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ints out that there is no plausible reason to stop at one level of simulation so that the simulated ancestors might also be simulating their ancestors and so on creating an infinite regress akin to the problem of the first cause 35 in 2019 philosopher preston greene suggested that it may be best not to find out if we are living in a simulation since if it were found to be true such knowing might end the simulation 36 economist robin hanson argues that a self interested occupant of a high fidelity simulation should strive to be entertaining and praiseworthy in order to avoid being turned off or being shunted into a non conscious low fidelity part of the simulation hanson additionally speculates that someone who is aware that he might be in a simulation might care less about others and live more for today your motivation to save for retirement or to help the poor in ethiopia might be muted by realizing that in your simulation you will never retire and there is no ethiopia 37 besides attempting to assess whether the simulation hypothesis is true or false philosophers have also used it to illustrate other philosophical problems especially in metaphysics and epistemology david chalmers has argued that simulated beings might wonder whether their mental lives are governed by the physics of their environment when in fact these mental lives are simulated separately and are thus in fact not governed by the simulated physics 38 chalmers claims that they might eventually find that their thoughts fail to be physically caused and argues that this means that cartesian dualism is not necessarily as problematic of a philosophical view as is commonly supposed though he does not endorse it 39 similar arguments have been made for philosophical views about personal identity that say that an individual could have been another human being in the past as well as views about qualia that say that colors could have appeared differently than they do the inverted spectrum scenario in both cases the claim is that all this would require is hooking up the mental lives to the simulated physics in a different way 40 computationalism edit main articles computationalism and mathematical universe hypothesis computationalism is a philosophy of mind theory stating that cognition is a form of computation it is relevant to the simulation hypothesis in that it illustrates how a simulation could contain conscious subjects as required by a virtual people simulation for example it is well known that physical systems can be simulated to some degree of accuracy if computationalism is correct and if there is no problem in generating artificial consciousness or cognition it would establish the theoretical possibility of a simulated reality nevertheless the relationship between cognition and phenomenal qualia of consciousness is disputed it is possible that consciousness requires a vital substrate that a computer cannot provide and that simulated people while behaving appropriately would be philosophical zombies this would undermine nick bostrom s simulation argument humans cannot be a simulated consciousness if consciousness as humans understand it cannot be simulated the skeptical hypothesis remains intact however and humans could still be vatted brains existing as conscious beings within a simulated environment even if consciousness cannot be simulated it has been suggested that whereas virtual reality would enable a participant to experience only three senses sight sound and optionally smell simulated reality would enable all five including taste and touch citation needed some theorists 41 42 have argued that if the consciousness is computation version of computationalism and mathematical realism or radical mathematical platonism 43 are true then consciousness is computation which in principle is platform independent and thus admits of simulation this argument states that a platonic realm or ultimate ensemble would contain every algorithm including those that implement consciousness hans moravec has explored the simulation hypothesis and has argued for a kind of mathematical platonism according to which every object including for example a stone can be regarded as implementing every possible computation 17 in physics edit in physics the view of the universe and its workings as the ebb and flow of information was first observed by wheeler 44 consequently two views of the world emerged the first one proposes that the universe is a quantum computer 45 while the other one proposes that the system performing the simulation is distinct from its simulation the universe 46 of the former view quantum computing specialist dave bacon wrote in many respects this point of view may be nothing more than a result of the fact that the notion of computation is the disease of our age everywhere we look today we see examples of computers computation and information theory and thus we extrapolate this to our laws of physics indeed thinking about computing as arising from faulty components it seems as if the abstraction that uses perfectly operating computers is unlikely to exist as anything but a platonic ideal another critique of such a point of view is that there is no evidence for the kind of digitization that characterizes computers nor are there any predictions made by those who advocate such a view that have been experimentally confirmed 47 testing the hypothesis physically edit a method to test one type of simulation hypothesis was proposed in 2012 by physicists silas r beane zohreh davoudi and martin j savage 48 under the assumption of finite computational resources the simulation of the universe would be performed by dividing the space time continuum into a discrete set of points which may result in observable effects in analogy with the mini simulations that lattice gauge theorists run today to build up nuclei from the underlying theory of strong interactions known as quantum chromodynamics several observational consequences of a grid like space time have been studied in their work among proposed signatures is an anisotropy in the distribution of ultra high energy cosmic rays that if observed would be consistent with the simulation hypothesis according to these physicists 49 in 2017 campbell et al proposed several experiments aimed at testing the simulation hypothesis in their paper on testing the simulation theory 50 reception edit astrophysicist neil degrasse tyson said in a 2018 nbc news interview that he estimated the likelihood of the simulation hypothesis being correct at better than 50 50 odds adding i wish i could summon a strong argument against it but i can find none 51 however in a subsequent interview with chuck nice on a youtube episode of startalk tyson shared that his friend j richard gott a professor of astrophysical sciences at princeton university made him aware of a strong objection to the simulation hypothesis the objection claims that the common trait that all hypothetical high fidelity simulated universes possess is the ability to produce high fidelity simulated universes and since our current world does not possess this ability it would mean that either humans are in the real universe and therefore simulated universes have not yet been created or that humans are the last in a very long chain of simulated universes an observation that makes the simulation hypothesis seem less probable regarding this objection tyson remarked that changes my life 52 elon musk the ceo of tesla and spacex stated that the argument for the simulation hypothesis is quite strong 53 in a podcast with joe rogan musk said if you assume any rate of improvement at all games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality before concluding that it s most likely we re in a simulation 54 at various other press conferences and events musk has also speculated that the likelihood of us living in a simulated reality or computer made by others is about 99 9 and stated in a 2016 interview that he believed there was a one in billion chance we re in base reality 53 55 it is unclear however how many people in the general public give credence to the idea that we re living in a computer simulation one 2026 literature review found no validated scale or representative study of simulation belief 56 a commercial civicscience poll conducted from april 2019 through february 2026 found that 15 percent of respondents said it is somewhat likely we re living in a simulation and 7 percent said we are very likely living in a simulation 57 56 dream hypothesis edit further information dream argument the idea that a dream could be considered a type of simulation capable of fooling the dreamer and that perhaps even waking reality is entirely a dream existed long before bostrom s formulation one of the first philosophers to question the distinction between reality and dreams was zhuangzi a chinese philosopher of the 4th century bc he phrased the problem as the well known butterfly dream which went as follows once zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly a butterfly flitting and fluttering around happy with himself and doing as he pleased he didn t know he was zhuangzi suddenly he woke up and there he was solid and unmistakable zhuangzi but he didn t know if he was zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was zhuangzi between zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction this is called the transformation of things 2 tr burton watson 1968 49 the philosophical underpinnings of this argument are also brought up by descartes who was one of the first western philosophers to do so in meditations on first philosophy he states there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep 58 and goes on to conclude that it is possible that i am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false 58 chalmers 2003 discusses the dream hypothesis and notes that this comes in two distinct forms that he is currently dreaming in which case many of his beliefs about the world are incorrect that he has always been dreaming in which case the objects he perceives actually exist albeit in his imagination 59 both the dream argument and the simulation hypothesis can be regarded as skeptical hypotheses another state of mind in which some argue an individual s perceptions have no physical basis in the real world is psychosis though psychosis may have a physical basis in the real world and explanations may vary in on certainty the philosopher ludwig wittgenstein has argued that such skeptical hypotheses are unsinnig i e non sensical as they doubt knowledge that is required in order to make sense of the hypotheses themselves 60 bertrand russell has argued that the dream hypothesis is not a logical impossibility but that common sense as well as considerations of simplicity and inference to the best explanation rule against it 61 the dream hypothesis is also used to develop other philosophical concepts such as valberg s personal horizon what this world would be internal to if this were all a dream 62 lucid dreaming is characterized as an idea where the elements of dreaming and waking are combined to a point where the user knows they are dreaming or waking perhaps 63 in popular culture edit the simulation hypothesis and related themes like simulated reality have been explored in literature film and theatre 64 simulacron 3 1964 by daniel f galouye is an early exploration of a computer simulated city and inspired screen adaptations including world on a wire 1973 and later the thirteenth floor 1999 65 66 the thirteenth floor 1999 is itself an example of a simulation within a simulation moreover though the matrix 1999 popularized the idea of flesh and blood humans unknowingly living inside a machine generated virtual reality 67 the thirteenth floor features fully digital humans who are unaware they are in a simulation 8 philip k dick s short story we can remember it for you wholesale 1966 about implanted memories and unstable realities formed the basis for total recall 1990 and its 2012 remake 68 in overdrawn at the memory bank 1983 1984 the protagonist undergoes compulsory doppling therapy that transfers his consciousness and after a mishap his mind is kept inside the corporation s central computer 69 theatre has also treated the topic jay scheib s 2012 play world of wires was explicitly inspired by bostrom s simulation argument and by fassbinder s world on a wire 70 71 the 2017 doctor who episode extremis written by steven moffat is set almost entirely within a simulation being used by a race of alien monks to trial different times and places for a real life invasion in 2025 italian creative director and producer giorgio fazio released the two track music project nothing but simulation thematically tied to the simulation hypothesis and paired with a generative web experience 72 73 see also edit artificial life artificial society boltzmann brain brain in a vat digital physics interface theory fine tuned universe holographic principle matrix defense metaverse mind uploading subjective idealism virtual reality references edit manjoo farhad 2022 01 26 we might be in a simulation how much should that worry us opinion the new york times issn 0362 4331 archived from the original on january 26 2022 retrieved 2022 02 10 paul sutter 2022 01 21 do we live in a simulation the problem with this mind bending hypothesis space com retrieved 2022 02 10 windt jennifer m dreams and dreaming stanford encyclopedia of philosophy yukov joseph 2024 staying human in an era of artificial intelligence new city press 1 2 3 4 5 sutter paul 2024 01 31 could our universe be a simulation how would we even tell ars technica retrieved 2024 09 12 bostrom nick 2003 are you living in a computer simulation pdf philosophical quarterly 53 211 243 255 doi 10 1111 1467 9213 00309 kelly stephen 2022 01 18 the matrix are we living in a simulation bbc science focus retrieved 2022 02 10 1 2 garner bianca 2018 04 01 questioning reality revisiting the thirteenth floor filmotomy retrieved 2026 07 30 grabianowski ed 7 may 2011 you re living in a computer simulation and the math proves it gizmodo archived from the original on 11 january 2019 retrieved 29 october 2016 empiricus sextus 2005 against the logicians cambridge university press isbn 978 0 521 53195 5 maffie james aztec philosophy internet encyclopedia of philosophy retrieved 19 april 2021 linker damon 2022 02 08 life is not a simulation the week retrieved 2025 05 01 skepticism stanford encyclopedia of philosophy 2024 chalmers david 2005 the matrix as metaphysics in c grau ed philosophers explore the matrix oxford university press pp 157 158 isbn 978 0 19 518106 7 lccn 2004059977 evil genius hypothesis i have a disembodied mind and an evil genius is feeding me sensory inputs to give the appearance of an external world this is rené descartes s classical skeptical hypothesis dream hypothesis i am now and have always been dreaming descartes raised the question ...