In the 1940s Konrad Zuse (pronounced zoo-s˘uh), the man credited with developing the first computers, had a flash of insight into the way the universe may work. When he did so, he also gave us a new way of thinking about our role in creation. While he was developing the programs to run his early computers, he asked a question that sounds more like something out of the plot of a novel than an idea meant to be taken as a serious scientific possibility.
Zuse’s question was simply this: Is it possible that the entire universe operates as a big computer, with a code that makes whatever is possible, possible? Or, perhaps even more bizarre, he wondered if a form of cosmic computing machinery is continually creating the universe and everything in it. In other words, are we living a virtual reality running on a really big computer made of quantum energy itself? This is clearly a huge question with implications that rattle everything from the ideas of life and evolution to the basis of religion itself. Also, it spawned the hugely popular 1999 film The Matrix.
Zuse was obviously a man ahead of his time. Thirty years later, he elaborated on these ideas in his book Calculating Space and set into motion the events that led to the revolution in our view of reality and everyday life.1 Commenting on how his mind-blowing insights took shape, Zuse described how he made the connection between the machines that he was building and the machinery of the universe. “It happened that in contemplating causality [the relationship between things that happen and what causes those things to happen],” he said, “I suddenly thought to interpret the cosmos as a gigantic calculating machine.”2
The bottom line of this way of seeing the universe is that whether we’re talking about rocks and trees, the ocean, or you and me, everything is information. And just as any information can be the output of processes that put it all together, the universe is really the product of a very big program that began long ago. While the Who? and the Why? of such a program are certainly key, Zuse was looking more at how something like this could be possible. Although he was asking the right questions, the technology to test his theories was simply not available to him as it is to us now.
In recent years, new discoveries have directed scientists right back to Zuse’s original questions. Picking up where he left off, a growing number are now thinking along the same lines and asking the same question: Are we living in a virtual simulation? If so, then the universe and everything in it is what and where it is because something in the cosmic program put it there. And that would mean that we’re living in a digital reality where everything is made of information rather than things.
In 2006 Seth Lloyd, the designer of the first feasible quantum computer, took the idea of a digital universe one step further, elevating it from a question of What if? to the statement of It is. Based on his research in the new field of digital physics, he leaves little doubt as to where he stands in this emerging view of reality. “The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation,” he asserts.3 Just in case there’s any uncertainty in our minds about precisely what Lloyd is saying here, he clarifies his findings. Rather than suggesting that the universe may be like a quantum computer, he blasts us into the most radical description of reality to emerge in the last 2,000 years, stating: “The universe is a quantum computer [my emphasis].”4 From Lloyd’s perspective, everything that exists is the output of the universe’s computer. “As the computation proceeds, reality unfolds,” he explains.5
Wow! At first blush we find our minds reeling from the magnitude of what such a possibility implies. Then we find ourselves taking a closer look and a deeper breath, sitting back in our chairs, and saying, “Hmm . . . this actually makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. This may just be the way things really work!” The reason is because the comparison between the atoms of the everyday world and the information of a computer’s works so well.
1Zuse, Konrad. “Calculating Space.” Project MAC. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 Feb. 1970. Web.
2Zuse, Konrad. “Is the Universe a Computer.” German Symposium 6-7 Nov. 2006.
3Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 3. Print.
4Lloyd, Seth. “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Wired 1 Mar. 2006. Print.
5 Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. Excerpt on the Random House website
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Excerpted from pages 16 to 18 of Spontaneous Healing of Belief by Gregg Braden. Copyright © 2008 (Hay House).
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18 responses to “Living In A Virtual Simulation”
Very interesting discussion, Gregg. Gave me a few questions of my own…What if this computer were, let’s say, a Mind (an Oversoul so to speak) and the programmer was “us”… Each individual mind, as an aspect of the larger Mind, acting as an individual program code, creating its own form simulation at the level of cause…”programming” it’s own reality? Could that be the “machine”? Food for thought.
In this simultion, are we supposed to face and witness -virtually speaking- the job of quantum mechanics heralding the beginning of the infinite universe? “As the computation proseeds , reality unfolds”.
How could that causality be programmed by the human mind ; since science is still striving and probing into the matter for truth?
Good post but you could have expanded further.
We are the tiny quantum particles of elements which compose whatever this main computation is on its entirety. Nonetheless, if the univerfse is expanding with time and space intertwine. We have been living in a holography universe whih changes we are unable o notice with complete certainty. The reality is that time has been transending, and we are not fully aware of its effect until now. Thus, now, we realize that space is expanding. The question is. Does the lack of awareness kept us from knowing all the wondeers of the universe?
Frances
I’m going to leave this discussion with a quote from Duane Elgin, at The Stanford Research Institute:
“Once you discover that space doesn’t matter, or that time can be traveled through at will so that time doesn’t matter, and that matter can be moved by consciousness so that matter doesn’t matter—well, you can’t go home again.”
Interesting isn’t it?
I’m the living proof of what you say is true but the human mind still reciste the truth, if it’s proclaim from someone who, for them, is irrelevant.
I had the honor of hearing Gregg speak at a Wesley nurse Symposium. Wow!
My mother is now 91 years old. She rarely peaks about God or religion. She always wears a Miraculous Heart of Mary medal. Some years back, out of the blue she told me that she believed a God is the mainframe and that we are all secondary computers. We are here to collect information. Every second of our lives. This information is used by God to continue the growth and expansion of the Universe. So, that’s a lot from one senior citizen.
Check physicist Tom Campbell’s YouTube lectures and everything will become crystal-clear , this is a Vitual realty.
Gregg..read P.D. Ouspenskys “In Search of the Miraculous” chapter 7.
We are avatars in a matrix.
Our souls possess our avatar bodies, reality is made of coded light, which moves so fast as to appear solid.
I just wonder where the programming comes from
I have written a book, The Yoes Code for Heaven on Earth, that is about my experiment with a mantra I found sixty years ago. I asked the Universe for an all-purpose mantra I could use as code for a heaven-on-earth state of consciousness. I found the encoded mantra at Matt. 5:37 in the KJV of the New Testament. It is: “Let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay, whatsoever is more than these cometh from evil(error).” Twenty years after I discovered the JC Code, that I use my name, yoes to suggest a synthesis of yes and no, I was meditating/contemplating in the desert of New Mexico and I had an altered state of consciousness that started a revelation/decoding of YyNn. I teach a meditation system based on that decoding experience called, Rainbow Making, the ritual of general practice of Yoes Yoga…
13th floor movie is another similar computer simulation or virtual reality model. Competitor to the Matrix. Well in a dream state our minds are very efficient at creating a perceived reality so why not on a larger scale.
I watched your story about a women being instantly cured of cancer by some priests. So what if we are the ones that control what happens. We just do not know or accept it yet. We control the “computer” and are writing the codes!!!
I was telling my Sister this 30 some years ago & we laughed about such a possibility!!!! I can still remember how” in awe” we were in discussing such a great possibility & if anyone would believe me…….. thinking back now, I remember being in an very enlightened state,believing that it was so true that the Universe worked this way……….
Each one of us is the programmer. When thrust into the physical world we were distracted by outside influences and forgot about the being inside the physical human.
A computer does not qualify as a Living entity. The challenge in utilizing our mentality alone, is that it cuts off access to higher states of Awareness, obtained only through Intuition.