Quantum Matrix

Well, the release date for the last Matrix movie is approaching, and I was recently thinking about something… wouldn’t a lot of the “weirder” stuff from quantum physics start to make a little more sense if we were, in fact, inside a Matrix ?

Take, for example, the idea that things that are not being watched may temporarily cease to exist. Well, obviously, if you were designing a computer simulation of anything, you would not render what is not visible. It’s just common sense. It would also explain the Schroedinger’s cat thought-experiment: the result is, indeed, only made real when someone opens the box and looks inside. Before that, the result was not rendered and, thus, did not exist, and the cat may not even be there.

Or the problem with the randomness of quantum events (God playing dice); this is also easy to explain. At some point, in the limit of the resolution of the simulation, the program needs to decide what to do, and a random number generator would make the universe more interesting than a fixed set of rules. And if you want to watch the universe from the outside, you want to make it interesting.

Some other strange things might be the result of bugs in the simulation (or, actually, features that were not expected to be used and lead to undefined behaviour). I`m sure it is possible to think of several other examples… anyone ?

Just something to think about before going to bed