If you could change the laws of nature, what would you
change?
Maybe it is that pesky speed-of-light limit on cosmic travel —
not to mention war, pestilence, and the eventual asteroid that has Earth’s name
on it. Maybe you would like the ability to go back in time — to tell your
teenage self how to deal with your parents, or to buy Google stock. Could the
universe not use a few improvements?
اضافة اعلان
That was the question that David Anderson, a computer scientist,
enthusiast of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), musician,
and mathematician at the
University of California, Berkeley, recently asked his
colleagues and friends.
In recent years the idea that our universe, including ourselves
and all of our innermost thoughts, is a computer simulation, running on a
thinking machine of cosmic capacity, has permeated culture high and low. In an
influential essay in 2003, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of
Oxford and director of the Institute for the Future of Humanity, proposed the
idea, adding that it was probably an easy accomplishment for “technologically
mature” civilizations wanting to explore their histories or entertain their
offspring. Elon Musk, who, for all we know, is the star of this simulation,
seemed to echo this idea when he once declared that there was only a
one-in-a-billion chance that we lived in “base reality.”
It is hard to prove, and not everyone agrees that such a drastic
extrapolation of our computing power is possible or inevitable, or that
civilization will last long enough to see it through. But we can’t disprove the
idea either, so thinkers like Bostrom contend that we must take the possibility
seriously. In some respects, the notion of a Great Simulator is redolent of a
recent theory among cosmologists that the
universe is a hologram, its margins
lined with quantum codes that determine what is going on inside.
A couple of years ago, pinned down by the coronavirus pandemic,
Anderson began discussing the implications of this idea with his teenage son.
If indeed everything was a simulation, then making improvements would simply be
a matter of altering whatever software program was running everything. “Being a
programmer, I thought about exactly what these changes might involve,” he said
in an email.
If the software were well written, tweaking it should be easy
work, he reasoned. Modifications could change our laws of physics, or add new
features to the universe: menu options, speed filters, closed captioning,
pop-up blockers — buttons to push that would make our lives richer or more fun.
Moreover, if the software running the
universe were open source — publicly available for other programmers to inspect and manipulate — then
these “meta-hackers” might be amenable to our feature requests and might even
be looking for them, Dan Werthimer, Anderson’s colleague in Berkeley,
suggested. Think of it as a cybernetic version of prayer, a way to petition the
Great Simulator.
Anderson recently polled his colleagues to ask how they would
tweak the cosmic algorithm, which he calls Unisym. He posted the responses on
his blog, along with comments on how these changes might be put into effect and
how well they might work.
“This was during COVID, when I was filling my ample free time by
writing various essays on philosophy, politics, and music and putting them on
my website,” he said. The emphasis was not on eliminating war and injustice but
on features that might help us cosmic small fry to navigate the vicissitudes of
“life”.
For example, Anderson would like to be able to click a button
and view all of the footsteps he has ever taken, glowing orange on the ground.
“I can see where I’ve been in Berkeley and go to the Sierras and I can see all
the hikes I’ve taken there,” he said. Clicking another button would highlight
all of the footprints ever made. “Are there places no one has ever been?” he
wondered. His son, he added, would like to know if a joke he was about to tell
would get a good laugh.
Some feature requests from his other respondents: the ability to
pause the simulation long enough to think up a snappy retort in conversation,
or a rewind option to undo a regrettable remark or revisit a missed
opportunity, something I would definitely up-vote.
Simple as these requests may sound,
Anderson noted, using such
features might require a fair bit of computational engineering behind the
scenes. For instance, briefly pausing the universe to collect your thoughts
would require branching your own existence into a temporary parallel
simulation; then, when you knew what you wanted to say, you could hit the
escape key and revert to the original simulation. Rewinding to correct the past
would also cause the simulation to branch, but in this case, Anderson said, you
would continue in the parallel simulation “and never hit escape.”
Of course, he added, “the usual time-travel weirdness applies.”
Stepping into the future and returning would endow your present self with
memories of things that hadn’t happened yet. This, in turn, would change the
future, such that when you got there it wouldn’t be quite what you had
remembered from your first visit.
Likewise, stepping into the past could alter what you remembered
happening in the future. It might even obviate your own existence. Apparently,
time travel is about the most dangerous thing you can do.
What is on your
cosmic wish list? How would you tweak the
supreme algorithm? The year 2023 is still young; there’s plenty of time to
petition the cosmic hackers for a better deal. Just look out for the
butterflies, and be careful what you wish for.
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