How Our Universe Being a Simulation Could Explain Quantum Mechanics

The most recent post over on the StarTalk board delves into the simulation hypothesis, what it means and how philosophers and physicists have tried to untangle the puzzle.

But one thought stuck with me: doesn’t the simulation hypothesis kind of explain the weird stuff about quantum mechanics?

This wasn’t an original idea – in fact, there’s a great paper that covers these issues and even proposes some tests.

The Problems with Simulating a Universe

Bostrom's original paper introduces the concepts of the simulation hypothesis, but brushes over a key issue. He speaks of “posthuman” societies with planet-sized computers, but later authors generally pay more attention to the limitations. No matter how big the computer, the processing power is still finite.

Campbell et. al. [2] compare this to rendering a computer game. Most designers don’t render the whole map all the time – you really only need it to render what the player can see. Taking this shortcut maximizes the usable output from your limited computing capability. It’s efficient.

And if you were simulating a universe – especially ones that could contain simulations themselves – efficiency would be crucial. You’re unlikely to have a definitive plan for every electron, through the whole history of the universe.

What This Could Explain About Quantum Mechanics

• The program “plays dice”: Why is quantum mechanics probabilistic? Because like No Man’s Sky or the Binding of Isaac, the generation of the universe is procedural. Simply calculating as needed based on some probabilities would save computing power.

• Wavefunction collapse: When we make an observation of the quantum world, we’re taught that the many possibilities of the initial wavefunction “collapse” to a single result, but nobody knows why. The simulation hypothesis explains this easily: the precise value would only be “rendered” when we look at it. The strange behaviour is because the simulation finally settles on one possibility when we look.

• Quantum entanglement: How do we get “spooky action at a distance” aka quantum entanglement? It’s weird that information can apparently travel faster than light, unless it’s a simulation. Then the information may not travel that far at all – it’s all in the same computer, after all.

But, as Terence Tao pointed out on the podcast, if reality is a simulation, it’s incredibly – suspiciously – consistent.