If you could change the laws of nature, what would you change?
Perhaps the annoying limit on the speed of light in cosmic travel, not to mention the wars, plague and asteroids that can affect Earth.
Maybe you wish you could go back in time to tell your teenage self how to treat your parents or buy Google stock.
Couldn't the universe use some improvements?
That was the question David Anderson, a computer scientist,
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
enthusiast , musician, and mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, recently posed to his colleagues and friends.
In recent years, the idea that our universe, including ourselves and all our innermost thoughts, is a
computer simulation
, running on a cosmically capable thinking machine, has caught on in culture high and low.
In an influential 2003 essay,
Nick Bostrom,
an Oxford University philosopher and director of the Institute for the Future of Humanity, proposed the idea, adding that it would probably be an easy feat for "technologically mature" civilizations that wanted to explore their histories. or entertain their offspring.
Elon Musk, who is, as far as we know, the star of this simulation, seemed to echo this idea when he once declared that there was only a one in a billion chance that we were living in "
base reality
."
It's hard to prove, and not everyone agrees that such a drastic extrapolation of our computing power is possible or inevitable, or that civilization will last long enough to do so.
But we can't refute the idea either, so thinkers like Bostrom argue that we should take the possibility seriously.
In some respects, the idea of a Great Simulator is reminiscent of the recent theory by cosmologists that the universe is a
hologram
whose edges are covered in quantum codes that determine what happens within it.
A couple of years ago, in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, Anderson began discussing the implications of this idea with his teenage son.
If everything was a simulation, it would be enough to modify the computer program that controlled everything to improve it.
"Being a programmer, I thought about exactly what these changes would entail," he said in an email.
If the software was well written, modifying it would be easy, he reasoned.
Mods could change the laws of physics or add new features to the universe:
menu options, speed filters, subtitles, pop-up window blockers... buttons that would make
our lives richer or more fun
.
Also, if the software that runs the universe were open source—that is, made publicly available for other programmers to inspect and manipulate—these "metahackers" might be receptive to our requests and even search for them, suggests Dan Werthimer, a colleague. Anderson at Berkeley.
Think of it as a cybernetic version of prayer, a way of making
requests to the Great Simulator.
Anderson recently asked his colleagues how they would tweak the cosmic algorithm, which he calls
Unisym.
He posted
the responses on his blog, along with comments on how those changes could be implemented and how well they might work.
"This was during COVID, when I was spending my extensive free time writing various essays on philosophy, politics and music and posting them on my website," he explains.
The emphasis was not on eliminating war and injustice, but on characteristics that could help us cosmic fry navigate the vicissitudes of "life."
For example, Anderson would like to be able to press a button and see all the steps he's taken glowing orange on the ground.
"I can look at where I've been in Berkeley and go to the Sierras and see all the hikes I've done there," he says.
By pressing another button, all the traces I have left would appear.
"Are there places no one has ever been?" he wondered.
His son, he added, would like to know if a joke he is about to tell is going to make him laugh.
Some of the requests of the other respondents:
the ability to pause the simulation long enough to think of a witty retort in a conversation, or a rewind option to
undo a
regrettable comment or replay a missed opportunity, something I would definitely vote for.
As straightforward as these requests may seem, Anderson notes that using these features might require a healthy dose of behind-the-scenes computer engineering.
For example, pausing briefly in-universe to reflect would require branching out your own existence into a temporary parallel simulation;
then when you knew what you meant, you could hit the escape key and go back to the original simulation.
Rewinding to correct the past would also cause the simulation to branch, but in this case, Anderson said, you would continue in the parallel simulation "and never hit escape."
Of course, he added, "the usual time travel weirdness applies."
Traveling to the future and back would endow your current self with memories of things that haven't happened yet.
This, in turn, would change the future so that when you got there it would not be exactly what you had remembered from your first visit.
Similarly, going into the past could alter what you remember happening in the future.
It could even obviate your own existence, like the time traveler in Ray Bradbury's classic story "A Sound of Thunder," who steps on a butterfly and returns to a future where Nazis rule the world.
(Or like Homer in "The Simpsons" episode "Time and Punishment," inadvertently creating an unknown world for the donuts.)
Apparently time travel is the most dangerous thing to do.
For my part, I wish I could push a button when entering a restaurant that would drop a cone of silence on every other table.
(My hearing is no longer what it used to be.)
My wife says that she would like a hologram of her to appear every time she was late for an appointment, and to disappear when she arrived, so no one would know that she had been absent.
One popular modification is what Anderson calls "the death stare," the pinnacle of road rage:
With the blink of an eye, he could sentence offending drivers and their cars to be incinerated by a powerful laser.
"Every such request should fork a new universe, for obvious reasons," Anderson writes on his blog.
"It's a safe bet someone would give me the death glare in a day or two," he writes.
"And within a few weeks almost all of the drivers would be burned. So it's probably best to implement this so that each death glance branches a new universe in which the requested burning occurs, but the original universe continues without it."
What's on your cosmic wish list?
How would you modify the supreme algorithm?
The year 2023 is still young;
there's plenty of time to ask the cosmic hackers for a better deal.
Be careful with butterflies and what you wish for.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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