Are We Living in a Simulated Cosmos?
As I was about to enter a book event on “The Simulation Hypothesis” by Riz Virk, I received an email that asked for my view about free will and fate. I responded promptly:
“Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Here is the way I see our existential situation. There are too many degrees of freedom in the human brain and the environment for us to have any predictive power about our fate. Hence, we have the notion that we possess free will when our brain interacts with the world.
This unpredictability is important because it brings a sense of responsibility to our life and the impression that we can shape our future. Fundamentally, it may not be true, but in practice — it is important for us to believe in free will.”
This exchange was very timely as the first concern that I voiced to Riz at the opening of our fireside chat is that the hypothesis that we live in a simulation takes away the sense of responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Humans seek ways of escaping the hardships of reality, either by taking drugs, placing goggles on their head and living in the metaverse, advocating for the existence of a multiverse — where anything that can happen will happen an infinite number of times, believing in promises on life after death, or more generally in fictional stories that extend beyond the physical reality that we all share. Physicists like myself, on the other hand, wish to decode the nature of the physical world, assuming that it is real and not fictitious. Despite the hardships and frustrations that reality brings, I see it as my obligation to attend to the constraints that reality poses and accept the real consequences of my actions, rather than escape from this all.
It is far more difficult for the human mind to attend to the specific physical reality around us than to drift into desirable virtual realities. Human history is full of tragedies inflicted by the wish to believe stories that collapsed as soon as they faced a reality check. The scientific method was invented as a procedure that allows the drifting human mind to correct wrong ideas and wishful thinking through the guidance of evidence and experimental data. This method is our only hope for overcoming our inherent psychological weaknesses.
Regarding the simulation hypothesis, I also noted to Riz that I am currently working on a scientific paper that suggests a new method based on atomic clocks to resolve the physical reality all the way to the Planck frequency, 10^{43} frames per second, and test empirically whether there we live in a simulation with a smaller frame rate.
My gut feeling is that such an experiment will not find discretization of time or space. My lifelong work as a physicist is consistent with that premise. Of course, I may be proven wrong if the cosmos happens to be a computer game. But until proven wrong, I will continue my default state-of-mind, aiming to figure out the world and take responsibility for my actions as if it is all for real.
Of course, there are parts of reality that escape us. Examples include what happened to our cosmos before the Big Bang — 13.8 billion years ago, what is the correct interpretation of quantum uncertainty and entanglement, what lies inside a black hole, what is dark matter and dark energy, is there extraterrestrial intelligence? But in difference from the simulation hypothesis, these unknowns do not reside in a reality separate from ours. Instead, they reside in parts of our reality that are not accessible to us right now and that we hope to uncover with future experimental data.
The scientific learning experience can be made more efficient by focusing on experimental anomalies rather than on nuances on what we already know. Here, the weakness of the human mind is to retreat to existing models of the world and shove anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking. Ignoring anomalies is a self-defense mechanism that allows us to maintain a stable world model. Experts have a cognitive dissonance when facts appear to be misaligned with their world model. Their instinctive pushback against breakthrough ideas slows down the progress of our scientific knowledge.
Our ability to learn new things about the nature of the cosmos is propelled by our open-mindedness to attend to anomalies, followed by disruptive interpretations that shake our world model. In a recent podcast interview, led by two scientists at Oxford University, UK, I was asked how I regard controversy. In reply I said: “If the boat goes in the wrong direction, I try to correct its course by shaking the boat.” This is a reflection of my sense of responsibility toward a cosmos that is real and not simulated. In that mindset, the consequences of the boat heading in the wrong direction are real for all of us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
