Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you.
If you were in fact in the Matrix, how would you know? According to Silas Beane of the University of Bonn, there is in fact a test you can take to see if you are stuck living in a simulation.
How does it work? I don’t fully get the science, but the idea is that they can use some fancy ideas like the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit, quantum chromodynamics and lattice gauge theory to put it all together. The idea is that even the most sophisticated simulation would have limits that could eventually be hit. Supposedly these limits can be detected and there is no way around them.
Keep in mind that this is basing itself on the idea that we’ve seen these limits in our own computer systems— that doesn’t mean some advanced robot or alien life would be playing by the exact same rules does it? Interesting concept, but I’m not so sure if it would really prove anything for fact.
What the testing on the concept of virtual worlds does do is advance our own understanding of how a simulation would and could work. Eventually we could understand it so well that we make our own simulations. Then as we advance further we end up becoming more reliant on robots. They take over and put us in the simulation. All the while, it turns out that this world was already a simulation. This would mean that the robots are living in a world that was already a simulation created by someone else— isn’t the science and idea of simulation confusing? Maybe not “time travel paradox” confusing, but still.
What do you think? IF we really were living in simulation, do you think that our simulation controllers would even allow a test like this to work in the first place? Food for thought.
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