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visualculturemikeholbrook · 7 years ago

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4000 Word Essay

Explain how we could be living in a simulated reality.

Introduction

Throughout history and religion, the idea of our entire perception of reality being merely a simulation has been spoken about time and time again. From the ancient concept of Maya, to modern adaptations of the hypothesis portrayed in various pop culture media, the theory has widespread influence and recognition. As well as being an interesting thought experiment that makes the observer question their own reality, the hypothesis also provides commentary on the current state of the world in a metaphorical sense. Throughout this essay I will be examining the origins of theory, its use in visual culture throughout history and the current day, and the ways it can be presented to be true in the current society we live in. The entire argument is purely hypothetical and the true answer may never be known, but that doesn’t stop people speculating and adapting the idea to create original forms of visual culture.

The origins of the simulated reality hypothesis and maya.

Although the exact origins of the hypothesis are not known, one of the earliest known forms of the idea comes from maya, a fundamental concept in Hindu philosophy. The concept originally denoted the power with which a god can make humans truly believe in what eventually turns out to be illusion, however through time it eventually came to mean “the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real”(Encyclopedia Britannica, 2018). The world around us isn’t what it seems, and our current perception is just that of maya. Maya can also be referred to as ignorance, the way in which the real nature of us and the world around us is hidden. The philosophy explains that maya ceases to exist once we become aware of the true nature of the world, also known as “Brahman”. “The changing world that we see around us can be compared to the moving images on a movie screen: without the unchanging screen in the background, there can be no movie”(Vedanta Society, 2016). Brahman can be compared to the unchanging screen, onto which our perception of reality is projected.

Hinduism explains that our perception of reality is conditioned and obscured by our misplaced identification of ourselves. We identify too much with our ego, body and mind, when in reality we should identify with the “Atman”, the divine self. Because of this, we create more pain and ignorance within ourselves, developing fears of disease and death. Hinduism claims that all of the badness and misplaced beliefs doesn’t affect the real nature of ourselves.

One useful metaphor for understanding maya is understood by comparing it to clouds which cover the brightness of the sun. The clouds cover the sun and prevent all light passing through, however once the clouds have dispersed we become aware that sun has always been there. The clouds in this metaphor refer to the maya, which represents the egotism, hatred and all negative feelings we have towards the world and each other. The maya is dispersed when we reflect upon our true nature and act purely. This reflection drives away the maya and allows our true nature, Brahman, to be understood. Shankara, a philosopher from early Indian times, used an example of a rope and snake to illustrate the idea. The example follows a man as he walks down a dark path. Ahead of him he sees a snake, and his heart begins to beat. However, as he gets closer, the snake turns out to be merely just an ordinary piece of rope, and all of his fears and preconceived notions disappear. When compared to maya and the world we live in, we walk down a darkened path and our perception is formed by what we can see. We become aware of the restrictions and suffering placed upon us. However, once the illusion of maya is shattered and broken, we become aware that both us, and the universe is all Brahman. Our mortality and universe cease to exist, and we become aware of Brahman existing all around us.

Although it may not be the origin of the simulated reality hypothesis, the concept of maya reflects a universal truth and shows that the idea of our entire reality not being what it seems has deep roots in philosophy and our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Simulacra and Simulation

Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et Simulation) is a philosophical work written in 1981 by Jean Baudrillard. In his work he looks at the relationships within reality, and the use of symbols (in this case referring to copies) to construct a reality in which all beings have a shared existence.

Baudrillard suggests that humans have completely replaced all of reality with symbols and signs ( representations of reality) and therefore the human experience is a simulation of reality. This idea is largely different from the philosophical concept of maya, however it has common ground in certain ways. One point is that “our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map”(Dino Franco Felluga, 2015). This is to say that through human history we have slowly replaced all aspects of reality with copies of what we determine to be “real” (simulacra) and therefore the reality we our experiencing is based off of a simulation of reality itself. To illustrate and provide credence to this idea, Baudrillard points to five phenomena of the current world that explain the loss of distinction between reality and the simulacra which we have created.

The first of the phenomena spoken about is the media culture in today's society. “Contemporary media (television, film, magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us”(Dino Franco Felluga, 2015). Because of the media, we no longer acquire goods because of an immediate need for them but because of the ideas and desires created and enforced by the media and advertisements. This can be seen in the huge value placed on the advertisement industry. Companies spend millions creating effective marketing campaigns to sell their goods and services, often employing tactics that exploit human psychology and prey upon our weaknesses and desires. In this sense we have lost touch with our actual human needs and we instead base our desires on the “simulation” created by the media culture.

The second phenomena highlighted by Baudrillard is the exchange value. “Baudrillard claims, commodities are not merely to be characterized by use-value and exchange value”(Douglas Kellner, 2007). He instead claims that value is denoted by “sign-value” which is the “expression and mark of style, prestige, luxury and power”(Douglas Kellner, 2007). In simple terms, Baudrillard is claiming that the value of goods and services is no longer related to its use value, and is instead controlled by the perceived value. A good way to illustrate this is to use the real world example of rapper Kanye West’s one hundred and twenty dollar white t-shirt. In this example, the value of the actual goods and labour put into making this t-shirt we’re probably quite minimal, but due to the association with a popular celebrity making it appear “stylish”, its value was inflated to make it worth over one hundred dollars. The t-shirt sold out almost instantly, which highlights Baudrillard’s point about exchange value. This adds to his simulation argument, that goods we purchase are no longer linked to actual reality, and instead to the simulated ideas that we have constructed ourselves.

Baudrillard's third phenomena, multinational capitalism, points out that we have lost touch with the reality of the goods we consume. Due to the world becoming more and more connected, companies no longer operate on a national basis. This means “Not even national identity functions in a world of multinational corporations.”(Dino Franco Felluga, 2015). Our identity is now driven by our capital, and the way in which we purchase and consume goods has caused us to lose touch with the reality of the items we buy, and the work put in by labourers to produce them. An example of this is the huge coffee industry. Coffee is one of the most consumed beverages around the world, with over two billion cups being consumed worldwide every day (Coffee Drinkers Make Better Lovers, 2012). This alone is incredible, however, most people in developed countries couldn’t identify a coffee plant. This proves Baudrillard’s point about Multinational capitalism. The ease with which a general consumer can purchase a product that is grown and cultivated halfway across the globe and not even have to consider the work and effort that has gone into producing it, highlights the fact that we have indeed lost touch with reality and are living in a version simulated by ourselves. In the natural world, we would not have access to certain items and goods, yet through multinational capitalism we can have such items with ease. We have become accustomed to the simulated reality we have created, where purchasing goods from around the world is the norm.

The fourth of Baudrillard’s phenomena is urbanisation. Baudrillard states that as we develop and build on the remaining natural land there is, we further lose touch with our sense of the natural world. Humans have become detached from the natural, nonhuman world and culture is now centred around multiple productive systems that are so large they cause feelings of alienation. This point is further illustrated by the fact that remaining natural areas are now labelled as such, as if to suggest they are different from a human centred reality. This emphasizes the simulation argument proposed by Baudrillard, buildings and urbanisation are now the reality we live in, although they directly contradict the idea of a natural world.

The fifth and final phenomena refers to language and ideology. Language is the way people communicate, and we are bound to its limitations. Due to this, language keeps us from accessing reality. Earlier understandings of ideology stated that it represented a false consciousness, to keep us from seeing the real workings of dominant groups in power. Postmodernism changed this however and suggested that ideology is the support for our perception of reality. According to this understanding, there is no way to escape ideology. We are so reliant on language to communicate and structure our perceptions of the world, that any way we can represent reality using language is already influenced by ideology, which has been created as a simulation.

In total, Baudrillard’s “Simulation and Simulacra” presents an argument for the fact that we are living in a simulated reality that is believable and has basis in fact. It might not be pushed quite to the extremes that are presented in some visual culture, however the points Baudrillard raises shows the amount we are detached from the original natural reality that existed before humans. Humans in this sense have fully created a simulated reality to exist in, so much that the we have lost touch with what came before.

The Matrix

While Baudrillard’s theory was more detracted, The Matrix takes the simulated reality argument in a very literal sense and plays on the idea. The idea was originally conceived by Lana and Andy Wachowski as a comic. The film takes place in the not so distant future, and portrays a world where machines have taken over and placed every human into a simulation of reality called “The Matrix”. The plot follows “Neo”, a computer programmer who becomes aware of the fact he is in a simulated reality with the help of a few other humans who have “broken free” from the Matrix. Once Neo has learned the truth behind his reality, he can’t go back. As Morpheus says “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes” (The Matrix, 1999). Morpheus refers to the real world outside of the Matrix as the “desert of the real”. This is a reference to Baudrillard’s work.

The philosophical metaphors within the film inspire thoughts about the reality that we perceive. The fact that almost everyone living within the Matrix is blissfully unaware of the reality that came before it and without the knowledge of the real world, the simulated world becomes the reality. Until the veil is broken, the Matrix is reality, similar to the concept of maya. We as humans will blindly believe the way we perceive things as real, until the perception is shattered, at which point we become aware of the simulation and all illusion is broken. This also ties in with Baudrillard’s work, where we have become so accustomed to the simulated reality we have created for ourselves that it becomes reality and we lose all touch with the original reality that came before.

The Matrix has also inspired other forms of visual culture too. The phrase “a glitch in the matrix” has come to mean a seemingly impossible event happening in real life, suggesting that our reality is simulated and that we all live in a version of the Matrix. This has inspired communities of people sharing stories, e.g. reddit.com/r/glitch_in_the_matrix. The top story of all time on this forum speaks about one user hearing voices coming from his fan. This is eventually discovered to just a motor in the base picking up radio signals, but the stories inspire feelings of fear and intrigue and even if some are purely fiction, the popularity behind the community highlights the fact that people are interested the hypothesis and whether it has any truth behind it.

The Matrix is one of the most well known films worldwide, and it was mine, and many other peoples first point of contact with the simulated reality argument. It presents the hypothesis in an understandable way, and while many brush the film off as just a work of fiction, it has many aspects of philosophical discussions that have been spoken about throughout history.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

In 2003, a philosopher by the name of Nick Bostrom wrote a paper named “Are you living in a computer simulation?”. In his paper, he argues that at least one of three propositions are true. The first proposition is “the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage” (Nick Bostrom, 2003). This is to say that before humans can reach an advanced level of civilisation, there will be some event that causes us to go extinct. These events are known as “great filters” and are proposed to be one of the reason we haven’t discovered any advanced forms of alien life. The next possibility Bostrom proposed was that “any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof)” (Nick Bostrom, 2003). If this were true, it would be impossible to run a simulation of human consciousness and history, and we, or any other species would never be able to reach a perfect simulation. The third proposition, if the other two are false, is that “The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one” (Nick Bostrom, 2003). This follows the belief that one day we will become advanced enough as a species to run simulations of our ancestors, and if this is true, then we are most likely to be in a simulation ourselves.

Bostrom argues that if a species became advanced enough to simulate their ancestors, complete with individual consciousnesses, then it could be argued that it is more rational to assume we are one of the many simulations they advanced species is running, rather than the original biological minds. Bostrom himself doesn’t claim that either one of his propositions are true, but that almost certainly one of them is.

Video Games

Another way to examine the simulation argument is to look at the rapid development of technologies used in video games. Elon Musk, a South African businessman and engineer, claims that it’s almost certain we live in a simulated reality, similar to an advanced version of The Sims, a game where you control the life of a simulated person. Musk makes the point that “40 years ago, all we had was pong, just two rectangles and a dot” (Elon Musk, 2016), yet only four decades later we have massively multiplayer online games, with photorealistic graphics and the technology is improving greatly every year. If you were to travel just a few thousands years into the future, assuming technology continues to advance at the same rate it does currently, it wouldn’t be too difficult to imagine us being able to simulate universes, and ourselves, accurately. This is one of the main driving factors behind the simulation argument and it is the reason why many high up people within the tech industry believe that the hypothesis could be true.

Another point often overlooked is the illusion of free will. Video games are a good example of this, and how our perception can be distorted to make us think we are fully in control of all that happens around us. If you look at some of the first games, such as “Super Mario Bros”, they all follow a very linear playstyle. The experience follows from left to right as the player progresses through the level and while they are in control of the character, there is only one way to advance. Compare that to recent games such as “Grand Theft Auto V” or “Fallout 4”. In these games, you are presented with an open world with seemingly endless possibilities. The player is given a sense of free will, to act however they please within the game world. They feel completely in control of what happens and what will happen. This isn’t true however, as every action and event that can happen has been predetermined by the creator of the game. This theory can be applied to our own universe and our experience of free will, maybe all of our actions are predetermined by our creator and the simulation we exist in. A simulation of our universe would only need to give the illusion of free will to be accurate. It is rational to assume that as technology advances, our ability to simulate the feeling and experience of free will will also advance, to a point where we can no longer distinguish between pre-programmed events and original organic ideas.

Video games and the illusion of free will presented within them provide a compelling argument for the simulation hypothesis that many people can understand, and if technology continues to advance at the rate at which it currently does then it isn’t ridiculous to assume that simulating universes, including our own, is possible.

Virtual Reality

On a similar note to video games, virtual reality technologies present an interesting aspect to the simulated reality hypothesis. The rapidly advancing technology now means that fully immersive virtual reality experiences can begin to be created.Some users become so immersed that they forget that the virtual environment they’re in isn’t real, and lose all sense of the real world around them. It can become so immersive that users will go to lean on an imaginary table that only exists in the virtual world and subsequently fall over. Chris Milk, an American entrepreneur said “In virtual reality, we're placing the viewer inside a moment or a story... made possible by sound and visual technology that's actually tricking the brain into believing it's somewhere else.” (Chris Milk, 2015).

The fact that our perception of reality can be so easily altered and fooled by merely visual and auditory stimulation, highlights how much we rely on what we see and hear to gain an understanding of the world around us. Add to that the fact that this is using current technology, and it makes you wonder what virtual reality will be like in ten, twenty years time. One could easily assume that within the next one thousand years, we could see virtual reality technologies that are completely indistinguishable from real life. This plays in to the simulation hypothesis well, as if our perception is so easily fooled using rudimentary technology, who can argue that our “reality” is genuine either.

The Future

Gazing into the future, we can begin to imagine what kinds of computing power it would take to simulate an our entire universe. If this ever becomes reality, how can we know it hasn’t happened before, and like the inhabitants of our simulated universe, we would be unaware to the fact that we are just a simulated consciousness inside a machine.

At first, simulating a universe might seem impossible, but by dissecting the issue you can become aware of what kinds of computing power you might need to accomplish a task. To begin, you are not required to simulate every single atom at the same time. You only need to simulate what the observers (humans) of your universe are currently witnessing. For example, you don’t need to simulate stars at the edge of the universe, as your observers are trapped on earth for now. Similarly, you don’t need to simulate the inside of a human body until one of your observers decides to, albeit morbidly, have a look. We might think we are made up of lots of stuff inside of us, however maybe our simulation only creates it when it needs to. Due to this, the minimum requirement needed for this hypothetical simulation is just the consciousness of your observers. This saves on a lot of computing power.

Now, we might have saved some time by not having to simulate an entire universe, but simulating a consciousness isn’t easy either. Firstly, we need to work on the assumption that given enough computing power and an accurate map of the neural network of the human brain, we can achieve a simulated consciousness. For all we know, there might be some magic “stuff” that means consciousness can only be achieved biologically, however for this argument we’ll assume that it is possible. To theoretically simulate a human brain you would need roughly 10^18 operations a second. For our hypothetical simulation, say we want to simulate two hundred billion humans each with a fifty year lifespan, to loosely represent all of human history. One year is roughly thirty million seconds. We can use these values to create an equation to see the amount of computing power we’d need to simulate all of the consciousnesses of our observers, and therefore simulate a universe.

30,000,000 seconds * 50 years * 200,000,000,000 humans * 10^18

= 3 * 10^38

= 300 billion billion billion billion

= 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

You would need a computer capable of running 300 billion billion billion billion operations per second to simulate the entirety of human history in one second. This number is larger than there are stars in the observable universe, so with our current understanding of technology, simulating a universe seems impossible. Technology is continually advancing however, with new revelations in quantum computing, building a computer capable of running our simulating becomes more and more possible. The field of quantum computing is still extremely young and it’s capabilities still aren’t surely known, however we do know that it is a lot quicker than conventional computing methods, so simulating the entirety of human history might be possible in the not so distant future.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s impossible to determine whether our reality is simulated or not. Hypotheses like this aren’t supposed to provide answers, they work more to start trains of thought which make people question their own reality, authority and religion. It relies heavily on assumptions, but none of them can be proved not to be true either. This kind of thought provoking argument has such a presence in visual culture due to the fact it can’t be proven or disproven, and plays on human psychology to create fascination in the irregular and, at first, seemingly impossible proposition.

It's currently impossible to provide definite answers as to whether we are existing inside a simulation, so we have no choice but to continue on as we are, not knowing whether anything we experience is genuine.

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