Supper Table Conversations, Simulated Reality, and the Speed of Light
When my girls were growing up, we had a rule about eating supper at the supper table together, every night (my daughters are 18 and out of the house now). We batted around various topics during those meals. Racism was a recurring one - my kids are adopted and non-white. What life was like before Google and the internet came up a lot (“But how did you know?”). George W Bush and Katrina got significant time too, because I was walking around kind of permanently pissed off at my government at the time (a situation I returned to with Trump).
Another recurring favorite was this: are we living in a computer simulation? The theory entered popular culture in 2003, due to an article in Philosophical Quarterly. For us, it was mostly just a fun idea to toss around. How could you prove it? How would it affect your life? Could you break out of it? Would free will still exist? The idea gained steam and popularity, I assume because it’s really fun to think about.
I saw a recent article in Scientific American that stated there might be proof, and I understood just enough of the article to become a little obsessed with it. According to the article, there should be some artifact left in the physical world due to the one limitation a computer simulation would have: processor speed. The processor would have a hard upper limit of how fast it could perform a calculation, and we should be able to see the result of that limit in our own lives.
Is there an artifact here in the real world that looks like such a limit? Yes, it turns out. The speed of light. The speed limit of the universe. The one aspect of the universe that is NOT relative. And the writer in Scientific American posits that the absolute limit formed by the speed of light is a result of the absolute limit of the processor of whatever computer our simulation is running on.
Here’s the thing that got me obsessed. Back in 1901, before computers, before space flight and space-based telescopes, before the actual Theory of frikkin Relativity, Einstein figured it out. He didn’t know what he’d figured out exactly. Or rather, we are still unravelling what he figured out. But he was able to sit in his boring job in the patent office, over 100 years ago, and perform “thought experiments” that led him to pull on the one thread that helps reveal the nature of reality, even though philosophers and scientists have been pondering the exact same thing since literally the beginning of humankind. Einstein looked at the world and saw the One Big Thing that didn’t make sense. Unless the speed of light was an absolute, the universe didn’t work right. And from that one observation, he spun his theories of relativity, which still (mostly) hold up today.
Those theories led us to the nuclear bomb, but that’s a subject for another day.
The big hole in this, to me, is the assumption that some unimaginably powerful alien computer will have that much in common with our own computers. Our computers have processors, and a hard limit on processing power, but to assume a super-computer made by alien minds uses the same mechanics, and has the same limits, as our own computers seems a bit human-centric.
The Scientific American article points out another possible flaw. The universe has a huge amount of “wasted complexity.” From the article: “Physicist Frank Wilczek has argued that there’s too much wasted complexity in our universe for it to be simulated. Building complexity requires energy and time. Why would a conscious, intelligent designer of realities waste so many resources into making our world more complex than it needs to be?”
Anyway. That wasted complexity idea deserves a little obsession as well. A topic for another day, along with that pesky nuclear bomb thing.
We’ll keep the links list short this week.
Peace.
My latest story: Fuck, Marry, Kill
February’s story: Veronica Scissors
My first novel, Life Under Water