Unconfirmed. We Live in a Simulation?
This article is a short rebuttal to Fouad Khan’s piece titled “Confirmed! We Live in a Simulation” that was published in Scientific American on April 1, 2021.
In that piece, the author argues that there’s a theoretical maximum limit to the processor speed. And the entities that live in a simulation are aware of it.
All computing hardware leaves an artifact of its existence within the world of the simulation it is running. This artifact is the processor speed. If for a moment we imagine that we are a software program running on a computing machine, the only and inevitable artifact of the hardware supporting us, within our world, would be the processor speed.
Recall that in order to measure the velocity of a moving object, you must solve the equation of distance traveled over time. Similarly, a processor’s speed is measured by the amount of calculations in a given unit of time, where 1GHz roughly translates to one billion calculations per second. Given that speed is a function of time, let’s see how the Simple English Wikipedia article talks about it in the context of “spacetime.”
[…] in a relativistic universe, time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space.
If we were to create a simulation of our reality from scratch, we must include both concepts of time and space and apply them to everything therein. As such, time becomes a part of the simulation, and it too is therefore governed by the limits that are imposed by the processor.
When put together, this means that no entity within the simulation can reliably determine the speed at which the simulation is running. Sure, it can hit measurable limits like the speed of light (c) or Planck’s constant (h); however, they can only be measured against a relative concept of time as seen within the simulation itself. Thus, without an external anchor outside of the simulation, these constant values are not enough to prove or disprove that we live in one.
Anyone who has basic knowledge of computer programming is welcome to prove me wrong by solving the following challenge. I’ve set up a simulation boilerplate in JavaScript. The goal is to figure out the value of the variable called 𝚜𝚒𝚖𝚞𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚛_𝚌𝚙𝚞_𝚍𝚎𝚕𝚊𝚢_𝚒𝚗_𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚍𝚜 from within the function called 𝚛𝚞𝚗_𝚜𝚒𝚖𝚞𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 without using global objects like 𝙳𝚊𝚝𝚎 or 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚘𝚕𝚎.𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎.
To be clear, I’m not saying that we don’t live in a simulation. I just haven’t come across any compelling proof that we do. I often think and tweet about this very problem. Follow me on Twitter or on Medium for more on this topic.
