Rizwan Virk: The Simulation Hypothesis

2019; Bayview Books

An Analysis and Critique

Introduction

The idea that our consciousness is embedded within a sophisticated computer simulation, a la ‘The Matrix’ is, for me, a deeply intriguing philosophical notion. I committed to reading this book on the recommendation of Sam McRoberts (Twitter: @Sams_Antics), and although I’m less impressed by this material than he, I’m still glad I did.

Virk delves into principles of computer science, quantum mechanics, and primarily Eastern religious beliefs to draw the conclusion that our existence is embedded in a simulation run by higher order beings (or being, singular, perhaps). The coverage from these fields is quite comprehensive, in particular from the point of view of computer gaming as we know it.  There are some gaps, however, as well as some flaws, and even at times some spectacular leaps of both faith and logic, and that’s why I can’t rate this above two stars.

Video Games and Science Fiction

There is much material on video games — their principles and features and how they work, which is to be expected given the author’s background. The section on the evolution of video games to simulations is compelling, and the idea that we might be in one ourselves has been around for some time, although made far more visible and popular by Elon Musk in 2016. The idea is simple: Given the depth and power that these tools (or toys) have increased over the past fifty years or so, and therefore the extrapolation of where they might be in the foreseeable future, then it seems not just possible but inevitable that computer simulations will match our reality in terms of detail and completeness. Hence, reality would be indistinguishable from a simulation and therefore we have the argument that our own reality is likely a simulation. Musk himself declared that the probability that we are not living in a simulation to be “one in billions”.

The argument is a good one, however, to me it feels like it might be fallacious, perhaps the result of a very human bias of the same kind that gives rise to the view that our universe was designed for us, given the arguments for the Anthropic Principle.

Throughout the book there is a lot of reliance on examples from sci-fi stories and movies as well as computer games to make some of the salient points, and these are interesting in their own right. Furthermore, where possible the author tries to support the ‘technical’ material with references to real-world state-of-art research and development. But sometimes the over- emphasis on the fictional world seems to be driving his agenda and conclusions, rather than merely providing inspiration for them. This is particularly evident in the section on downloadable consciousness — again, an interesting notion in its own right — however, there are no existing technologies that resemble those of the sci-fi worlds mentioned. Hence there is a leap from the untethered world of science fantasy to a very specific mechanism of the simulation hypothesis, almost as if it were an obvious conclusion.

Mysticism and Religious Beliefs

The arguments from Eastern mysticism — Hindu yogic teachings and Buddhism — that refer to higher order realities and reincarnation are thoroughly unconvincing. The argument is also extended to the Abrahamic religions, with particular reference to being judged before entering heaven. My own view on these is that given enough time and tolerance for any spiritual belief, eventually human religious traditions are bound to develop differing philosophies of reality, including beliefs that there are other ‘realities’ that lie beyond our reach. For this reason I found these sections tolerable, but neither persuasive nor necessary, and frankly I’d prefer this nonsense left out of serious discussion of the subject at large.

To labour this point, there is an important reminder here that merely considering we might be, or even believing that we are simulation-bound is itself an unremarkable idea. What really brings the concept to life is the exploration of compelling arguments for it. And superstitious beliefs offer none of these.

Part III of the book addresses specifically how Eastern mysticism has long referred to our existence in the “metaphor” of a dream. Metaphor is a good word choice, and this section raises some interesting historical reminders. But they are not at all persuasive arguments. What we have is a collection of metaphors only; comparative descriptions of similar ideas experienced by different peoples, with different contexts, over long periods of time. This may be good evidence of the reproducibility of human conceptions of metaphysical ideas, but it is not good evidence, or evidence at all, that we are in a simulation now.

As an example, ideas about consciousness are mentioned in several contexts, with the apparent underlying assumption that an individual’s consciousness is some kind of discrete entity that can, in principle at least, be migrated wholesale from our current body into some other milieu. This is an easy but lazy assumption to make and takes no account of the fact that our consciousness fluctuates throughout our daily life: Sleeping vs. awake, under the influence of drugs, as we are born and grow, and as we die.  Stories about a yogi transferring his consciousness to a pigeon, and from there to a human cadaver, are interesting fragments of Hindu mythology. But modern science demonstrates clearly that our consciousness is not separable from the structure and chemistry of the brain within our head. ie., It makes little sense, outside the realms of mysticism (or science fantasy), to talk of consciousness as though it were some kind of object (or even ‘software’) that can be detached from the functioning, physical brain that defines it.

Furthermore, I found the section on karma and reincarnation simply bound to primitive superstitions and lacking in imagination or original thought. These notions are introduced again as metaphors for video game simulations, but it becomes clear that these concepts are how the author imagines our (simulated) reality really works.

Chapter 10 delves into mysteries such as UFOs, near-death experiences, and other pseudoscience and conspiracy-like theories, with the claim that these events are best explained by the simulation hypothesis. As a result, this is one of the most disappointing sections of the whole book. The author seems to fail to understand the nature of parsimony and Occam’s Razor, and seems to favour such reports as evidence for the simulation hypothesis, rather than more likely explanations, such as illusions, delusions, other cognitive biases, or fraud.

Quantum Mechanics

The weirdness of quantum mechanics is presented as a hint that we are experiencing the ‘edges’ of the simulated world. The classic thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat is used to illustrate ‘quantum weirdness’, although Virk fails to point out — perhaps because he fails to properly understand — that Schrödinger’s Cat was first devised to illustrate the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation of the observations of quantum mechanics.  In the relevant sections of the book there is an attempt to relate this to video games through the notion of quantum indeterminacy (QI). Furthermore, his hypothesis is that the QI we observe in our world is a reflection of the fact that not all of our world is always ‘rendered’, but rather, remains as unrendered data until an observer (a conscious player character) needs to interact with it. In light of the apparent misunderstanding about Schrödinger’s criticism of the Copenhagen interpretation, this argument becomes interesting only in a Deepak Chopra – kind of way. ie., Not at all persuasive. 

One example quote: “The best answer physicists have come up with is that consciousness somehow determines the collapse and that observation and/or measurement are part of the process.” No leading physicist in the field of quantum research would say that consciousness determining waveform collapse is the “best” answer.

The most popularly accepted alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation is the “Many Worlds” interpretation of quantum physics, and this is discussed in the context of time travel, again with some fictional examples given. However, time travel is mentioned here essentially as, that if the many-worlds scenario is true, then so is time travel. It’s a non-sequitur that the author may be attempting to smuggle in, or perhaps he really believes that one implies the other. 

Leaving the notion of time travel, there is further discussion of simulated worlds being copied — multiplied and branched — in order to optimise for a best (lowest energy) future solution, and whether or not these branch copies are fully realized as separate simulations, or simply treated as data for optimisation computations that are not actually fully rendered.  

Some of this discussion is genuinely compelling in its own right, except for two points:

1. Our current universe doesn’t require a collection of Monte Carlo simulations in order to be ‘optimized’ for a lowest energy solution, because this is already built in to our existing laws of physics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a demonstrable feature of our reality, and it is part of classical physics, not quantum physics. And,
2. The association of the branching/multiplying ‘hypothesis’ with the many-worlds interpretation in quantum physics seems to be nothing more than an analogy or a comparison. Again, there is no persuasive argument made that our quantum observations giving rise to many-worlds are a demonstration that there are multiple branching computations of our existence. It is little more than a vague comparison.

The following section on quantization of space and time as it applies in existing computer games and simulations is good, if not intuitive, or even obvious — the notion of Planck time is not new.  However, there is one problem in the discussion of the speed of light (p 173), in which the author states, “Why would the fastest speed at which we can send information in the physical world be the same speed that we use for sending electromagnetic signals? This is an open question and one that points to the simulation hypothesis in and of itself.”

This is a circular argument that seems to assume those running us in their simulation have the same laws of physics that we do.

In addition, there is some reference to the fascinating work of Sylvester James Gates.  This is tantalising material, but all too brief and superficial, and I was disappointed that this wasn’t explored more deeply. I feel it was a good opportunity lost.

Consciousness

Virk takes the position that a primary feature of a simulation hypothesis is that our consciousness (and therefore our ‘real’ body) is actually external to our world but hooked into it via some interface that therefore delivers the illusion of realness for the simulation in which we are embedded. An alternative view is the simulation argument of Nick Bostrom (presented mainly in chapter 4), which suggests that our consciousness itself is also fully simulated. This is the far more interesting version of the simulation hypothesis. However, Virk chooses not to engage with this option to any degree, preferring instead the view that we are ‘real’ people that are (apparently naively) hooked in to the simulation, interacting with both simulated NPCs and other real people, although we can’t tell the difference (since NPC behavior in the simulation is advanced enough to have passed the Turing test.)

To further emphasize the point, he again refers to religious mysticism:

“… our physical world is a kind of “illusion”, populated by conscious beings that exist outside the simulation. Bostrom didn’t seem to contemplate this possibility, since his argument implicitly suggests that most beings are simulated beings, but it may be one of the most intriguing aspects of the simulation hypothesis, bridging the gap between two domains of knowledge that rarely overlap, religion and science.”

What Virk seems to miss is that Bostrom’s view — that consciousness itself is a simulation — is the more parsimonious one. Invoking mechanisms of jacking in an external consciousness, or adding religious overtones to any form of simulation hypothesis, are actually adding unnecessary features and elaborations.

Additional Points and Conclusions

I was more sympathetic to the final section (Putting it All Together) which presents some interesting ideas even if a few of them are highly speculative, if not downright grasping at straws. But the concept of quantum entanglement providing for a potential error correction mechanism was certainly thought-provoking.

However, there is one major omission in Virk’s book that I find significant. Evolution, and other long-term world state changes, are features of many compelling computer games that are directly relevant to the simulation hypothesis. While Virk’s subject matter knowledge on the history of simulation game developments is obviously very deep and comprehensive, this important part of the genre (or indeed, genre in its own right) is all but neglected and the story is much weaker as a result.

Furthermore, and following the point that Virk clearly favours the ‘consciousness is downloaded’ position (in contrast to Bostrum’s ‘consciousness is simulated’ view), another major objection is ignored. That is, if our consciousness is downloaded, then our contemporary knowledge that all current life (including us, obviously) is the product of an evolutionary process over deep time becomes all but pointless. The only reason our creators would have for providing the existing evidence for deep time and evolution is to deceive us into merely thinking that our existence is part of a temporal chain that is billions of years long. This is equivalent to creationist thinking and fails the most basic tests of logic.

At this point I should pause, and re-state that I have no problem with the fundamentals of the simulation hypothesis. The idea holds a sincere fascination for me, and while I do think it is still somewhat of a fringe notion at large, the most vocal proponents of it are not necessarily crackpots. I do fear, however, that the more time, or pages, or column inches, are spent on religious, mystical, or other intellectually parochial interpretations, the more it will remain and be viewed as a fringe ‘cult’, like the flat earthers or other nonsensical conspiracy theorists.  For this reason Virk’s thesis is less of an illumination and more of a good opportunity lost.

 

Review: A Sticky Note Guide to Life, by Chaz Hutton

2016; HarperCollins

Unassuming Gold.
The often self-deprecating Chaz Hutton holds up a mirror to the banalities and paradoxes (paradoces?) of our modern behaviour and thinking. He covers social media, social interactions, everyday home and work life, and occasionally the philosophical. Charts and Venn diagrams are used in original ways to convey hiding-in-plain-sight truths. He occasionally reminds me (perhaps weirdly) of the great Gary Larson, even though their respective styles are very different: Larson’s work evokes stereotypical but often rich and sympathetic characters to tell simple stories of ridiculousness and the bizarre in a single frame (eg., absent-minded nuclear physicists, or psychoanalyst chickens). Hutton’s characters, on the other hand, are either us, or bland stick figures (usually both), and his simple stories of ridiculousness are vignettes of our everyday lives. Both are short, pithy, and often revealing of larger truths.

Of course one can take Hutton’s material simply at face value and enjoy it all rather superficially. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.) However, after spending some extended time with Chaz’s observations – both this book and his daily-or-nearly-daily Instagram material – I’ve begun to enjoy seeing a bigger picture statement come through in his work. His insights capture with honesty, but without judgement, the banality of our cultural priorities and responsibilities. While some of his pieces have a certain timelessness to them, the majority are ephemeral: They are very much of our current era, and might be frankly obscure to an audience in as little as 20 years’ time. And yet, this makes the work arguably more important, because it provides future historians with a succinct and flavoursome time capsule of our particular current state of postmodernism.

Having said all that, if Chaz himself were to consider any of this analysis, he might feel inclined to prepare an ironic sticky note summary that politely, but pointedly, deflates it (and, ultimately, himself).
5 sticky note flags.

Review: A Colorful History of Popular Delusions, by Robert E. Bartholomew and Peter Hassall

2015, Prometheus Books

This is indeed a fascinating and comprehensive collection of “deluded” crowd behaviours. It includes over 100 well-documented and referenced examples of such behaviours, grouped together into a taxonomy of 14 different ‘categories’. Those categories include rumours and gossip, urban legends, fads, crazes and manias (each has a different definition!), stampedes, panics and riots, and the more intriguing anxiety hysterias and classical mass hysterias.
In each chapter, the authors first take us through their definition of a given category, and then present a group of well-referenced historical examples, describing the circumstances of each mass delusion from start to finish.

Some of the cases revealed are truly fascinating. There are witch hunts, UFO and Big Foot sightings, the urban legends of alligators in sewer systems, and various disturbing cases of ‘motor hysteria’, in which those affected suffer tremors and fits as a result of their mass delusions.

There is also the case of the (in)famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast – this did indeed cause a major community panic, and even loss of life – but not in the United States as I (and perhaps many others) had always understood. In 1938, Orson Wells gained some notoriety by broadcasting a contemporary version of H.G. Welles’ story of invading Martians. The incident was re-popularised in the 1970s made-for-TV movie “The Night that Panicked America”. But the authors of the current book give that incident barely a passing mention as a rather limited ‘small group’ panic. Obviously it caused a stir, but was by no means an actual panicking of all of America.
The story of real significance actually occurred in Ecuador in 1949, when a similar realistic-sounding broadcast of invading aliens was made by a radio station that truly panicked the city of Quito. When the locals learned they had been deceived, they became a rioting angry mob, trashed the radio station and brought about the deaths of 20 people. The impact of the South American incident was clearly more profound than the Orson Wells broadcast, but the former seems to be all but unknown today.

The book is not without its flaws and weaknesses, however. Here are three, in order of importance, beginning with the trivial.

Proofreading. I’ve come to expect the occasional typo in just about every piece of professional writing I read these days. This book seems to have more to its fair share, especially in the first half. And there is also at least one howler where the concluding sentence of a paragraph appears to contradict the original point being made. These editing errors aren’t so numerous to be that big a deal, of course. Or at least, they shouldn’t be. But I found they occurred just often enough to be an annoying distraction.

Referencing. The liberal use of references is a testament to the authors’ expertise and depth of research in the field. However, I was still bugged by a couple of points. When a book contains citations, I’m the type of reader that keeps one thumb in the references and the other as a current page marker, flipping “in real time” between the two whenever a citation appears.
To repeat: The references are one of the strong points of the book. But I was disappointed by (a) the high degree of reliance on secondary sources (many of which didn’t feel fully accurate or persuasive), and (b) the over-use of ibid. If there are only one or two pieces of source material describing a particular event, we only need one or two citations at the end of the paragraph. We don’t need one every second sentence pointing back to the same source.

Treatment of Religious Beliefs
While we have here a well-curated collection of irrational human behaviour in tribes and crowds, I feel that the mass delusions of religious beliefs are let off far too easily. Sure – there is certainly coverage of some religious-inspired oddities, like self-flagellation, the Salem witch hunts, worshiping the image of Jesus in a tortilla, and the Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown mass suicides. However, the field of religious beliefs and practices – the traditions, the psychology, the counter-intuitive rationalisations – is rich for further expansion, and much has been left on the table that could have been explored in this context.
One might fairly argue that dealing with religious beliefs wasn’t the intention here. But if that is so, then the error is in the title of the book itself. Rather than being A Colorful History of Popular Delusions, a more accurate label might have been A Colourful Collection of Irrational Crowd Behaviour. After all, not all rumours and pieces of gossip, or fads, or stampedes or riots, for example, are necessarily driven by “delusion”. On the other hand, why should it be assumed that poisoning oneself in order to board a comet to heaven is any more delusional than, say, the belief that a piece of bread is an actual (not metaphorical) piece of the body of Jesus Christ, or that Muhammed actually ascended to heaven on a winged horse? Delusions of this type are some of the most popular of all time, and are sadly all but neglected here – not simply by example, but as representative of some of the most powerful aspects of human tribal psychology.

Despite its limitations, this is still an excellent collection of material that I can see myself dipping back into from time to time, whenever I want to recall examples of popular, irrational crowd behaviour.
3 out of 5.

Brief Review: A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss

This is a brief review of A Universe from Nothing (Why There is Something Rather than Nothing), by Lawrence Krauss (2012).

ISBN-10: 1451624468 | ISBN-13: 978-1451624465. Amazon.

I loved making it through this book, but I have to admit that I couldn’t follow much of the physics described by Lawrence Krauss. I am scientifically trained, but my own field was biology and more specifically neuroscience and physiology, with a little bit of biochemistry. My physics is very much limited to the basics covered by first year university science programs (from nearly 30 years ago)!
Having said that, I feel that if I persisted – probably by re-reading the book a few more times and/or following up some of the fundamentals from other sources (I reckon Wikipedia would suffice!) – I would probably appreciate the material a lot better. However it is certainly straightforward enough to follow the key points, such as the flat, eternal expansion of the universe, dark energy and cosmic background radiation, that the total energy of the universe is zero, and the outrageous but statistically balanced properties of virtual particles (see Ch 10: Nothing is Unstable).

One of the excellent features of Krauss’ coverage is that it is very much an outlined history of the major discoveries in cosmology and particle physics over the past century or so and their significance to our existing understanding of physics on the sub-atomic and the whole-of-universe scales. Credit is paid to the vast array of famous and not-so-famous physicists that have made the important contributions to the field. The material is all presented honestly, from the ground breaking findings that are not in dispute, to false paths that some researchers have taken in their quests for the truth, as well as the poorly-understood and even highly-speculative fields such as string theory.

However, it really isn’t necessary for the reader to follow precisely every description of every important discovery in cosmology or quantum mechanics in order to appreciate the circumstances of the origin of the universe. The physics basis is critical to the conclusions, of course, but the most important implications come out in Krauss’ final chapters and the Epilogue. A distinction between science and theology that is highlighted here (and indeed, throughout the book), is that scientists don’t claim to know all the answers. The very fact that we don’t know it all is indeed the main driver for further exploration and experimentation:
“…That is why we have science. We may supplement this understanding with reflection and call that philosophy. But only via continuing to probe every nook and cranny of the universe that is accessible to us will we truly build a useful appreciation of our own place in the cosmos.”
In contrast are “…those who have decided in advance […] that the supernatural (i.e., God) must exist so they define their philosophical ideas (once again completely divorced from any empirical basis) to exclude anything but the possibility of a god.”

Furthermore, Krauss doesn’t need to get bogged down in esoteric metaphysics. All he does is highlight a few salient points and questions about our origins, and whether there really is any need for God in our rationalisation for existence. The philosophical discussion has now been pushed back, to beyond whether ‘something can come from nothing’ by virtue of rational, physical, natural causes, because we now know that it definitely can. Instead the metaphysical ponderings are now about the laws of physics, and the question apparently first highlighted by Albert Einstein. To paraphrase: “did God have any choice in the creation of the universe?”. Or more specifically now, did God have any choice in the laws of physics? (“God”, in this context, can be taken as the omnipotent deity if you’re theistically inclined, or as Einstein and Krauss would contend, simply the profound nature of all reality that doesn’t require intelligence, morals, or any other anthropomorphised attributes.)

Despite what theologians might have to say on this matter, no one yet has the answer to this question (was there any ‘choice’ in the laws of physics for our universe), including Lawrence Krauss. Importantly, the question is a human one, and while we can ‘supplement our understanding’ of it with philosophy, the most robust approaches we have to address it, as well as any other question of relevance to humanity, are those of scientific enquiry.