We live in a matrix?

 Science confirms: We live in a matrix, we are slaves to unknown beings.

If science finally confirms that we live in someone's simulation rather than in reality, the search for the answer to the scariest question man has ever asked himself follows: who is deceiving us?

One of the questions that has marked the history of philosophy in the last five centuries is certainly one of the seemingly most absurd ones ever asked: is this around us a reality or a dream, do we really exist in this world the way we think we exist or are deceived? an evil demon, a mad scientist or some alien being?

Epistemology as a modern philosophical science began with Rene Descartes, and entered popular culture and the minds of the vast majority of people with the film franchise "Matrix", primarily its first (and best?) Part.

The basic idea behind this hypothesis is that we can never be sure if we are dreaming or waking up, since we have all experienced dreams that are so real that even when we woke up we were not sure if it really happened or not. Descartes debated the possibility of being deceived by an evil demon who is smart and deceiving as powerful as he is, and who uses all his strength to create the illusion in us (and perhaps in others) that the outside world exists.

The modern philosophical variant of this concept is the so-called a brain in a jar connected by wires to a supercomputer, which creates the same illusion. 

The Matrix is ​​an artistic development of this hypothesis: our world is an illusion, a computer simulation made by a machine with artificial intelligence, while we actually live in capsules with bodies attached by cables to a supercomputer that makes us think we exist where we exist even though we are in things in the vast “fields” where we are raised by robots like we raise pigs today (do you now feel any compassion for the animals we raise industrially for slaughter?).

The action in the film begins when Morpheus (played by Lawrence Fishburn) offers Neu (Keanu Reeves) a choice: take the blue pill and continue living in blissful ignorance, or take the red one, find out the real truth about the world you live in and discover "how many rabbits the hole is really deep ”.

Scientists are now able to offer us the same choice by studying radiation from space. If we really live in simulation then the physical laws that govern our world do not necessarily have to be the laws that govern the meta-universe of our deceivers.

The first attempt by science to discover the truth about our universe came in 2001, when Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanics engineer at MIT, estimated the number of computer operations our universe has performed since the Big Bang. His conclusion was that it is unlikely that we are in a simulation because a computer for something like that would have to be bigger than the universe itself, and it would take more energy than the whole universe has. 

However, other scientists soon found that such a thing would not be necessary at all: it would be simple enough to make an imperfect replica of the cosmos that is good enough to deceive its inhabitants. For example, microscopic life, trees in the forest and distant stars would not exist immanently in the simulation, but only in those rare situations when one of us observes them. We would never know that because every time we look at these objects, they would be there and disappear when we turn it.

If this is true, then a far weaker computer is needed than Lloyd thought 12 years ago.

Even with today's technology that people possess, it is not impossible to create a virtual universe. What's more, scientists do that when they make simulations about the early cosmos and young galaxies that are evolving and changing. As technology advances at lightning speed, soon only laws could be what prevents us from creating such a simulated cosmos in which artificial but still sensitive people live.

- Within a century, we will be able to involve people in the simulation - claims Silas Bean, a nuclear physicist from the University of Washington. 

Because of all this, Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, concluded in 2003 that it made much more sense to bet that we were deceived by silicon-based artificial intelligence in one of many simulations than that we were carbon-based and living in the real world. .

This bet became real when the mathematician John D. Barrow of Cambridge estimated that an imperfect simulation of reality would have to have occasional glitches and like any software would have to be updated from time to time. What kind of failures are we talking about? For example, when the physical world behaves contrary to the laws that govern it, or when we lose the keys and find them on an empty table that we have checked several times. And that's what's happening.

The aforementioned Silas Bean proposed a concrete test: a series of scientific hypotheses and calculations came to the conclusion that, if our universe is a simulation, we would have to witness the maximum energy of the fastest particles. And look at the miracles, astronomers have noticed that the maximum energy of the fastest particles is always the same and is 10 to 20 electron volts.

In addition, if the universe is infinite, then cosmic rays would have to come from all directions equally. If we live in a simulation then that equal distribution would not exist. Astronomers need a lot more data and research to be able to answer this question, but before that happens we would have to prepare for the worst.

If we are really deceived, who is our deceiver, or who are the deceivers? Is this the being we have always called God? Would the confirmation of the simulation hypothesis be the final proof that the heavenly father exists?

Or are our deceivers really just benevolent scientists who do it just to understand the cosmos, without wanting to interfere in their simulation? Are they perhaps the creators of some giant reality show we are in, who change the rules as they please and interfere in our affairs for their own entertainment? Are they perhaps playing to us like we are playing Sims? In that case, should we then try to live as fun as possible in the hope that our deceivers will resurrect us in some new simulation?