Charles Petzold

In the movie Groundhog Day (1993), weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) has no explanation why he is forced to suffer the incessant repetition of a single day. When another time loop entraps characters in the movie Palm Springs (2020), Nyles (Andy Samberg) has no definitive explanation either but suggests it might be “a glitch in the simulation.”

That’s the difference of 27 years: By 1993, writers of science fiction and pot-smoking undergrads had long been speculating about simulated universes, but the concept had not yet seeped into the general consciousness. Now it has. Violations of the laws of physics were once heralded as miracles; now they’re regarded as coding errors.

The thought experiment known as the Simulation Hypothesis has been presented most formally by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2003 article “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” published first in The Philosophical Quarterly and available on Bostrom’s website with much supporting material. A documentary about Bostrom’s hypothesis due to be released in three days is entitled A Glitch in the Matrix from a famous line in The Matrix (1999) about déjà vu.

Why does the Simulation Hypothesis make sense? As our computing power increases, it is not inconceivable that we might one day be able to simulate human consciousness and perception in software. From there we could create whole worlds of simulated sentient people and allow them to interact just like “real” people. If that is plausible, then it will probably come to pass that there will be more simulated entities in existence than non-simulated entities, in which case sheer probability implies that we are among the simulated who have been fabricated by people more technically advanced than ourselves.

A simulated world would not take the material form that we perceive, but it would still require some kind of medium in which to exist. In my view, the strongest argument against the Simulation Hypothesis involves the enormous quantities of computer memory necessary to maintain the illusion of the simulation. Even if many parts of this simulated universe are created on demand as required — for example, the appearance of the far side of the moon was not necessary until probes took photos of it beginning in 1959 — the memory requirements are still considerable. Yet, if there’s anything we’ve learned about computer memory, it’s that one decade’s inconceivable is the next decade’s commonplace.

Prior to pondering the Simulation Hypothesis, I tended to believe that the universe is the result of some natural phenomenon such as a quantum singularity, that life began through conglomerations of proteins, and that the human species is the result of millions of years of evolution.

I’ve become intellectually humbler in recent years. I am now willing to accept the possibility of a Creator, a word I capitalize only in awe that such an entity has access to computing power far beyond my comprehension, and is able to exploit these computers with coding skills that put the rest of us to shame. Since I can neither prove nor disprove the existence of such a Creator, I suppose I am (epistemologically speaking) an agnostic. (But so are we all.)

The Simulation Hypothesis has clarified for me certain aspects of the nature of this hypothetical Creator, whether it be a gonzo-coding Geek God existing in some other level of hyperreality, or a more traditional supreme-being-type God that existed prior to everything else. In many respects these two kinds of Gods are equivalent and certainly indistinguishable. Even if we had evidence of this Creator’s existence (and we don’t), I don’t see how we would be able to determine what type of God it is.

A being that is powerful enough to create an entire universe (either in hardware or software) is largely imponderable. We are incapable of speculating about its nature or motivations. We should be especially wary of anthropomorphizing this Creator. That would be very risky.

But I feel a need to take that risk. I want to ask a simple question. I want to ask Why?

Why would this Creator create?

If the Creator knew what was going to happen with the Creation, there would be no need to create it. It would be like a kid playing with toy soldiers in a historical battle with known maneuvers and a preordained outcome. It might be fun to line up the troops and move them around, but ultimately, what’s the point? The only reason to create a universe with interacting entities would be out of curiosity — to find out what would happen with this Creation under a certain set of boundary conditions or function parameters. The process of evolution seems to me particularly rich in interesting outcomes: The simulation program could be run many times with butterfly effects causing evolution to veer off into many different directions. Most interesting would be a world in which evolution leads to the existence of interacting entities capable of creating their own simulated worlds.

This is not to say that these interacting entities have free will. The minds of these entities are likely still at the mercy of molecules bouncing around, even if those molecules exist only in software.

Regardless of the nature of this Creator, I think it’s likely that it is not omniscient, at least in a temporal sense. It doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the future. This ignorance is part of the motivation for this Creator to create. Creation is an experiment to satisfy the curiosity of the Creator.

Support for the absence of temporal omniscience was provided by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936-1937 paper on computability. Turing essentially showed that there is no general process to determine what a program running on a digital computer will do. We actually have to run the program to find out. Turing’s results imply that the code running the simulation is ultimately unpredictable.

This makes me happy. I can forfeit the concept of free will. I can accept that my future is entirely predetermined by colliding molecules. But I simply cannot abide omniscience. I do not want this hypothetical Creator knowing what’s going to happen to me. My future should be as surprising to this Creator as it will be to me.

Yes, I know that I can’t prove this, but I very much need to believe it.

Call it faith.