This isn't so much a book review as a summary of The Simulation Hypothesis, by Rizwan Virk. I'd highlighted a lot of text in the ebook, so I decided to reproduce many of these highlights as a general indication of what the book is about.
I may do an actual review in the future. For now, I'll just say that I found the book brisk and readable, and despite occasional lapses of grammar, the main ideas are presented clearly.The author's treatment of the evolution of video games was particularly interesting. His analysis of spiritual and paranormal topics (religion, NDEs, UFOs) was less compelling and seemed somewhat less well informed, but at least he is open to these possibilities. One area of possible confusion is that at some points he speaks of downloading consciousness into an avatar, but at other points he refers to the entire physical world, including the avatar, as being rendered on the "screen" of consciousness. There appears to be an inconsistency here.
Overall, I liked the book and recommend it to those who are interested in this type of speculation. For the record, I don't believe we are literally in a conspirer simulation, but I think computation serves as a useful model for making sense of many paradoxical phenomena, including the subject matter of parapsychology.
In any event, here are some key points, arranged by topic and not presented in the order in which they appear in the book. Blank lines between quotes indicate that the quotes are not found together in the book. In some instances they are separated by many pages.
Excerpts from The Simulation Hypothesis by topic:
The Great Simulation
By treating the world not as physical (and we’ll see that the physicists have admitted it is not) but rather as information and computation, we might be able to come to a more comprehensive understanding of the natural universe.
Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, in his 2003 paper which popularized the Simulation Argument, refers to a species which is able to build these hyper-realistic simulations is becoming “post-human.” I like to say that such a civilization has passed the “Simulation Point.”
I call this video game the “Great Simulation.”
Video game technology
[A basic "game loop":]
1. The computer presents the existing state of the game world and your character.
2. The player issues a command.
3. The program changes the game state based on this command and other factors.
4. Repeat
The world [of a video game is] a graphical representation, or a “rendered world,” populated by graphical characters and graphical objects.
The techniques used to graphically represent a large game world and render only a portion of the game world at a time – the portion that the player’s character is observing – [have] significant impact on the simulation hypothesis.... We’ll see there is a direct parallel [between quantum phenomena and] the conditional rendering of video games.
[Games have] the ability to store and track the state of a large number of simultaneous characters (whether a PC or an NPC) and the state of the shared, persistent game world as information. The information, which is the basis of everything that goes on in the virtual world, is stored somewhere outside the rendered world – on cloud servers that are invisible to those inside the world and rendered as needed.
Not only is a virtual world in modern MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] larger than we can see on one screen, it isn’t fully rendered into pixels until and unless it’s necessary.… Only those places in the world where there is an observer get fully rendered as pixels.
This is ... the basic idea of a rendering engine – it converts from mathematical points to a set of pixels that can be shown to the user in a video game.
Where is the rest of the world if we are rendering only a small part of it at a time? What is it stored as? It is stored as a set of 3D computer models – which by themselves cannot be seen by the player unless they are rendered.
Video games are optimized to render only that which is needed. The rest of the “world” exists in some informational form, so computing resources aren’t expended unless and until they are needed.
Some specific rules that a rendering engine might follow include:
Do not render anything that is obscured, or behind other objects (that the user wouldn’t see)
Adjust the field of view by quickly adjusting the pixels that have already been rendered
Pre-cache the scenes adjacent to the current one (to make them quicker to load)
Calculate/render new pixels only when necessary
The modeling techniques developed for video games are the same models that are used by 3D printers, and once again we see physical objects being reduced to digital information. A table created in Minecraft or Second Life … consists of digital information that is rendered using the basic building blocks of the game (pixels), which persist inside the virtual world as long as the world is running. Can we say any more of the physical world around us?
These [early] games became the first to have well-defined physics engines. This means that they obeyed some (scaled-down) version of Newton’s laws of classical mechanics.
MMORPGs are still rendered on individual computers – as such, a “shared rendered world” doesn’t really exist. Each computer renders what is happening in your scene. If my character is present and yours is present, then both of our CPUs/GPUs will be rendering the scene based on shared information. Where is this information? It is both decentralized and centralized – it is sent from the client machines based upon every choice you make and then synchronized and sent to the other people that are in the same place that you are.
Informational patterns in nature
The cells in your body have been replaced many times – you are literally not the physical person that you were many years ago. There must be some “information”… that defines who you are and tells the cells how to grow. This applies not just to healthy but also to diseased cells; theoretically if all the cells are replaced, then the diseased cell should just disappear on their own. This doesn’t happen because of patterns of information. Even biological entities, at their core, follow a computational structure.
[Stephen] Wolfram, by studying [the] cellular automaton and its similarity to nature, proposed that nature itself might be a collection of computer programs. He referred to these as simple programs and believed that simple programs were a basic building block of all science. Science, then, instead of being the study of physical processes, is really the study of computation and information involving things like recursion, registers for storing information, etc.
In his autobiography, [John] Wheeler summarized three phases of his long career in physics: “Everything is Particles” evolved to “Everything is Fields” which eventually evolved to “Everything is Information”.
Reality and illusion
In many Vedic texts, maya connotes a “magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem.” There is another term that is used in the Hindu Vedas, the lila. [It means "play".] The word play has dual meanings – first that the world is built from a spirit of playfulness and creativity, and second, that what we see can be thought of as being like a stage play …
If maya is a kind of illusion, then what is beyond the illusion? There is, in the Hindu traditions, Brahman, the absolute “real” world beyond form, and in the Buddhist traditions, the dharma, the absolute basis of reality from which all phenomena emanate. While they don’t say exactly what this world is like, there is a resting place for souls between lives, called the bardo.
We are players outside the game (and thus conscious entities) playing characters inside the video game.
Running simulations
Many ... questions in life may be computationally irreducible. This means that we would need to run a computer program through many different steps to figure out where a particular planet might be, or where a particular particle may end up in a turbulent flow of particles, or where a biological population might end up after a number of years.
Sometimes we need to “rewind” our computer simulation and rerun it to see a different set of variables before we know exactly where we will end up.
Quantum indeterminacy
At the heart of the matter is QI (or quantum indeterminacy) which means that all outcomes exist until and unless one particular outcome is observed. In the case of quantum bits, this means that the bit has values of both zero and one – until and unless it is observed.
A much better explanation of QI and why it exists – that it is a form of “conditional rendering” for a shared simulated universe.
In quantum physics, this collapse of a probability wave into a single future seems to happen based on conscious observation or measurement. In a video game, the path that any player follows depends on the conscious choice and subsequent rendering of that choice on the player’s own computer (which can be thought of as his or her “machine of consciousness”).
While there may be a master “state” on the server in multiplayer video games, rendering is done on each client machine. This corresponds to the finding in quantum physics that a probability wave collapses to a specific reality only when there is an observer.
There is a computer that is keeping track of all things in our physical world, and it doesn’t have the resources to render every possibility. It only needs to render those things that we, as conscious participants or players of the game, observe.
“Quantum indeterminacy,” says Elon Musk …, “is really an optimization technique.”
Many worlds, parallel universes
[Do] these parallel worlds actually exist or are [they] simply probabilities in a probability tree that is created by whomever or whatever is rendering the world around us[?]
It’s not at all unreasonable to assume that if the universe gets “copied” or “branched” that there are optimizations for accomplishing this – and that what is being copied is actually information and not physical particles.…
If the universe is seen as a virtual world with a game state, then we can envision how multiple probable futures can be generated (as information, not as physical worlds), and then choices can be made through this branching tree of possibilities using some evaluation function.
[Thomas] Campbell posits that there is a “Fundamental Process” that drives evolution of consciousness, biology, and even inanimate objects. The Fundamental Process, as he defines it, is a process that tries out every possibility, through trial and error, and gravitates toward the possibilities that are evaluated as the “most profitable.”
A computational model of the [multiple] universes as information allows for significant compression and optimization, and computation provides a mechanism that might actually be able to produce this kind of result: a giant computer system crunching numbers with the rendering engine that only renders when it’s needed.
Quantized space and time
Time inside video games is quantized, based on the steps of the simulation, which is some multiple of the processing time of basic operations in the CPU (or GPU).
All computer simulations rely on some time clock to control the simulation, and if we are really in a simulation, there should be some evidence of this. If quantized time proves to be correct, that lends even more credence to the idea that there is a clock-speed and minimum distance in the 3D world around us.
Every object would have a 3D representation within [the virtual space we use inside computer programs and simulations] – typically (x, y, z) coordinates – and a fourth coordinate for time, t. If the speed of light is fixed, and the smallest possible pixel is fixed, then the minimum quantum of time would be defined by light traversing the smallest pixel.
The Planck length … is defined as a unitof length equal to 1.616229 (38) x 10 [to the power of -35] meters and is considered the smallest possible length of space that we can reliably measure.
The speed of light seems to be the constant that relates space to time.
If space-time is pixelated, then we can use the constant speed to get a quantized time, a clock-speed of the simulation.
Using the Planck length, which physicists now generally acknowledge as the smallest possible measurable distance of length in our 3D reality, the value T in our equation comes out to a very small number, which is essentially how scientists have come up with the Planck time constant.
Quantum entanglement
If two pixels are co-related on the computer screen, then both physical pixels would be getting their value from the same point in memory. If we change the memory value (let’s say its RGB value from red to green), then both pixels should change on the screen from red to [green].
Let’s suppose pixels A and B share the same value in memory (in this case they are based off of the same address in memory). If we change the value in memory, then both pixels will automatically change, at least as long as they share the same memory location. If pixel A was to then suddenly start using a different spot in memory, we might say that they are no longer shared – or ... no longer entangled.
In quantum entanglement, it is possible for particles to de-cohere as well, by interacting with the environment, or by simply measuring the quantum state. This can easily explain how pixel B now gets its own value in memory, so that its state can be saved independently from pixel A.
Remote viewing
Since the client software is doing rendering based on the position of the virtual camera, it is possible, within the virtual world, to place the camera anywhere in the room!
UFOs
If we think of a 3D virtual world as having x, y, z coordinates, then teleporting would be a matter of setting new x, y, z coordinates without having to go through the points in between.
Some UFO researchers contend that UFO sightings have both an objective and a subjective component. When I met Jacques Vallee in 2017, he told me that he had documented cases where several people were together and some of them saw the UFO and others didn’t. This led him to believe that there was a consciousness aspect to UFOs. What could cause one person to see a UFO and another standing right next to them not to see it?
If we go back to the idea that each of us is conscious in a videogame-like simulation, then each of us would have to render the physical world on our own “computer” – in this case, in our own consciousness. A situation where the command is to render the UFO on person A’s consciousness now while not rendering it on person B’s only makes sense in the context of a distributed multiplayer simulation as opposed to a shared physical reality.
Since all the rendering is done on individual computers, it’s possible for one player to see an object in the scene that is not possible to other players, a process we call narrowcasting.
Subtle bodies
In many of the Eastern traditions and their new age updates in modern times, there’s the belief that certain subtle bodies, which contain consciousness, actually leave the physical body while we are asleep and that this [is] the same as being afk [away from keyboard].
In the Vedas, the five sheaths (koshas) correspond with the three bodies: the gross body, the subtle body, and the causal body. The gross body (sthula sarira) is the physical body that we all know about. The subtle body (suksma sarira) keeps the physical body alive and transmigrates with the soul across bodies and separates from the physical body at birth. The causal body (karana sarira) is the seed that creates the subtle body and the gross physical body.…
The subtle body is considered a template for the physical body in the Vedic literature.
In a simulation, each character has a rendered body. What is this based on? Information about the body (the character) is stored in some non-rendered state, but then a 3D model defines the look, shape, and feel of the character’s physical body. This 3D model isn’t visible to other people in the rendered world, yet exists somewhere in memory or on disk and is indispensable from the actual character/player. The model is usually drawn using polygons and is considered a “mesh” of lines outlining the shape of the character’s body, which is then textured to create the actual character’s rendering in the game world.
NDEs and the life review
Like an intelligent screen recording while we are playing a videogame, [the Great Simulation] provides not just a record but an evaluation of the gameplay and help[s] us to keep score in the video game. These recordings are available for us in the afterlife, and “God” reviews than with us give us the “judgment” according to the Western religious traditions.
During what we call [the] death of the character in the simulation, the player starts to wake up in another reality.
What is this other reality? All we can say for sure is that it is outside the rendered world of the shared video game, and there are other conscious beings there.
In fact, the decision to “go back” and continue the life of the character we were just playing is a lot like the crude “insert another quarter now to keep playing!”
Angels
Just who are these entities recording our deeds? According to some traditions, these entities might be angels, though they sound a lot like AI that monitors and automatically records our actions and plays them back to us later.
Beings that are not in the rendered world but are watching and influencing us is a good description of what these religions call angels and demons.
As we look to the recording angels, we see that they are as much “functions” as they are “entities” – i.e., they have a specific purpose and rules to follow to achieve that purpose in supporting us through this “testing ground” of life on earth.
Reincarnation and karma
The twin concepts of karma and reincarnation sound a lot like video games in which a player has multiple lives and an ongoing list of “quests” and “achievements.” The accomplishment of one task (or quest) unlocks new quests that get added to the list. This is a lot like the process of creating new karma described in Buddhism.
In Eastern traditions, consciousness is transferred to multiple bodies in a series of incarnations. This is a direct analogy to a single player who plays multiple “roles” or “characters” in a role-playing game.
[The] quest manifest [in a video game] is like a running total and is a subset of all possible quests; it is run by a quest engine.
This [series of quests] builds up experience and levels up our character based on some map or tree of quests and achievements that have been selected for us by our particular karma.
The karma of the player would be lessons or achievements the player may need to accept that “finish” over many lifetimes, while the karma of a given character may need to be resolved during the life of this character.
"Blank lines between quotes indicate that the quotes are not found together in the book. In some instances they are separated by many pages."
The standard way to indicate that is a line of dots, or anyway a couple of inches of them.
Posted by: Roger Knights | May 16, 2019 at 05:11 PM
Michel,
I'm glad that you stated that you don't think we are literally living in a simulation, but that it is a good model or metaphor. I have to agree. Virk (and you) seems to make a good case for the simulation model. It's a commonly understood concept these days and, thus, a useful platform for discussion. I'm trying to think of weaknesses, but am not able to immediately come up with anything meaningful.
Posted by: Eric Newhill | May 18, 2019 at 09:55 AM
Interesting overview of an interesting perspective!
Posted by: Matt Rouge | May 21, 2019 at 03:50 PM