Thoughts on Simulation Theory: An Opinion Piece

Today, I was in my biochemistry class, and I forgot my handout so I decided “I’ll just listen for now and then rewatch the lecture later when I have the handout. I’ll take my notes then.” So, that’s what I did. However, in the middle of the lecture, I started thinking about simulation theory, and I knew, right then, that an impending hyperfixation was arising.

Basically, simulation theory is a theory that was brought to the public in 2003 by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University. The theory follows the narrative that at least one of three statements are true: “(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation” (Bostrom et al 2003). The majority of the public, however (including me), only really pay attention to the statement that “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation”. Because of the depth of the topic, plus the existentialism that was provoked by the paper to audiences everywhere, this theory gained a lot of traction, and remains very popular throughout the media.

Now, when my hyperfixation commenced during biochemistry, I originally wanted to debate it. However, upon looking into the knowledge I already knew about the universe, or at least the current scientific theories that have the most evidence supporting them, I realized that the theory kind of made sense and that all I could do was add more depth to it with my own explanations. So, let me take you through my hyperfixation thought-train:

The first thing that I thought of was coding in general. Among other things, I am a self taught programmer, so of course I instantly thought of the very basics of programming a simulation: binary code. Binary code is simply a large chain of 0s and 1s that forms the primary layer of all computing technologies, it is the most universal. If you want to think of this in linguistic terminology, binary code is like the computer science version of Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian languages, which have been deemed the very first and oldest languages according to linguistic consensus. Once you have the baseline language, like Egyptian, for instance, there are then translations of that language that make the meaning behind it more specialized for different linguistic functions, and people tend to learn the language in their area of expertise (for example, Chinese citizens learn Mandarin while Canadians have a primarily-French background). These different versions are the cultural language version of different coding languages, like Python, MATLAB, and HTML.

When translating this computer science analogy to biosciences, I started to notice that the biological version of the binary code is subatomic particles, like your protons, neutrons, and electrons. This is because the basis of binary code is the electrical pulse that determines whether the digit within a line of binary code will be a 0 or a 1, and protons and electrons determine how biological organisms operate depending on the collection of charges these subatomic particles emit within the body. Thus, I made the connection that subatomic particles are the binary code of living beings.

This made me think “if these charged particles are the basis of my very existence as a living being, then my larger-scale biological code is my DNA and neural codes”. “DNA code” being my nitrogenous bases (A, C, G, and T) that are translated into amino acids, and “neural code” being the information processed by neurons in the brain. Basically, DNA code is the Python language for the coding of living organisms. Once I could define everything in the biological program, I came up with an alternate theory: Simulated Perception Theory.

The alternate Simulated Perception Theory deems that the world around us is not a simulation, but how we perceive it is. This is because there are two known truths:

1. Only we know the ins-and-outs of what we see and how our perception of the world around us looks. No one else has the ability to physically look through our eyes. Humans simply perceive the world as they can view it, and then we assume that other people can see exactly what we see because there is enough verbal agreement and majority consensus that the assumption is deemed to be a guaranteed truth in our worldview.

2. The senses that help us perceive the world (like our eyes, for instance) are coded to work how they do specifically according to our biological codes, like our DNA. Unless you personally become a part of a study in which your nitrogenous-base-filled-code is looked at and compared with the rest of the human population, you have no clue whether you are truly experiencing the world as everyone else is. 

These truths are why situations like people figuring out they’re color-blind in adulthood occur: because they are the only person who’s truly experiencing the colorblindness, and they were socially conditioned to be taught about these colors like everyone else has been taught, so it’s communicated to these people that the colors they are looking at actually have a different color’s name.

Now, during this hyperfixation-filled-biochemistry-lecture, I was sure I was onto something. However, then I remembered that everything on Earth is made up of atoms, and all atoms consist of subatomic particles. Therefore, everything is coded using this biological binary code. Therefore, the original Simulation Theory is still technically not wrong: the entirety of the world is programmed with the same baseline of our biological programming.

This is honestly as far as I have gotten with this hyperfixation, as it is a very deep topic with a lot of moving parts. While there are arguments against this theory, like that simulating the entirety of the world around us, and maybe even the universe, would take way too much computing power for any one place to be big enough to hold, I also simply don’t have the answers to that. However, if in less than 100 years, the human race was able to find a solution to the large overgrowth of wires and plugs due to the high demand of new technology and Internet programs, then there could definitely be a way to fit all of the processing power of a simulated universe into a designated space.