no, no one found proof that we're all living in a computer simulation

Unlike pop sci headlines keep telling you, scientists have not found any evidence that we're all just products of an alien computer.

One of the most persistent ideas in popular science is that we don’t exist. Well, we do, but not in the way we think. Rather than biochemical constructs of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, we’re a collection of bytes or qubits in an alien supercomputer modeling our universe. Basically, we’re the humans in The Matrix but without a physical body in some high tech pod wired into a mesh network, and the intelligence running the world in which we exist isn’t that of malicious machines, but alien creatures advanced so far beyond us, they may as well be gods in our context. Hell, they might not even know or care that we exist. We could all just be software bugs that behave like features.

Here’s the logic behind this notion. We run simulations to better understand how our world and the universe itself works. We rely on computer models to forecast climate change scenarios, the durability of nuclear weapons as the radioactive metals inside them decay over time, mapping out mass extinctions in our past and future, and why certain strange planets ended up looking and behaving that way. We know that those simulations aren’t reality, but by being diligent about the rules of these virtual worlds and universes, and comparing their outputs to real world data, we can see things that would ordinarily boggle us in a new light, and have new ideas to test.

When we run those simulations, an important concept to keep in mind is resolution, or the lowest level to which a simulation can go. For example, some of our best, highest resolution climate models look at data in blocks as small as a cubic kilometer. Now, if you wanted to investigate data below that threshold, you’d find nothing because there is no data to populate that block, and any attempt to scrutinize that cube would be in vain. It would appear as an inscrutable void somehow interacting with the rest of that virtual universe despite being seemingly made of nothing. And herein lies the germ of the simulation hypothesis in real science.

It would make sense that an advanced alien species which invents computing in some way, shape, or form would want to do something very similar. They too have questions they want answered, and they also would want to understand what’s possible, how all of those scenarios match real world data, or what they may be missing if the numbers in the real world and simulations simply refuse to add up. And if they are curious and motivated enough, and their supercomputers have the oomph, their simulations might hit some extreme resolutions, modeling subatomic particles which seem to be made of nothing, yet interact with the universe. You see where this is going, right?

where does the real end and the virtual begin?

This is why physicists who want to understand the limits of our universe have been so focused on studying “point particles” like quarks, gluons, photons, and bosons, all of which play important roles in the formation and behavior of matter and its interactions with itself and the cosmos at large, but seem to be nothing more than moving energy packets and clouds when we try to analyze them on their own. Some theoreticians are convinced that they are the resolution limit of our reality, and if they can show that this is indeed the case, we can make a strong argument that some of the phenomena that puzzle cosmologists are actually just the result of living in a finite, virtual universe.

Now, this wouldn’t affect our lives much. We couldn’t just decide to break the laws of physics on a whim because “hey, this is a computer model so let me just update those rules and limits” since this is just not how simulations and software work. Allowing the code running your simulation to empower its virtual constructs with the ability to alter its environmental variables or runtime logic, then recompile at runtime — this is known as meta-programming in computer science — would lead to countless failed iterations as the code becomes unstable and runs into nulls where it shouldn’t, or values which lead to impossible answers, error out, and crash.

In short, the rules in a working simulation need to remain stable, with deviations either weeded out by the logic of the underlying code or too unstable to even exist. In short, information, the arrangements of particles, coordinates, behaviors, and their data and metadata, need to have negative entropy, drifting towards stability instead of breaking down over time and dispersing into isolated fragments like everything else. Now, after arming you with all this prerequisite knowledge, we can finally talk about the paper by Melvin Vopson which had pop sci headlines buzzing with yet another round of Matrix references and claims that this time, we may finally know if we’re real or virtual.

You see, last year, Vopson, along with a colleague, introduced a concept he called the second law of infodynamics, modeled after the second law of thermodynamics. If you follow his reasoning, information could be considered a form of matter because it can represent actual, physical things that exist or can exist. If entropy increases over time, and matter will eventually break down into nothing but point particles according to the current understanding of physics, this means that information should also be trending towards disorder. His follow up paper then looks at the universe and says “hey, this is not all just falling apart at the seams, so… simulation?”

the shaky argument at the end of the universe

Okay, okay, sure, it’s a little more elaborate than that but not by much. Essentially, his proposal is that information is the most basic building block of matter, like a photon or a quark, and may even have mass. If it does, then it’s the smallest voxel — the term for a pixel in a 3D environment — of the universe, and therefore, we may be living in some sort of virtual construct. If you’re very confused and wondering how any of this makes sense right now, don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything. It’s really just technobabble in the format of a scientific paper which is trying to officiate a shotgun wedding between computer science and physics on false pretenses.

Remember that “second law of infodynamics” which says that information is a form of matter and must also break down over time due to entropy? That’s not a real thing. He called it a law by simply declaring that knowing the properties and buildup of matter is the same as the matter itself and must follow the same rules. No one has elevated this to the status of a law. It’s not even a theory. It’s barely a hypothesis. More like the kind of idea you write on the back of a napkin after thinking too hard and forget about. This means Vopson’s subsequent declarations about information are immediately suspect because he’s a referee in a game he created and where he is also a player.

If we strip away all the jargon, we end up with an argument that things made of matter should be falling apart at the seams due to entropy, and because they don’t, there’s a force or entity responsible for keeping it all together. If this sounds weirdly familiar and like something covered on the old blog, you’re right. This is pretty much the argument made by proponents of Intelligent Design, a.k.a. Diet Creationism. Its “luminaries” also refer to that force as information and build similar rhetorical castles in the clouds. The only difference is that Vopson is building a think tank claiming that we’re all alien byte arrays, while creationists build think tanks demanding the return of theocracy.

So, where does all this leave us? Nowhere, really. If we are being simulated inside alien computers, we may never know. We also have to consider that alien demigods able to model universes to the level of point particles face very long odds of advancing to this level, and they they might have very different computers, built for custom tasks rather than general systems like ours. There are countless unknowns in this universe, which is intimidating and exciting at the same time. But creating your own mythology around what you want the reality to be, whether it’s with claims of hearing the deity’s voice, or with reams of technobabble, only wastes humanity’s time.

See: Vopson, M. (2023) The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis, AIP Advances 13, 105308, DOI: 10.1063/5.0173278