We Might Be in a Simulation. How Much Should That Worry Us?

我们可能活在模拟现实中，人类应该多担忧这件事？

Imagine that when your great-grandparents were teenagers, they got their hands on a groundbreaking new gadget, the world’s first fully immersive virtual-reality entertainment system. These weren’t those silly goggles you see everywhere now. This device was more Matrix-y – a stylish headband stuffed with electrodes that somehow tapped directly into the human brain’s perceptual system, replacing whatever a wearer saw, heard, felt, smelled and even tasted with new sensations ginned up by a machine.

设想一下，当你的曾祖父母还是青少年的时候，他们得到了一个开创性的新设备——世界上第一个完全沉浸式虚拟现实娱乐系统。这些可不是你现在随处可见的那种傻乎乎的眼镜，这个设备更像“黑客帝国”——一个时髦的头带，里面塞满电极，以某种方式直接连接人类大脑的感知系统，用机器产生的新感觉取代佩戴者所看到、听到、感觉到、闻到甚至尝到的任何体验。

The device was a blockbuster; magic headbands soon became an inescapable fact of people’s daily lives. Your great-grandparents, in fact, met each other in Headbandland, and their children, your grandparents, rarely encountered the world outside it. Later generations – your parents, you – never did.

这个装置轰动一时；神奇头带很快成为人们日常生活中不可缺少的事实。事实上，你的曾祖父母就是在“头带乐园”里认识的，而他们的孩子，也就是你们的祖父母，很少接触到外面的世界。之后的几代人——你的父母，还有你——从来没有接触过外部世界。

Everything you have ever known, the entire universe you call reality, has been fed to you by a machine.

你所知道的一切，你称之为“现实”的整个宇宙，都是由一台机器提供给你的。

This, anyway, is the sort of out-there scenario I keep thinking about as I ponder the simulation hypothesis – the idea, lately much discussed among technologists and philosophers, that the world around us could be a digital figment, something like the simulated world of a video game.

不管怎么说，这就是我在思考模拟假说时一直在思考的那种不现实的场景——这个假说最近在技术专家和哲学家中被广泛讨论：我们周围的世界可能是数字化虚构的东西，类似于电子游戏中的模拟世界。

The idea is not new. Exploring the underlying nature of reality has been an obsession of philosophers since the time of Socrates and Plato. Ever since “The Matrix,” such notions have become a staple of pop culture, too. But until recently the simulation hypothesis had been a matter for academics. Why should we even consider that technology could create simulations indistinguishable from reality? And even if such a thing were possible, what difference would knowledge of the simulation make to any of us stuck in the here and now, where reality feels all too tragically real?

这个想法并不新鲜。自苏格拉底和柏拉图时代以来，探索现实的潜在本质一直为哲学家们所痴迷。自从《黑客帝国》上映以来，这样的观念也成了流行文化的重要内容。但直到最近，模拟假说一直是学术界的问题。为什么我们要认为技术可以创造出与现实难以区分的模拟？而且，即使这样的事情是可能的，对模拟的了解对我们这些被困在此时此地的人来说又有什么意义呢？因为不幸的是，现实给人的感觉太真实了。

For these reasons, I’ve sat out many of the debates about the simulation hypothesis that have been bubbling through tech communities since the early 2000s, when Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, floated the idea in a widely cited essay.

由于这些原因，我没有参与21世纪初以来一直在科技界涌现的许多关于模拟假说的辩论，当时牛津大学哲学家尼克·博斯特罗姆在一篇被广泛引用的文章中提出了这个想法。

 

But a brain-bending new book by the philosopher David Chalmers – “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy” – has turned me into a hard-core simulationist.

但是哲学家大卫·查尔默斯的一本另辟蹊径的新书——《现实+——虚拟世界和哲学问题》（Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy）——把我变成了一个铁杆模拟主义者。

After reading and talking to Chalmers, I’ve come to believe that the coming world of virtual reality might one day be regarded as every bit as real as real reality. If that happens, our current reality will instantly be cast into doubt; after all, if we could invent meaningful virtual worlds, isn’t it plausible that some other civilization somewhere else in the universe might have done so, too? Yet if that’s possible, how could we know that we’re not already in its simulation?

在阅读本书并与查尔默斯交谈后，我开始相信，未来的虚拟现实世界可能有一天会被视为与现实世界一样真实。如果发生这种情况，我们当前的现实将立即受到怀疑；毕竟，如果我们能创造出有意义的虚拟世界，那么宇宙中其他地方的其他文明是否也可能这样做呢？然而，如果这是可能的，我们又如何知道我们不是已经置身他们的模拟之中呢？

The conclusion seems inescapable: We may not be able to prove that we are in a simulation, but at the very least, it will be a possibility that we can’t rule out. But it could be more than that. Chalmers argues that if we’re in a simulation, there’d be no reason to think it’s the only simulation; in the same way that lots of different computers today are running Microsoft Excel, lots of different machines might be running an instance of the simulation. If that was the case, simulated worlds would vastly outnumber non-sim worlds – meaning that, just as a matter of statistics, it would be not just possible that our world is one of the many simulations but likely. Chalmers writes that “the chance we are sims is at least 25 percent or so.”

结论似乎是不可避免的：我们可能无法证明我们身处模拟环境中，但至少，这是一种我们不能排除的可能性。但也可能不止于此。查尔默斯认为，如果我们身处模拟环境中，就没有理由认为这是唯一的模拟；就像今天很多不同的计算机都在运行微软Excel一样，很多不同的计算机可能都在运行一个模拟的实例。如果是这样的话，模拟世界的数量将大大超过非模拟世界——这意味着，在统计学意义上，我们的世界不仅有可能、而且很有可能是众多模拟世界中的一个。查尔默斯写道：“我们是模拟人的可能性至少是25%左右。”

Chalmers is a professor of philosophy at New York University, and he has spent much of his career thinking about the mystery of consciousness. He is best known for coining the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness,” which, roughly, is a description of the difficulty of explaining why a certain experience feels like that experience to the being experiencing it. (Don’t worry if this hurts your head; it’s not called the hard problem for nothing.)

查尔默斯是纽约大学的哲学教授，他职业生涯的大部分时间里都在思考意识的奥秘。他最著名的说法是“意识的难题”这句表达，大体来说它描述的是，解释“某种体验会让正在经历这种体验的人产生相应的感受”这种现象为什么这么困难。（如果你觉得这句话让你很伤脑筋，别担心；它被称为难题不是没有原因的。）

Chalmers says that he began thinking deeply about the nature of simulated reality after using V.R. headsets like Oculus Quest 2 and realizing that the technology is already good enough to create situations that feel viscerally real.

查尔默斯说，在使用了Oculus Quest 2之类的虚拟现实头具后，他意识到技术已经足够创造让人发自内心地觉得真实的情境，于是开始深入思考模拟现实的本质。

Virtual reality is now advancing so quickly that it seems quite reasonable to guess that the world inside V.R. could one day be indistinguishable from the world outside it. Chalmers says this could happen within a century; I wouldn’t be surprised if we passed that mark within a few decades.

虚拟现实的发展如此迅速，让人觉得完全可以想象有一天VR之内的世界将和外部世界将无法区分开来。查尔默斯说，这种情况可能在一个世纪内发生，如果几十年内就实现了，我也不会意外。

Whenever it happens, the development of realistic V.R. will be earthshaking, for reasons both practical and profound. The practical ones are obvious: If people can easily flit between the physical world and virtual ones that feel exactly like the physical world, which one should we regard as real?

无论什么时候发生，写实VR的发展将震动世界，这里面既有实际的原因，也有深刻的效果。实际原因很明显：如果可以游走于实体世界，以及跟实体世界没什么区别的虚拟世界之间，那我们应该以哪个世界为真呢？