You Are Not Living In a Simulation

Get over yourself

Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

The idea that we are living in a simulation is a special kind of hubris. Notice that this idea has been popularized by the billionaire tech bro community.

The idea that we are likely living in a simulation begins with the assumption that some advanced civilization gained enough computing power and computing expertise to make their simulation so lifelike, that we - as the subjects of the simulation - couldn’t tell the difference. Then the beings or people in that first simulation eventually gained the expertise and computing power to make their own incredibly lifelike simulation, and so on and so on, to the point that we would have to be a simulation as it would have to be simulations all they way down, unless we are the first society, which could be, but would be very unlikely.

First of all, let’s look at the feasibility of the idea as an engineering challenge.

Is this physically possible?

It doesn’t look likely.

In researching this, I read more Reddit posts than I have in the past year and what I found was interesting, including this insanely informative post (most of which I understood, but not all) from Breakthrough Science here on Substack. A tip of the cap to you sir.

That we might be living in a simulation is a cool Sci-fi thought experiment, and makes for interesting stories. But it runs into the same physics and chemistry problems that we see from people who believe we can have neverending growth on a finite planet.

The conclusion below is from Reddit, but it summarizes what I found pretty well. The energy and computing power needed to simulate our universe so that it seems real to us, just isn’t possible.

Conclusion

Simulating “our lives” with perceptual realism and consciousness-level brain fidelity is far beyond our current or conceivable energy and computing capabilities:

• Brain-level realism: requires ~10^17–1019 OPS per human and MW-scale power per brain.

• Atomistic fidelity: fundamentally infeasible due to combinatorial explosion of states and physical limits.

• Energy requirement: always scales with fidelity; exacting simulations likely need more energy than accessible in the planet or even the observable universe.

(Full fidelity means that the detail is so accurate we wouldn’t be able to tell that we are in a simulation).

Takeaway: Only approximate, hierarchical, or probabilistic simulations could ever emulate human lives in practice. Full fidelity simulations remain a theoretical curiosity beyond universal resource limits.

Now, is it possible that Reddit might not be the most accurate place to find hard science? Yes, I grant you that. But I’ve found similar thoughts elsewhere. This was just a good summary. Jump down the rabbit hole yourself if the topic interests you.

Now ask yourself this question:

Do you care enough to make a lifelike simulation of ants that is so amazing that the ants can’t tell the difference? No, that’s a waste of time.

We would be ants in comparison to some advanced civilization. Yet our techbro billionaire friends are convinced that they are so important and amazing, that some advanced civilization that would see them as ants, would nevertheless spend tons of time and computing power to simulate 13.8 billion years of a universe’s existence just to create billionaires to watch. They believe some advanced civilization had nothing better to do than to create them.

No. That’s called self-important hubris. Get over yourself.

The simulation hypothesis is just another way for mankind (mostly just men) to point to their own self-importance, and overestimate how special they are. The most likely answer is that no one is spending an insane amount of energy and computing power - so much energy that it would take a universe of energy to do this simulation - just to produce a simulation of Elon Musk, or a simulated you, or me.

I’m fine not being that important.

If the people who believe these things could just be comfortable with the fact that they aren’t that important, we’d be a lot better off.

The parallels to our broader conversation

It may seem odd for me to be writing about this simulation question on a blog about degrowth and a post-growth future. I thought I’d write about this because it is the hubris of powerful people behind the argument, just as the hubris of powerful people has brought us climate change and ecological overshoot.

The people who tell you we are living in a simulation are smart people who should know that a simulation of our lives is physically not realistic and therefore highly improbable. But believing such a fantasy makes them feel important. The rest of us don’t really care about their fantasy. The people in power who downplay climate change, overshoot and pending collapse, are smart people, but to admit that their power and lifestyle is a bad idea would be too much for them to admit. But unlike the simulation fantasy, this one does real world damage.

Can we focus on that one please, you know the problem in the real world?

Thank you.