Frank Wilczek: Are We Living in a Simulated World?
Frank Wilczek’s answer to the question “Are We Living in a Simulated World?” is brief: We could be, but we probably aren’t. In his January 9, 2020 Wall Street Journal column shown above, he poses two different questions that I have put in bold, and answers each:
Could there be a richly experienced mental world that is not made of matter, as it appears to be, but of abstract data?
… pretty surely yes. In fact, humans occupy self-generated mind-worlds for an hour or two each day, when we dream during REM sleep. The objects we see in dreams are just patterns of electrical excitation in our brains.
Is the world we actually experience—the universe as described by the laws of physics and the facts of cosmology—such a world? …is our own perceived world manufactured, in fact, from such abstract data[?]
… the best answer is pretty surely no. …
… there are many aspects of physics in our world that do not look like the product of an efficient world-simulator. For example, our most accurate formulation of the laws of physics depends on the idea that space and time are smooth and continuous. When you work with continuous numbers, instead of 0s and 1s, it becomes much more difficult, in a simulation, to maintain precision.
More generally, our world contains a lot of hidden complexity. We can calculate a proton’s properties based on fundamental laws, but those calculations are extremely complicated. It would be a poor strategy to build a simulated world out of such hard-to-compute ingredients.
For me, it is delightful that Frank Wilczek is essentially using an economic argument for our not already living in a simulated world: if we were, whatever the computer we might be in is made of, and whatever the unknown-to-us laws of physics in the “real world” outside that computer, it is likely that resources in the “real world” would be scarce, so that a simulation would be done in a way that used those scarce resources efficiently.
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