Sentient World Simulations and Digital Twins
In which we venture further into the virtuality
Earlier, we went on a virtual date and dipped our toes in the Metaverse. Time to go full Matrix.
From SEAS to SWS 🌐
Once upon a time, about two decades ago, there was a research project at Purdue University called the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations or SEAS. Its goal was to provide realistic virtual environments to run all kinds of simulations.
“That sounds interesting,” the US Department of Defense thought and they swooped in to develop a new toy that could simulate our world and predict the effects of certain *hum* interventions. The result is the Sentient World Simulation or SWS. Think of it as a continuously running simulation of the real world. An update in this 2007 piece in The Register notes that SWS is:
…now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.
Since then, with the exception of a few general articles, radio silence. *ominous music*
Has the DoD claimed the project entirely and are they keeping it under wraps to Minority Report-style monitor everyone? Are they pushing it further to predict Asimov’s Foundational futures? Or, more likely, have they run up against the limits of such a simulation in terms of computing power and real-world chaos? After all, the only way to predict the future is to have the patience to wait until it arrives. The same goes for simulations. Like ye olde maps of yore, simulations will necessarily omit certain parameters.
In 1964, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a one-paragraph story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, that illustrates this wonderfully. In the story, an empire (it’s always empires) seeks to elevate the science of cartography to its peak. The result is a map of the highest possible detail. It’s as large as the territory it seeks to represent. Borges’ story is partially based on Lewis Carroll’s - yes, the Alice in Wonderland guy - story ‘Sylvie and Bruno Concluded’ that involves a map with a scale of one mile to one mile. The characters can’t unfold the map because it would cover the country and they are thus forced to use the country itself to navigate.
The moral of these wonderful stories? The only perfect simulation is reality.
You² 🦋
But that would be too easy. If Descartes and The Matrix have taught us anything it is that we’re easily fooled. A simulation doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be good enough for its purpose. Our perception of reality is far from perfect. Our senses and awareness are so limited that only a small slice of the universe makes it into our consciousness. And we’re getting a lot better at faking those slices. Virtual reality, augmented reality, it’s all moving fast.
Taken to the extreme, this leads us to the simulation hypothesis. This idea that we already are in a simulation is a popular trope in science fiction, but it is as old as an ancient Chinese butterfly:
Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou.
Other than giving us a philosophical headache, I don’t know if being simulated would actually change anything. If your life goes on as usual, if you have no idea who the simulators are or what their reasons for simulating us are, if there is no way to affect the simulation at all, would you take the red pill?
Let’s conclude this tour through the butterfly Zen garden with a brief visit to our digital twins. The sentient world simulation we started with might have been hubris, but smaller versions of it are very much alive and kicking. So-called digital twins are the virtual mirror images of physical systems. Initially used in engineering, digital twinning is rapidly moving to other fields, including biology. Organisms are physical systems too, after all. OpenWorm is an example of this that aims to build the first digital life form by simulating the little roundworm C. elegans cell by cell. But why stop there? Human digital twins might become staples in personalized medicine. We’re already tracking all kinds of parameters with our wearables and every query we launch online is tallied and categorized to the point where our social media platforms know us better than our close friends. Might as well mix it together in a simulated self and give birth to a digital twin.
As these twins become more and more detailed, more philosophical headaches are sure to arise. Is there a threshold of complexity beyond which a digital twin becomes sentient or self-aware? Can it? If it can, will it be aware of its simulated nature, or will it remain happy in its virtual Plato’s cave?
Ooh, butterflies.