Are we all living in a simulation?

Is the world as we know it just a massive hoax?

A computer game with damn good graphics and unimaginable computing power?

Any reasonable person intuitively dismisses such considerations as pipe dreams.

The red pill that already pointed the way from simulation to real reality in the 1999 film "Matrix" is difficult to swallow.

A dream feels real until you wake up and recognize it as a dream.

Why should our reality be any different?

Patrick Schlereth

Editor on duty at FAZ.NET.

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The metaphysical question about the nature of reality is significantly older than our technical achievements.

In Plato's allegory of the cave, the prisoners see only the shadows of the real world cast by the fire on the cave wall all their lives.

More than 2000 years later, the idea of ​​the illusory world takes on a new, technically conditioned topicality.

Everyone hears that the future of the internet is the metaverse, the industry association Bitkom speaks of the “next level of the internet” and of a “huge disruptive potential”.

Musk thinks the world is a video game

It's still hard to imagine, given that when you hear the keyword Metaverse, you think, for example, of Mark Zuckerberg's wooden baby doll avatar, who meets robots in a comic world to play cards.

Or “Second Life”, which failed two decades ago to lure large crowds into the digital parallel world in order to build digital houses with roughly drawn avatars or to shop for clothes.

But what if the metaverse eventually looks so real that it's indistinguishable from the real world?

How would this change our understanding of reality?

Not only billionaire Elon Musk estimates the probability that we live in the real world and not in a computer game at one in a billion, as he said at a tech conference in 2016.

Even scientists are seriously concerned with the probability of the so-called simulation hypothesis.

In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, published a much-cited essay entitled "Are we living in a computer simulation?".

He believes it is possible that with exponentially increasing computing power, the entire history of mankind can be simulated on the computer at some point - if mankind does not wipe itself out beforehand.

The inventor of the computer, Konrad Zuse, came up with the idea of ​​understanding the universe as a gigantic data processing system.

In this scenario, the speed of light would be the – at least theoretically – observable limit of processor performance.

If someone moves at 300,000 kilometers per second, they perceive a still image.

Time stands still because the computer doesn't calculate the environment fast enough.

Proof of the artificiality of what we perceive as real?

The simulation hypothesis is nothing more than a theoretical mind game.

In practice, it can probably never be checked because there is nothing outside the simulation that we can observe.

However, the hypothesis will gain relevance when mankind is able to build ever more complex simulations of the universe.

For now, for all the talk of the Metaverse, it doesn't look like it - yet.

Even in gaming, VR only serves a niche

Because technological quantum leaps are difficult to predict.

At the beginning of the 1970s, many were still amazed by the video game "Pong", which is rudimentary from today's point of view, in which a bar can be controlled on a vertical axis in order to ward off a ball.

50 years later, video game characters are based on real actors, and shadows and reflections have long had cinematic quality.

Developed for gaming consoles, the Matrix Awakens technology demo took a close look to tell the difference between the animated Keanu Reeves and the real thing.

It was released in 2021, parallel to the big comeback of the "Matrix" film series, which had an interesting twist in store right from the start.