Is this reality?
We take what we see for granted. We rely on our sight to judge distance, volume, area and speed. We have come to rely on it so absolutely that there is no way we could question the authenticity of it. However a closed mind is like a closed book; just a block of wood. What if our senses were not telling us the truth? What if in fact this was not reality?
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The human body has five senses; sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Of those five the two we rely on most heavily are sight and hearing. For those who are blind or deaf it has a profound impact on their lives, although one could argue that sight is the most important of the five senses. Here is an interesting question; how do you know the color green you see is the same color green someone else sees? We have all come to expect from childhood that grass, plants and most vegetables are green. Yet we have no way on independently verifying this. Asking someone else what the color green is and they too will respond that it is the color of grass, plants and most vegetables. What we can however tell is color blindness and the rarer monochromacy which is the complete inability to distinguish colors. But what if we could trick the eyes into believing an alternate reality? This was the idea behind Virtual Reality headsets that showed a motion controlled environment of a 3D world to the user.
The VR headsets that first starting appearing in the 1990's may have been a crude attempt at virtual reality but they did show us what was possible. As a result numerous films and books capitalized on the new VR craze. Two of the more popular motion pictures that dealt with being trapped in a virtual world were "The Thirteenth Floor" and "The Matrix".
The premise of "The Thirteenth Floor" was that simulations of people created within a virtual world realized what was happening and tried to escape via real life individuals logging into it. The plot of "The Matrix" revolved around sentient machines who had created a virtual world for humans to live in so they could be used as a power supply. In both movies the main characters were not aware that the world they were living in was virtual. In "The Matrix" the lead character Neo had always felt that something was wrong with the world but it took an outside source to unplug him from the simulation. The more interesting premise however come from "The Thirteenth Floor". The main character came to realize that the only way to know the truth was to perform an experiment on the virtual world. In essence he drove to a random place that he never would have normally gone to and as a result would be outside the parameters of the VR simulation. It was at this place he learnt the truth and saw the world for what is really was, computer controlled.
So how do we know if we are currently in a simulation? Well first let us look at the options:
1 - No simulation
This is probably the easiest option to accept and is it the one most people believe.
2 - Full simulation
A full simulation would involve everyone we know being hooked into a virtual reality system and interacting inside a simulation of the Earth. The logistics of this are staggering however in some ways we are all part of a simulation. The human sense of sight cannot see all the colors of the spectrum and compared to a number of animals it is quite substandard. So in this respect our vision of the world has already been modified by the limitations of our human bodies.
3 - Partial simulation
You are the only one inside the simulation. Everything and everyone you know are a computer controlled simulation. This is probably the easier option to implement and indeed we have seen VR headsets which give you an appreciation of how it would work.
In theory it would be easier to escape from a partial simulation than a full simulation. The latter would require a significant amount of flexibility as individuals within the system can interact with each other and travel. A partial simulation involving one person would typically be much smaller and confined. As we rely completely on our senses the only way to break out of the simulation is to break the simulation. No system is perfect and going beyond the bounds of what the designers had originally conceived could have unintended consequences thereby breaking what we would consider the laws of our reality such as gravity, distance etc.
A good example of breaking a simulation was a problem that occurred in the on-line game World of Warcraft. A number of players had found that by jumping their characters close to a wall in just the right spot caused them to literally climb the wall. Needless to say this wall climbing problem was eventually patched however it highlights the issues facing designers of virtual worlds. So how do you break a simulation of a world? Just remember that no simulation is perfect, so it can be broken. It is just a matter of finding the weak spot and exploiting it.
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