulation to appear to just be an element of the simulation and not a cleverly disguised ruse to distract us from this processing limitation.

It’ll need to be accepted as a normal condition of the simulation and it’ll need to be able to not be supported by the laws prevalent within the simulation, but instead something rather just assumed to be a given.

In our case Einstein battled with it, the Hubble telescope wrestled with it, and my eight-year-old fireworks observer simply discounted it, but the artifact that proves that we’re in a simulation is the limitation imposed on the speed of light.

Space is to our “universe” what numbers are to a computer program. Moving through our space then can simply be regarded as number flowing through a system defined by the limitations of its hardware.

If our simulation is running a program where all of us have been created, then it will be constrained by the container size in which the reality is housed, and it will have an upper limit as to what’s possible – unless more processing power is upgraded or added. But by imposing ceilings on both ourselves – such as age – or the simulated world in which we live – able to be instantly ended by a meteor or otherwise – then there’s really no need for any upgrades.

So we need to look for maximums. We need to look for things that are the limitations imposed upon what we can do. Things like travelling at speeds greater than the speed of light.

Now, while some have speculated that there may be entities that are already moving at speeds greater than that of light, what they say to make this true is that they were already moving at the speed of light before light was even recognized as a limitation.

But if we’re starting from a standing start, and if we’re working at the limits of the hardware processing power running all of this, then we can conclude that the maximum speed that’s attainable in this simulation is the speed of light – 671 million miles per hour.

This not only sets the boundaries of the universe that we’re in, but also shows us how to know that we’re in a simulation.

However as we begin to evolve as a “species” within the simulation, and as we’re growing closer to the self-realization of our own imaginary reality, they’ve just upgraded the programming and, as evidenced by the new James Webb Telescope, have just expanded our gaming area from a previously determined size of the universe as judged by the speed of light from 13.8 billion years of age to what’s now estimated to be 26.7 billion years old, but they can’t increase the processing power and so the speed of light is what remains a constant – it’s the artifact in the machine.

The game space has increased, but the limitations of the processing power – the speed of light – has remained a constant.

We can see that the speed of light meets all of the conditions of the limitations of a hardware restraint as evidenced by the realities of our own computer builds. Using the available parts in our own reality, we can see how we can’t expand beyond our own current abilities until new hardware is invented and one day we’ll probably meet a maximum in what’s possible until a whole new computing paradigm is conceived.

The speed of light is perceived as a maximum limit, and it’s unexplainable in relation to the accepted laws of physics of our universe. It’s an absolute and a defined number. It’s a hard stop. It’s the mistake, the hardware artifact that proves to me that I’m – and perhaps all of us – are living in a simulation.

And if we were to examine it more closely, and not simply acknowledge it to be an accepted norm, then we’d be able to peel off at least one layer of the nesting doll worlds of simulations in which we all reside.

Navigating Infinite Realities

But even if we do open the door to another level of understanding, the basic truth remains the same in that no matter what floor of simulations that we ascend to, and how we’re eventually able to determine how to break through to the next one once we get there, while we’re living in our evolving simulations we’re bound to its rules and have no way out until we can evolve in our minds and through our knowledge to be able to first imagine our place in whatever “universe” we’re in and then work towards moving on to the next levels until we get to the next.

If that is indeed what our real purpose is, and if anyone has any desire to really try to do it, then there should be no limit to the infinite universes that exist. That is to say as long as we believe in universes at all.

There’s a variation on an old adage that says,

“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make intelligent.”

With this in mind, might it not be better and easier to simply shape this “reality” to bend to your dreams and aspirations rather than having to move to a whole new universe where the rules and the conditions might be very, very different?

Perhaps this is ultimately what people like Elon Musk have figured out.

Perhaps this is why they don’t mind telling us…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.