An associate professor of physics at the University of Portsmouth has suggested possible types of simulation humanity could be in, following highly controversial claims that evidence could support the idea we are not living in base reality. 

Dr Melvin Vopson made headlines last year when he claimed to have found evidence for a new law of physics termed the “second law of Infodynamics”, and that it could indicate we are living in a simulated universe. On top of that, he claims to have found this potential evidence whilst studying mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the short version is that Vopson believes there are processes – such as symmetry in the universe and in virus evolution – that appear to be biased towards minimizing information in the universe. 

“Since the second law of infodynamics is a cosmological necessity, and appears to apply everywhere in the same way, it could be concluded that this indicates that the entire universe appears to be a simulated construct or a giant computer,” Vopson explained in a piece for The Conversation.

“A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation. This is exactly what we are observing all around us, including in digital data, biological systems, mathematical symmetries and the entire universe.”

Vopson believes that there could be ways to test whether we are in a simulation, including determining whether information has mass. 

It’s a controversial claim, and one which would require extraordinary evidence. We do not have that. However, Vopson has outlined a few types of simulation we could be inside, and why an advanced civilization may take the time to simulate us.

A previous idea, proposed by Nick Bostrom, is that future civilizations may choose to run “ancestor simulations” to study their predecessors. According to his paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?”, if running such simulations becomes trivial, there would be far more “observers” living inside such simulations than in base reality, and so we should assume we are simulated.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Vopson outlined a few other possibilities, while also stressing that these are purely speculative ideas, and we have no scientific basis for believing that they should be true.

In one idea, he suggests that the simulation we find ourselves in could be purely created for entertainment purposes. In this version, people could enter the simulation voluntarily in order to experience a different life.

In another, our conscious experiences are merely a by-product of an advanced civilization trying to solve problems of their own.

“Imagine that our society has a complex issue to solve – environmental, economic, energy crisis, wars,” Vopson said in the interview.

“If we had the ability, the best way to solve it would be to run a simulation (or multiple parallel simulations) and see what solutions the simulated version of us come up with. If any of the simulations crack the problem, then we can adopt it in the base reality as a viable solution.”

In the third idea, he suggests that time could run much faster in base reality, and beings could choose to live multiple lifetimes inside a simulation back to back, suggesting that experiencing hundreds of lives could take mere hours in base reality. If such an option was available, we may choose to take it in order to extend our lifetimes. 

While fun to speculate about in a sci-fi way, like time travel, we have no real reason to suspect we are in anything other than base reality. We have not even figured out our own consciousness, let alone figured out whether it can emerge in anything other than biological beings, nor produced a computer capable of running such simulations. On top of this, the idea has been criticized for being unscientific, as it may not be possible to prove you are living inside a simulation from within it.

Nevertheless, there are those who share this idea we are living in a simulation who say it may be testable. One team recently tried to see if reality is rendered at the point of use. They have since gone a little quiet, but who knows, maybe they have been woken up in the real world by Lawrence Fishburne.