SUPREME REVIEW: Are we just Pokemon floating in a fake world?

It’s been uploaded to our reality for weeks now, but Pokémon Go still makes me feel as if I have awakened in a distant future. Hordes of smartphone-wielding people are showing up in places previously ignored by the pre-Pikachu world, looking for animated monsters in every nook and cranny. They’re stopping in the middle of traffic, crowding sidewalks, and roaming the streets for PokéStops, Pokémon Gyms, and other things non-Pokémon players like myself cannot see, understand, or really care about. But there’s a world out there that occupies huge chunks of mental and actual real estate, and as far as some people are concerned, they are real, even if they technically aren’t.

Augmented reality is, well, “augmenting” our reality. Pokémon Go is definitely its most popular application, but the technology is slowly seeping its way through various aspects of our lives. It turns mountains and vast terrains into virtual maps, it tells you what stars you’re looking at just by pointing your phone camera at the sky, and it even places prospective furniture in your house. If you forgot where you parked your car, there’s an augmented reality app that will literally point to it, like God’s finger coming down from heaven. If you want to get into graffiti but can’t stomach the vandalism part, you can now make virtual ones only visible in the app’s world.

Of course, the rise of AR isn’t happening in a technological vacuum. With virtual reality headset Oculus Rift and Apple’s recently teased forays into AR, 2016 is shaping up to be The Year Simulation Broke. It’s now easier to imagine a not-so-distant future where AR and VR become normative, where you get to have walks in the park with a virtual girlfriend or play one-on-one basketball with Kristaps Porzingis in your barangay basketball court.

Transcending Entertainment

At the rate we’re going, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that reality-altering simulations will transcend entertainment and gaming, and become a basic function of everyday life — kind of like what the Internet is right now. But what if this ever accelerating progress points to something else, something a lot less imaginable? What if it means that our reality, our entire universe, is itself one big computer simulation?

This is the mind-blowing suggestion behind the “simulation hypothesis,” an idea forwarded by a Swedish philosopher named Nick Bostrom in 2003 but is slowly gaining traction in the year of simulation. It’s been casually discussed by SpaceX and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk in the Code Conference in June, seriously considered by cultural critic Chuck Klosterman in his latest book, But What If We’re Wrong?, and the subject of this year’s annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate moderated by America’s most famous living scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and attended by actual physicists and cosmologists, and not by a bunch of conspiracy theorists who believe that 9/11 was an inside job or that the Marcos presidency was a golden age. This is really a thing. A scientific thing. In the Asimov debate, four out of the six scientists in attendance (including Tyson) argued in favor of the simulation hypothesis. So what, you may ask, the hell is going on here?

I’m not entirely sure either. But allow me — a math idiot and someone who follows science not as a field of study, but as a spectator sport – to sum it up as best as I can.

Probabilistic Argument

The most basic argument for the simulation hypothesis is probabilistic. If computer technology and artificial intelligence continue to advance (and if humans survive long enough), future technology will allow us to simulate entire universes. In a future world where this is possible, it is logical to predict the existence of hundreds, even thousands of simulated worlds and universes. That means that fake universes will vastly outnumber the original one. So statistically speaking, it’s highly unlikely that our universe is real.

This proposition may seem underwhelming. Pro-simulation physicists aren’t particularly interested in this line of thinking. They will point instead to the rigid mathematical laws governing the universe, such as error-correcting codes, similar to the ones in web browsers, that are present in string theory. But the most compelling “proof” I’ve encountered is physical. In 1978, a physicist named John Wheeler proposed a thought experiment designed to settle an age-old question on how matter behaves at a fundamental level: whether they manifest in waves or in particles. Earlier experiments have shown that when light travels through a two-slit barrier, it passes through the slits as waves. But Wheeler predicted that as soon as someone looks at the light, the waves will turn into particles. This was confirmed in separate experiments conducted by a French physicist named Alain Aspect in 2007 and an Australian physicist named Andrew Truscott in 2015: photons and atoms decide whether to be waves or particles only after human observation. “At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” Truscott said.

The experiments seem to prove that we’re not living in a materialistic universe — a universe that exists independent of consciousness. What it suggests is that consciousness dictates matter, the same way that a first-person video game’s POV dictates its surroundings. When you get past a certain building in Call Of Duty, the computer ceases to process the image of that building, so it isn’t really “there.” A Bulbasaur is only there on your toilet seat when you point your phone at it. Does this mean that a tree didn’t really fall in a forest if there was no one there to hear it? Or that my CD collection at home dissolves into shapeless bytes of RAM when I’m at work? Or that there’s an Almighty Programmer behind all of this, and if so, can we ask her to reboot 2016 because it sucks?

That’s so ‘Matrix’

If you’re thinking, “this is so Matrix,” you’re wrong. In The Matrix, Keanu Reeves’ actual body was connected to a machine that played tricks with his mind. What the simulation hypothesis suggests is that we have no real body, that we’re just basically abstract data. We’re just software with no hardware counterpart. Everything we take for granted to be real — from our deepest emotions to our monthly bills — are just digital simulations. Depending on your worldview, this could be horrifying, liberating, or flat-out hilarious. I see it as the scientific community’s way of stretching its legs after being stuck in traffic for too long. For a century, theoretical physicists have been trying in vain to formulate a “Theory of Everything,” so when the simulation hypothesis came along, they probably just went, “Sure, that’s it. Whatever.”

While most simulation arguments are fascinating, the main hypothesis is still hard to take seriously. It just seems so limited and too tethered to the now. Maybe the universe seems simulated because computer technology is the only reliable analogue we currently have. As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, playing devil’s advocate in the Asimov debate, “If you’re finding IT solutions to your problems, maybe it’s just the fad of the moment.” I find it suspicious that the universe’s great mystery resides in this home appliance I use to watch old Late Night With Conan O’Brien sketches.

Could it be that the inverse is true? That instead of reality being a product of computer programming, computer technology has become so advanced that it now resembles creation? That we’ve pirated God’s codes while still using counterfeit parts? But what if those parts can be replicated? Like, what if advanced consciousness is replicable in artificial intelligence? I mean, we created a self-aware robot just last year; will computers be able to feel things, hold opinions, and develop sarcasm in a matter of decades? Will we debate them in angry Facebook threads in the future? Oh, my God, we’ve been living in a simulation all this time, haven’t we?

I want to be reprogrammed as a happy little Pokémon who questions nothing.

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