The Expanding Simulation
From Simulism
Author: Ivo Jansch
If we are living in a simulation, would we be able to reach the edge of the simulation? And what if you were the author of a simulation, and the inhabitants of your simulation started to explore the boundaries of your simulation? In this essay, I ponder these questions and the implications.
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[edit] Boundaries?
Yes, if you create a simulation, it is very natural to have boundaries. In The Truman Show (spoilers ahead, but I'm sure everybody has seen it by now), Truman sails to the end of the ocean and ends up at a wall.
In The Thirteenth Floor, the boundary of the simulation is located at the end of a long road, where the rendering of the simulation just fades via a wire-frame into nothing. Likewise, in the movie Dark City, the main characters are unable to actually visit "Seal Beach", even though he has a memory of it, because it is beyond the boundary of the "simulated" world.
Most games like Sim City are situated on either an island, or have some predefined grid that you can't leave.
A boundary exists for technical reasons, or for practical reasons.
[edit] Why haven't we noticed our boundaries yet?
If we are living in a simulation, as this site suggests, then why haven't we run into its boundaries? This could be because the creators of the simulation would not want us to know that boundaries exist.
The most obvious reason: it would make us 100% aware of the fact that we are living in a Simulation. In both The Truman Show and The Thirteenth Floor, reaching the edge convinced people that the world around them was not real.
It could also be that we aren't generally looking for the boundaries. Each of us has significant limits on many axes:
- length of life
- the number of ideas we can contemplate
- money
- the number of places we can visit
- energy
These all work to limit the amount of work a simulation would need to do in order to be convincing.
Are there also physical boundaries? I'll explore that in the rest of this page.
[edit] Obfuscating the boundaries
[edit] A sufficiently large simulation
One way to prevent us from discovering the boundaries of the simulation we are living in, is to make the simulation mindbogglingly vast. In The Thirteenth Floor, at first the simulants didn't notice the boundaries because they were so remote. You had to drive an insane distance before you would reach the end. Likewise, the simulation we are living in contains an entire universe, and that universe is so enormous that it would be very difficult to reach the edge. We don't even have the means to travel that far yet.
Remember the movie 'Contact'? At one point, Ellie asks her dad "Do you think there's people on other planets?", and dad answers: "I guess I'd say if it is just us... it seems like an awful waste of space". In this scenario, it wouldn't be a waste of space however, it would just be a precaution to prevent us from reaching the edge.
[edit] An expanding simulation
I can imagine 2 problems with the 'sufficiently large simulation' concept. One is that it is hard to predict how large the simulation should be. Especially if the simulation is capable of technological growth, at one point or another, the simulation would be too small. (I used to have this problem with Sim City 2000, where after a while, my grid would just become saturated.)
The second problem is one of capacity. The larger a simulation is, the more computing power it requires.
A solution to both problems would be to make the size of the simulation flexible. It could gradually grow as needed. If people in the simulation approach the edge, the edge would just be moved, the simulation would increase. This way, we would prevent people from discovering any boundaries, and, as technology evolves over time, more computing power will become available and the simulation can grow in complexity.
[edit] Evidence for an increasing simulation
[edit] The flat earth
For a significant amount of time, we thought the earth was flat (wikipedia). When we tried to sail to the end of the world, we discovered that the earth was round. This could mean 2 things: billions of people had it wrong at first, and the earth had always been round, or at the point where we would actually reach the edge of the simulation, the simulation was updated in such a way that there wasn't any edge. (Round planets was a very smart move, if inhabitants of a simulation do not have the capacity to fly, you effectively have a borderless simulation. For a while.)
[edit] The expanding universe
If you have a round planet, and people forced by gravity to remain on the surface, there's a small chance that we discover edges of the simulation. But since our simulation is equiped with technological development capabilities, we found a way to leave the planet and explore the surroundings. At first, a solar system is enough to keep the borders out of reach, but with the Voyager satellite, and developments in spacecrafts, you need more than a solar system or even a galaxy.
If you would be the creator and discover that your simulation keeps on advancing, at one point you would grow tired of increasing the simulation every time a new Hubble space telescope is invented to look into the depths of space.
So a logical step is to make the universe expand automatically (wikipedia). You'd need to tune the running speed of the simulation with the speed with which you can expand the universe and with the speed of computing power advancements.
So the fact that the farther we can look into space, the more we see, and the fact that the universe is expanding at a certain rate, would be in line with someone running a simulation while trying to prevent the inhabitants from reaching the border.
[edit] Particles
The argument may work both ways. As we are trying to explore our surroundings, we are also working on finding out what the universe is made up of. We've discovered that everything is made up of molecules. But when we looked closer, molecules appeared to be made up of atoms. Nearly had we identified all atoms, or we discovered that atoms are not as 'atomary' (greek for 'undividable') as we thought; there were neutrons, protons and electrons that made up an atom. The more we know about the fabric of the universe, the more complex it becomes. Currently, Quarks, Leptons and Bosons are supposedly the elementary particles (wikipedia) that do not consist of smaller particles. Perhaps as soon as we think we know everything there is to know about them, someone discovers that even Quarks are made up of something else.
Like the expanding universe, this is in line with the concept of someone creating a simulation and preventing inhabitants from discovering how it works. (An analogy would be that if characters in The Sims would be cognitive, they would be looking for the elements '0' and '1', the basic building blocks of their simulation).
[edit] Wouldn't we notice the increase in the simulation?
If the earth was flat, and suddenly it was round, wouldn't we notice the difference? When making the update to the simulation, the simulation can probably easily be paused and updated. In the update, all evidence could be updated too, in such a way that past evidence that the earth was flat no longer exists (not so difficult if noone had ever reached the edge), and the earth would appear to have been round all along.
Wouldn't the inhabitants notice the gradual expansion of the universe? Sure, but they'd just call this a 'Big Bang Theory' and make it part of their understanding of the universe.
Category: Essays