The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game

John Wheeler, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, draws out the distinction between observer and participant in the experiment: Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as “sitting out there,” with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter slab of plate glass. Even

What causes this collapse? The debate rages on today, but Heisenberg writes: “The path of the electron comes into existence only when we observe it.” The act of observation itself seems to be the key to unlocking a particularly “local” reality out of the “non-local” probability wave of where the particle might be.

It turns out that the best explanation for what collapses the probability wave is the process of observation. It is as if we need to have someone looking at the thing to determine what the thing is, otherwise the thing is really just a mass of floating probabilities (often called the quantum foam).

It’s a simple probability, then, that tells us, since there are many more beings in simulated worlds than the physical real world, that the chances that we are simulated beings in a simulation is very high.

If our memories of the past can be modified, does this also mean that the past can effectively be modified? Is there a meaningful distinction between these two?

This was a confounding conclusion for the early quantum scientists, and they referred to the wave of possibilities as the “quantum probability wave” and suggested that when a particle is observed, it causes a “collapse” of the probability wave into a single possibility: the path that the electron took to get to a particular point on the screen.