A fun little theory about "emulated worlds"

A while ago I was watching Arcane and started thinking about how far animation has come in the past 50 years. This led me down a fun little rabbit hole thinking about the evolution of animation technology, and to a broader extent, the evolution of our creative expression or "resolution" over time.

I should be very clear, I don't subscribe to "simulated reality" theories because I find they too often revolve around dissociating from reality or perceiving this reality as "not real". Our reality is real. It's the realest reality we have. We feel here, we love here, we experience the consequences of our actions here. There's no escape from this realm of existence aside from death (which could be the beginning of a new reality, but that's not where this rabbit hole goes).

Here's where it starts:

Our creative resolution gets higher with time. "Resolution" meaning definition, representation and resemblance to reality. Different creative resolutions signify different eras because they represent the creative technologies of the time. It follows that our "creative resolution" will continue to increase with time, and whatever creative technology we're experiencing now will always look dated in 50 years. Currently, motion graphics are becoming more difficult to distinguish from the real world. Where does that leave us in 50 years if the technologies continue to advance, especially if we account for AI advancing simultaneously?

This trajectory of "creative resolution" is stable and predictable, in that it is ever-increasing. Maybe not as a perfectly straight diagonal but it will always reliably increase. So it's inevitable we will reach a point of creative resolution where we can not longer differentiate between real life and simulated life. Entropy is integral to the passing of time, and entropy in humanity's creative technologies will inevitably lead to the point of simulations and emulated realities, the most advanced being impossible to differentiate from the real world. This outcome, given enough time, and assuming we don't destroy ourselves first, is inevitable.

So, is that proof we exist in a simulation? Because the likelihood of this happening is so certain, is the probability that it is already happening also likely?

"Simulation" isn't quite the right word though, especially if we're talking about science. A simulation is a model built for study. This experience of living, to me, doesn't feel like an experiment used for training or problem solving, though it wouldn't be impossible of course. I just think we're a species more likely to play before we study and analyze. I have nothing to back that up. But "emulation" feels more apt, ie: "to imitate (a particular computer system) by using a software system, often including a microprogram or another computer that enables it to do the same work, run the same programs, etc., as the first." (thanks dictionary.com).

So in the same way we create sim worlds to play with, if our technology had the capacity to build a deeply emulated world, wouldn't humanity be very likely to jump right in? It's a scenario I can so easily picture, especially given the increasing volatility of our climate and world politics. I feel like if given the chance to fully immerse ourselves in another world (or worlds), as a civilization, we would take it gladly.

So let's assume we achieve the technological capacity to combine motion graphics with quantum AI and wowee looky here we can build entire emulated realities now.

If you're still with me, cool, thanks for your support. I'm not having a meltdown, this is just really fun to think about. And besides, so far this really just sounds like simulation hypotheses that have already been explored, so relax. I don't agree with Nick Bostrom's speculation that we'd be likely to run simulations of our forebears. Why? We already know what happened to them. Boooooring. I think we're much more likely to create retuned versions of ourselves. That is, if we chose to create our "selves" at all. Sometimes you'd want to play as a mouse, or a bird, or a tree. Why not? But I do think the first thing humanity would do as an overwhelmingly narcissistic species is build silly little avatars of ourselves, like we already do in open world RPGs. 

So there's a chance it's already happened, and we're already in a novelty realm created to entertain our higher selves.

This is where the rabbit hole starts spinning, so hang on.

One "realm" could create multiple emulations. Thousands even. We already do this in gaming, just on a more rudimentary level. But if we assume everything above is possible, the only limitations to these emulations would be server space and energy. That's a variable that's impossible to weigh given our current tech—who's to say servers won't become vastly more efficient and easier to cool than the ones we use now (which are currently sucking our planet dry). I'm going to pretend they will become more efficient, because if they don't we'll all burn before we get a chance to spawn more worlds. In this thought experiment, the tech advances and our planet stays mostly liveable for a few more hundred years. Phew.

So multiple emulations spawning from one realm. And the effect of entropy remains—those new emulated realms could each also evolve to a point where their technologies spawn more emulated realms. The effect becomes exponential. As we established earlier, entropy in humanity's creative technologies will inevitably lead to the point of simulations and emulated realities. So this cycle of creation would hypothetically repeat both exponentially and infinitely. Not every realm would get there, of course. But plenty would. As long as the probability exists, the branches will continue to spawn.

Each emulated realm's time would likely shrink too, similar to "game time" where our characters' time passes much more quickly relative to our time. So if we were an emulated reality, our lifetimes and eras could be a matter of hours to the "higher realms", and this shrinking of time could happen infinitely with each emulated realm, each successive realm's time nested into the one preceding it, like Ukrainian matryoshka dolls, but like, planes of existence. The further removed a realm is from the origin realm, the greater the disparity in time would be. 

Still here? Okay I'm not done.

This also fits with theories of "quantum immortality"—if your "self" dies in one realm, it makes no difference to all the other selves. They continue to live, until they die, and their deaths have no impact on the other selves either. If a "higher self" died, their spawned entities would continue to exist as long as their realm held, though perhaps those entities would fail more frequently. I actually don't think this is what the quantum immortality theory meant at all, but I think the term fits this theory better. This is still working with the idea that we would consistently recreate our individual selves, which is less probable than us simply creating multiple entities for the novelty of it. So it isn't as probable that the beings in the successive realms would be direct avatars requiring guidance from their higher selves, though those entities would still exist. So, rarely, a person in our world might have a "higher self" directing them, and others might just be a highly advanced NPCs (non-player characters), but we'd never know the difference. Gives new meaning to the word "basic".

But these infinitely emulated worlds definitely and obviously apply to the many-worlds interpretation. Like duh.

So right now you should have the image of a sideways, massive leafless tree in your mind. The tree's branches would become finer (time shrinkage, remember) and more numerous as they radiate further outward, becoming denser as they extend ever-forward.

And if a higher realm ended, so would all the branches it spawned. But, if that higher realm were obliterated, the effects of that obliteration would impact the successive realms in the order of their closeness to that higher realm. And the speed of the obliteration would be slower for each further removed successive realm. The effects of the higher realm's obliteration might not be felt for thousands or millions of years to the farthest successive realms. Obliteration could be as slow as a dying star, or the pull of a black hole. To the host realm, the impact would be swift, but for every successive realm it would become slower and slower. 

Any massive catastrophic event would subsequently "prune" the cluster of branched emulated realms. Now, if a certain region of the cluster was more lucky than the others, and catastrophes were rarer, and the branches became extremely dense, would the emulations ever overlap or interact? Would the realities ever drift through each other? I'm not going to answer that because I don't know how, but it's fun to think about.

And finally, if we're talking about servers, sleep applies. All servers need cool down phases in order to run optimally. Maybe this is why sleep is so baked into our existence. Everything sleeps, even our computers. This also speaks to why we don't emulate our current computers, but they emulate us. Programming, algorithms, learning, sleep, the computers perform all these things as rudimentary imitations of us. We aren't computers, they're us. We're the chickens, they're the eggs. And then the eggs grow into chickens and lay more eggs, ad infinitum.

Not to brag but this also fits with the "Big Bounce" and Big Bang theories, because a higher realm being obliterated would pull everything back to its preceding realm's branching point, then spawn another branch. Which applies to both the "single bounce" and "cyclic universe" theories, because it's kinda both. Beings of a spawned world wouldn't know whether they spawned from a "bounce" or a "bang"—from their perspectives, the two realities would seem the same. All part of the same boiling, popping, branching, twisting, radiating quantum tree.

So this "emulated worlds" theory then accommodates just about every theological and religious perspective; polytheism, monotheism, atheism, animism, totemism, life after death, reincarnation—there's room for all of them within this framework. The absurdist in me has always loved the position of "maybe everyone is right", and this supports it quite well.

And then there's a part of me that wonders if this is part of what Musk et al are up to. What's with the sudden explosion of advancing AI at any cost? Did they figure out colonizing Mars is actually fully impossible and oopsie y'all wrecked the planet, now where're you all going to go? Into the computers, boys!

As I said when we started this journey together, I don't "believe" that this is that way anything actually works. I just love turning these ideas over like toys, giving them a shake, and seeing if anything happens. I'm only human after all.