ILLUSION OF THE UNIVERSE: our world is not at all what it seems

Photo by Pramod Tiwari on Unsplash

We all live in a world we usually consider to be objectively real. But what if it isn’t? The idea of the universe as an illusion has fascinated the greatest minds of humanity since ancient times. Modern scientists are no less intrigued. Although such ideas are still considered marginal in the scientific community, quantum experiments suggest that there may, after all, be a rational grain of truth in the simulation hypothesis…

FROM PLATO’S CAVE TO THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

ecent experiments with quantum computers and three pairs of entangled photons have shown that, essentially, each of us lives in our own universe. In the quantum world, measuring a process from the standpoint of each observer yields completely different results — and all alternative facts turn out to be true. Yet we are accustomed to believing that the reality around us exists objectively, not as something that adjusts itself to fit each of us individually.

There is no consensus among scientists on this matter; many regard such ideas as populist fantasies. However, doubts about the objective nature of reality arose thousands of years ago. These questions were pondered by Parmenides and Plato. The latter imagined the world we see as shadows of the true reality, flickering on the walls of a cave. Trying to comprehend the world through these shadows, one is doomed to remain within illusion.

Following them, Descartes proposed a hypothesis: what if the world is ruled by an evil yet omnipotent genius who plays with our minds, deliberately deceiving us? In the age of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and targeted algorithms, it’s easy to imagine a world constructed as a computational system. Perhaps our modern technologies are possible precisely because they replicate the way the universe itself is structured for us?

THE WORLD AS A PROGRAM WRITTEN BY AN «EVIL GENIUS»?

In the 1960s, the German scientist Konrad Zuse — the creator of the world’s first working computer — viewed the world as a computational system. In the 1980s, American physicist Edward Fredkin suggested that it could be described as the outcome of calculations. Around the same time, theoretical physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term «black hole», proposed the «It from bit» theory, according to which information is primary in relation to energy and matter. Thus, time, matter, and space are forms of information carriers, and the reality we observe exists as a dynamic set of informational states.

Having a centuries-long tradition, the idea that the world is a masterfully tuned illusion has survived to this day. One of its supporters is Australian philosopher David John Chalmers, a leading thinker in the philosophy of consciousness. He believes that our senses deceive us — but who is doing the deceiving, and why? Behind it all must lie deliberate computation — by some artificial or natural superintelligence. The same question — concerning the artificial origin of the universe’s computational nature — arises in the simulation hypothesis of Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom.

Essentially, this represents an evolution of Descartes’ «evil genius» concept into the notion of a highly advanced civilization concealing reality from us through computer simulations. Their number is extraordinarily vast, hence the multiplicity of «truths» perceived by different observers in quantum experiments. What we take to be objective reality is merely one of countless virtual imitations that emerged after the Big Bang. This, in particular, is what American quantum mechanic and MIT professor Seth Lloyd argues in his book Programming the Universe.

ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE «INFORMATION APOCALYPSE»

Since 2019, British scientist Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth, has argued in a series of papers that all of us are characters in an advanced virtual world. The universe, he suggests, functions as a computational system in which processes operate on enormous volumes of data, aiming for compression, optimization, and the structuring of information. According to Vopson, information is a physical quantity — it has mass and energy, just like photons, protons, and electrons. This means it obeys the laws of nature, which we are capable of understanding and describing.

Vopson didn’t merely assume this — he calculated the energy and mass of a single «bit». It turned out to be almost a million times smaller than the mass of an electron. However, this information mass is rapidly accumulating on Earth, driven by the explosive growth of digital technologies. If this trend continues, Vopson warns, we face an information catastrophe: one day, the number of digital bits could exceed the mass of the planet. The idea is not only original — it’s revolutionary!

Yet the scientific community finds it difficult to accept. After all, if a «bit» has mass, it should somehow influence gravitational processes in the universe. Unfortunately, no such influence has been detected. On the contrary, scientific observations show that information behaves in black holes in ways that do not imply the presence of mass. These findings, published in scientific journals in 2020, brought good news for us all — the information apocalypse has been cancelled!

INFORMATION RULES THE WORLD

Still, Vopson did not give up easily, claiming that gravity is merely a side effect of informational entropy — a by-product of data compression. Unfortunately, these claims also failed to withstand rigorous scientific scrutiny. For now, only one thing is clear: if the universe has been «computed» or «designed» by someone, this can exist only within the metaphors born of the human mind — those of Plato, Descartes, Bostrom, Vopson, and others. What is striking, however, is the persistence with which such ideas continue to emerge across different cultures and epochs.

There was a time when quantum theory and relativity, too, were dismissed as science fiction. It is therefore possible that, over time, the horizons of science will expand and the simulation hypothesis will cease to be seen as marginal. Even now, discussions around such ideas have practical significance. Human consciousness remains the greatest mystery to humanity itself — perhaps that is why we imagine that someone is «playing» with our minds?

Debates about the illusory universe and the nature of reality are, above all, humanity’s dialogue with itself — about its intellectual capacities and limitations. Moreover, let us not forget that, in quantum experiments, reality arises from the act of conscious choice. It is logical to assume that behind this lies some fundamental law of existence, connected to the informational nature of the cosmos — one that humanity has yet to discover.

Original research: