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Ask HN: Why do half of Internet users think we are living in a simulation?
27 points by alister 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 113 comments
My question is inspired by an Internet poll[1]. When it appeared on HN two years ago[2], 45% voted that, yes, we are living in a simulation (of 14,463 votes at the time). When I checked back just now, about half (51%) still voted yes, but now at 4,111,498 votes.

Whether we are living in a computer simulation is indeed a fascinating question, and I'm not dismissing it, but there's no proof or experimental evidence for it as far as I know.

I know about the simulation argument[3], but that's not a mathematical/physical proof or an experimental result. Lots of brainteasers and paradoxes have arguments structured like the simulation argument; one example is Olbers' paradox: Why is the night sky dark if there is an infinity of stars, covering every part of the celestial sphere? The argument about the stars seems to make sense but it doesn't count as proof or experimental result, and we know it's not true.

So I'm wondering how and why so many people are now convinced that we are living in a simulation?

[1] https://neal.fun/lets-settle-this/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29866981

[3] https://simulation-argument.com/simulation




If it is possible that to make a simulation which matches our experience, then it is likely possible to make an unbounded number of such simulations. Thus, if such simulations are possible, it is vanishingly unlikely that we are executing directly on the underlying substrate.

If it is not possible, then, well, it's not.

So to a good approximation, the question "do you believe it is more likely than not that we are living in a simulation?" is equivalent to the question "do you believe that a simulation of the phenomenon you have observed is possible?"

And... well, sure, there's not a strong reason to think it's /impossible/, based on the evidence available to us. So, yeah, more likely than not.

Another way of phrasing this: Do you think it's more likely than not that there's some physical law, as yet discovered, that makes high fidelity simulation impossible? Such a law is certainly imaginable (limits on information density, magical-ness of souls, whatever); but if you don't have a reason to believe such a law is likely, then you probably believe we are more likely than not in a simulation.


There’s a counter argument from my physics undergrad brother that I found convincing.

We already do have a law of physics that is relevant here. We know that the information capacity of space is finite and fixed. A centimeter of space can only store so much information before it becomes a black hole. That means that to build a simulation in our universe you can only ever subdivide a fixed pie of information. That means the more relevant thing to ask is if a quantity of information is more likely to exist in the base reality or the simulated one. Because we have to assume that the base reality is not carpeted over with simulation super computers it seems safe to assume a random bit of information is more likely to be part of the base reality rather than a simulation all else being equal.

I think the idea of the universe being a simulation is just more fun


> That means the more relevant thing to ask is if a quantity of information is more likely to exist in the base reality or the simulated one.

Well, what quantity of information? It seems relatively unlikely that one would bother simulating an entire universe for billions of years at this level of fidelity; what's the point? On the other hand, the quantity of information needed to simulate your current experiences, including the experience of having memories, is probably in the megabytes; human bandwidth just isn't that high.

The same logic suggests that, even if you discount simulation for reasons of faith or whatever, Boltzmann brains are worth considering. The idea that the experience you're having right now of reading my precious prose is worth keeping a universe running, or even a large-scale simulation, is a bit self-centered of you, isn't it?


I think I'm very suspicious whenever infinities come into probability calculations, because I think human institution's break down when it comes to infinites. What I like about pointing out that the information content of the a cubed square foot has a ceiling is that it implies that there can't be an infinite number of simulations except in the way that there is an infinite amount of space (at least without throwing out that bit of physics) and an infinite amount of space is something I feel more capable of reasoning about.

Unless we think most information exists in simulations than if you take a random bit of information out of the universe it's more likely to be associated with the root existence's goinings on than it is with any kind of simulation. This works because it's an argument about that bit of information, not anything else. I think you could push back and say that really actually information isn't what's important and that actually even if we think that most information won't be part of a simulation most consciousnesses will be, but idk, that seems suspect, we don't have any reason to think that. Certainly most simulations we do now seem not to include consciousnesses.

I think the idea of Boltzmann brains fall apart because in that sea of possibility space it actually seems much more likely for the seeds of a universe to form than a complete brain full of consistent memories of writing 3/4th of a post on a randomly generated website called hacker news. I think it's just another illustration of the problems apply infinity to probability.


Also worth considering that simulating the universe for billions of years could run on the equivalent of a raspberry pi in some higher order universe. It just seems huge to us because we are living in it


Another thing to consider might be that the simulation has not been running for “billions for years” but might have just started.


And the simulator may have been done with simulating it all in a blink of an eye. Our perception of time is completely irrelevant.


Who ever said that the computer doing the simulation is working under laws of physics that are identical to our own? There are plenty of sets of physical laws that would support such a simulation, and a great many of them are entire computational complexity categories stronger than our own - consider, for example, a reality that is truly real-valued, rather than approximately real-valued with some semi-bounded probabilistic error. And then it's not "tiling some large fraction of reality" that's needed; if you go up a few alephs you end up with computers where our experienced reality falls out of people noodling and with stuff like "run all discrete programs with length less than N bytes" the same way we do things like compute the error of the fast inverse square root for all 32 bit floats.


Sure, but the original argument was that with current known physics we should expect the universe to be full of simulations in the future


It is a counter argument against that we can build a perfect simulator of our universe, but not a good one against that our universe is simulated.

In fact if I were to build a simulator, I most likely have to design a mechanism to prevent its residents from observing beyond a certain micro scale due to limited cpu/mem resources and laziness to implement all the details. Tiny black hole is a good mechanism to reduce resource consumption when simulating a fixed volume of this universe. Imagine living in the world of Minecraft, the minimal unit is a block. Trying to look inside of it yields nothing. All physically meaningful characteristics are described by its surface. In our universe this looks very much like a blackhole.


I you're really maybe missing the simulation business w.r.t. computing, etc. It's like cells in a dish debating the world outside them without any context of it.

It's pretty trivial to have this reality be a 'container', as it were, within some superset reality, regardless of the information density of said contained reality.

Think of it like a human body sort of being its own unique, low-entropic thing.

I personally like thinking that in one sense, we're all a bunch of bits of fleeting consciousness on the edge of some fractal of realities, and the 'substrate' is simply possibility itself.

After all, the mandelbrot fractal is drawn by which series terminate, and often how long it takes them to terminate.

Why not us? Why can't we be one infinitesimal reality in the entire sea of possible realities, held together by the fact that our reality happens to have coherent rules that allows it to exist as some possible state in the greater states of some amorphous soup of possibility?

Just a thought. I know it may be more out there for some.


I think it's fine to imagine that there might be a root universe that doesn't share this one's restrictions on information density, but we don't have any reason to believe it and without believing it the argument that there should be near infinite simulated realities starts to break down


I think the problem with that assumption is that a simulation would have to represent every bit of information under simulation. From the perspective of a human being, most of the universe could be simulated only at a very high level of abstraction - there’s no need to maintain the state of every subatomic particle in a star in a neighboring galaxy, for instance.


The argument presented above rules out a infinite chain of simulations inside simulations. It may still be possible to have a finite chain of simulations, where the fidelity successively decreases. At some point down the chain the simulation can't have enough capacity anymore to contain conscious beings, which wonder, whether they live in a simulation.


I think that maybe brings in a question of if you should assume a piece of information say the existence of this 't' is uncorrelated with being simulated or not. If not than I think it can be shown that it's probability of being part of a simulation is just equal to the fraction of information in the universe that's dedicated to simulations which I think most people would imagine is less than 50% given the knowledge that that space has a max information capacity. I do admit that you might think information associated with consciousness is more common in simulations than out, but idk, also maybe not. Personally I find the particular set of facts I'm presented with to not seem particularly simulated. My life isn't particularly interesting and I think most information in the kinda of limited resolution simulation you're imagining should have unusually high value of some kind.


This would only be true if the arrow of time only moves toward the future. If it also moved backwards, even in a greatly limited manner, you wouldn't need to track everything. You'd basically have infinite storage for a finite amount of data.


The second law of thermodynamics creates the arrow of time, only pointing to the future right? And aren't all other laws of physics time symmetrical? What explains these laws co-existing better than it being part of a simulation?


Or even just passed thru from the base world.


The simulations aren't nested, they're simultaneous and all under one hypervisor! Maybe one of my old Qubes laptops is running the second layer of the simulation - I should probably turn it back on.


Have you ever heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready-to-assemble_furniture ?


I don't understand that but feel confident that if there were anything to understand I would understand it, and it makes me want to quote Billy Madison.

Edit: I don't understand the argument that if many good simulations exist, we must be in one, either. It seems bizarre to me. So having a bit of an odd suggestion about information density is as good of a response as any.


If we're in a simulation, wouldn't that simulation run in a universe that may have different capabilities than our simulated one, such as a different maximum density or even a completely different set of physical laws that governs it?


Sure, but then we're back to knowing nothing about it. I think what many people find compelling about the simulation argument is that it claims that we can just follow forward our laws of physics and see that we are more likely than not living in a simulation, but I think that's not true


> If it is possible that to make a simulation which matches our experience, then it is likely possible to make an unbounded number of such simulations.

Why? This seems to me to be the weakness in the argument.

Of all the universes in which it is possible for a technological species to evolve and create a simulation of our universe, what’s the probably of said simulations having a given incentive or conducive cost/benefit ratio for said species?

Theoretically this could range from “can only do one once before our budget runs out and we move on” to your “unbounded” claim. But with what distribution?

This question seems fundamental and so reduces the initial question to a more complex one than what you pose: is it possible and if so how plausible?

Unless I’m missing something, leaping over this factor, as seems to be the mainstream approach, indicates to me that some techno-utopic-transcendentalism bias is at play.


> Unless I’m missing something, leaping over this factor, as seems to be the mainstream approach, indicates to me that some techno-utopic-transcendentalism bias is at play.

Yeah, at some level. The universe that we observe doesn't seem to be set up, in the current epoch, to have very tight resource limits other than time. Energy is plentiful. The main cost of anything is opportunity cost. Sure, simulating a universe might cost /our/ civilization so much compute capacity that we have to choose between than and advertising Christmas sales, and that's clearly no choice at all -- but it only takes a small percentage of similar planets to hold civilizations that are just slightly more advanced to make this a reasonable freshman project, and at that point, plentitude creeps in again. Basically -- and I agree this can totally be interpreted as utopianism -- it's hard to imagine a line between "it is possible to build a computer capable of computing <X>" and "it is expensive, on the scale of reasonably-advanced civilizations, to build a computer capable of computing <X>."


> it's hard to imagine a line between "it is possible to build a computer capable of computing <X>" and "it is expensive, on the scale of reasonably-advanced civilizations, to build a computer capable of computing <X>."

Well it’s not so much about whether there is a line but what the probability distributions are and whether it continues to make sense to think that of all sentient beings the majority are likely simulated.

And while I personally get the argument you and the parent post make, I think it’s worthwhile highlighting that it’s likely not a simple matter of whether it’s possible and that the biases/utopianism that facilitate making that leap are also factors and worth making explicit.

Personally, I find it hard to conclude that a sufficiently advanced civilisation would necessarily be concerned with running so many simulations when there are probably a number of things they could spend time on that we can think of and many more we can’t because we’re not that advanced.


I think your summary of the question conflates a couple very different things. One of those things is the possibility of a simulation like the matrix, where you could attach computer IO to a human brain with the brain unable to tell the difference. But "we are living in a simulation" requires that technology be possible, and it also requires that at some point everyone did that, and they never left, and that something in the real world causes all their offspring to get wired in young enough that we don't notice it happening at any point in the process of pregnancy, birth, and infancy.

I don't see any reason to assume it's entirely impossible to make a computer system that provides brain IO indistinguishable from the real world. It'd obviously be very far beyond us, but it seems possible that a sufficiently advanced computer could manage it. But accepting that doesn't mean I have to accept that enough people did it to establish a population, they did so permanently, they forced it on their offspring (conceived both in the real world and simulation), and they never told anyone or left clear signs in the simulated world.

Alternatively it could assume that we are ourselves simulated, just programs unaware that we're programs. But that leaves many of the same questions (who did it, why keep it going forever, etc). We currently could dedicate all of humanity's exaflops of computing power to Monte Carlo simulations of Snakes and Ladders, but why? I don't think there's any reason to step from "theoretically it's possible" to assuming any amount of likelihood.


I always took the simulation to mean “society”, nation state norms, gossip about one another, elites… truisms of society being “facts” like GDP, not facts like speed of light.

Like in the “clearly people doing the work is why potatoes are on store shelves, not due to the shareholders of Ore-Ida, which is hallucination.”


There is always the option that humanity eradicates itself into oblivion before the technology for building a simulation has been developed.

Looking at how green/co2 certificates work, looking at politics and misinformation, looking at escalating wars out of stupidity, looking how many countries have been far-right-winged lately into Sharia law,...I think that's the far more likely option.

Humans are petty, humans are irrational, humans forget too quickly.

Always bet on humans acting like psychotic apes wanting more bananas even when their belly is so stuffed that it almost explodes.

Whether you want to admit that this is how the planet works or not doesn't matter. In the end, right wing populism always wins because they bet on stupidity and irrational beliefs, not on compromise and rationality.


It's unlikely to be half of all internet users.

* The 4 million internet users that self selected to answer a philosophical question on Matrix type simulations are unlikely to respond to general questions in the same manner as, say, 4 million K-Pop fans.

* Neither of the above groups are likely to be a good and true representation of the mean responses of the 5.3 billion internet users worldwide.


Along your line of thinking, simple question: do set even know if they’re unique users? Maybe one person or small group is racking up those numbers.. are there controls?


I find the simulation argument is little different in nature to the argument that because something exists, someone (a god) must have made it.

And I think humans are highly susceptible to creating explanations without evidence.


Absolutely - the simulation hypothesis is basically identical to belief in God, you’ve got an omnipotent being that exists outside the universe (God or the creators of the simulation) and created it. Any of the supernatural elements are totally possible when something that exists outside the universe can change its rules arbitrarily. The only difference is whether the omnipotent being wants you to covet your neighbours ox.

Extend this to Roko’s Basilisk and it’s even more similar - instead of getting tortured in hell for eternity for coveting the ox you get tortured in cyberspace for eternity for not working on the AI.


Arguments about God had come to a stall, when all sides of a debate agreed that a hypothesis of God is not falsifiable. But it is still a question whether hypothesis of a simulation is falsifiable or not.

How simulated Universe would be different from a "real" one? Some give an answer like "we couldn't know" and finish at that. But this approach is a way to lose opportunity to think. Suppose we can guess some properties of a simulation, what they would be? I'd say simulated Universe would have an informational nature. We can create informational models of real phenomena. But our models tend to have limitations brought to simplify calculations.

For example, we limit precision of calculations. Probably these can be detected from inside of a model.

We tend to resort to stochastic models in some cases. And quantum mechanics sees a lot of stochastic.

Physicists tend to talk about information like it is a real thing. I do not understand what they mean by that, maybe they just talk about logarithms of probabilities? But it looks weird... simulation like.

All this leads me to two questions:

1. Can we make some falsifiable predictions from a simulation hypothesis? Information in physics could be one of such predictions, but it is not, because we retrospectively explain it with a simulation.

2. Probabilities and information look to me as artefacts of a human mind's way to function, it is very strange that they pop up in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that they are not really real but a projection of our mind to reality?


How could you know when some phenomenon is an artefact of a simulator Vs an artefact of the universe we are in?


The great part of it we can do this mental exercise without knowing.


And the explanations also don't even resolve anything. "OK, then where did God come from?" or "OK, then where did the simulation come from?". I just don't see the point.


It's like Occam's razor, we just added another layer of abstraction for no reason.


Occam’s Razor suggests that we remove unhelpful abstractions.


People often believe in things without rational proof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion


is this site just as edgy as reddit when it comes to religion? genuine question


What I said was extremely tame, and if I'm wrong in my assessment please feel free to let me know.


What do you define as edgy here? I would expect most of HN userbase to be atheist/agnostic. So religious topics would probably be considered edgy.


I consider myself firmly Christian, but I’m more likely to be perceived as agnostic in my conversations around religion - especially here.

My faith is based on subjective experience, not objective ones. It wouldn’t make any sense at all from my perspective to expect anyone else to believe based solely on my word.


Thanks for sharing. There's a time and place for belief based on subjective experience. That's nearly all the time, but many don't accept that :)

The idea that people shouldn't take you at your own word in order to accept your belief is interesting, though. The religion was pretty much word of mouth for most of its spread. Why not from you?

This is most definitely not snarky. You piqued my interest and I try to work out my doctrine with fear and trembling ;)


No snark detected at all :)

It’s 1am here, though, and I have to be up early. I’ll try to remember to come back to this thread tomorrow - if I don’t, feel free to bug me.


Do you mind sharing your subjective experience? Just quickly. I've heard some really weird stories and often wonder if these people are just extrapolating normal events in their head into communication with God, so I like to hear em

Cheers


There have been multiple in my life, but one that stands out to me was actually when I was only about two years old. My grandfather had a bad heart attack and wasn’t expected to live more than a few weeks; my family moved across the country for him to spend his last days with his children. A year later, he had (unexpectedly) recovered. My mother and grandparents wanted to move back to where I am now, but had no way to do so - no vehicle, no money and no job waiting for them back here.

My grandmother prayed for God to provide a way for them to get back home. The next morning she received a letter informing them that their bid on a Corps of Engineers contract to maintain a park had been accepted. They’d be paid quarterly, and the first check was enclosed. It was enough to buy a truck, a camp trailer to live in, and make the move.

No one had submitted a bid - no one was even familiar with the process or the position. I would be the first to propose that someone in the family bid on their behalf, but they later learned that the bid had both my grandparents’ signatures on it. My grandfather was in the hospital when the bid was submitted, and my grandmother maintained that she’d never seen the paper before getting a check in the mail for the rest of her life.


(Sorry for intruding into the conversation, and thank you for sharing your experience).

First thing I thought about was they might have applied and just forgot (I registered "grandfather"/"grandmother" as older people, though now I realize it might not have been so, as you were a two year old, so they might as well have been into their forties).


The problem I have with this reasoning is that you can’t know which God intervened.

I don’t pray to anything. Good things and bad things happen to me. I don’t mind thanking supernatural parties— but they never leave their card!

Maybe I am a favorite of Odin? I do really like crows.


It's trendy. I'm sure that on some level, many people just think that it makes them look smart, and even a little edgy without appearing politically incorrect.


And besides, it is a fun and already pretty old philosophical mind game:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428359


You asked in the poll “are we living in a simulation?” but here in this post you say “computer simulation”, is that what you meant with the original poll? Because I might say yes to this being a simulation but no to it being run by a computer.


This is a religious stance, like many worlds theory or any religion you know. You can’t prove it. You can spend your live chase evidence, but there is no experiment to prove it. So, go warship if that’s your thing.


Having just completed a first year university philosophy subject on the matter I feel I am an expert and will share the answer.

The people who think they are living in a simulation because they can't argue their way out of it should tell the people who accuse them of it to prove it.

(I think I passed the subject. Waiting for the results.)

/ please appreciate the humour in that I know nothing more than I knew last year


In a perfect simulation with no outside influence, there's no distinction between "real" and "simulated" - the simulated world is real, and the outside world is not observable (effectively doesn't exist).

So unless the "entity" doing the simulation interferes with it in some way, it simply doesn't matter.


Interestingly, if there is a way to detect that we are in a simulation, it means that there is some side channel by which information can pass between the simulation and it's bare metal, the world in which it is being run. This would mean that the simulation itself is a phenomenon inside this base reality and so is very real and also that we can learn things about it. If there is no way to do this, this would mean that thermodynamics and information behavior in this outside, real world are very different from ours, as we cannot as a rule build such a system ourselves, there are no standalone, completely isolated systems of any kind in our universe, and also interestingly, the simple fact of acknowledging this negates it's truth because you're detecting a fundamental difference between your simulation and the universe in which it is running, which makes it a paradox.

If a universe exists with laws that allow for a simulation which cannot be detected from inside, but that the simulation itself is observable from outside, that means information can only flow outward. A universe like this would basically be an infinite substrate with many different systems in it that cannot observe each other, and the inability to observe a separate system would be the stable state of such a universe. So it wouldn't make sense that an observer in such a universe would exist to observe the simulation as he would be a system without the capability of observing anything outside of himself, or in other words, information cannot flow outward either. So, it is very unlikely that we would not be able to detect and learn about the bare metal from inside, which means that it would be falsifiable. If it is falsifiable then people making the claim ought to be able to demonstrate it. If not, it's a "simulation" that is completely isolated to the point that nobody in the universe where it is running can even detect that it is running, or in other words, not a simulation at all.


Not sure how you got this part:

> So it wouldn't make sense that an observer in such a universe would exist to observe the simulation as he would be a system without the capability of observing anything outside of himself

I can easily simulate and observe systems without influencing them as they run. I may have the means to influence them, but it doesn't mean that I have to use them. In fact, many simulations in this world are performed for the exact purpose of inspecting what the end result is going to be without interfering while they're being run.


So in particular at a quantum level, simply observing something interferes with the outcome. Ignoring that, any system you set up will affect and be affected by the external world, such as heat transfer, light bouncing off of the system or it's components, electrical noise on a circuit, and it inherits the natural laws by which it's environment, the universe, is governed, such as the speed of light. You don't need to interfere, the system will be affected by it's environment, and stopping that from happening entirely is impossible.


The simulator will be affected, but if it affects the simulation itself, it means the simulator is flawed.


A simulation running on a simulator will be affected by anything that affects the simulator. Electrical noise warping the speed at which the simulation happens, but flips from cosmic rays, even the hard latency due to the speed of light, all things that affect the simulation itself. It is unavoidable, some information about the real universe will leak into the simulation. So if we are a simulation, it is detectable, unless the bare metal universe allows for 0 entropy processes, in which case the simulation would likely be as unobservable from the universe as the universe is from within the simulation, which makes it not really a simulation at all.


The speed at which the simulation happens is completely irrelevant to the inside of the simulation and does not have to be detectable from the inside. Latency doesn't matter, and even in our world we already have protections against things like bit flips. You're jumping to conclusions way too fast.

The simulator may misplace the rock[0], but you have no guarantee that it ever will during this particular simulation. And even if it does, but a state that fails integrity checks does not continue to be simulated, you'll never have the opportunity to actually use it for anything inside the simulation.

It's not enough to affect the simulator in some way to affect the simulation. The fact that your breath provides some thermal energy to your computer does not make it detectable from a ZX Spectrum emulator running on it, even if you could detect it from your computer itself. If you were to detect whether a ZX Spectrum program runs on a simulator or on the real thing, you would have to look for differences in how the real ZX Spectrum behaves versus the emulator. Without that knowledge, you're completely in the dark, and even bit flips won't help you (the real thing could have been bit-flipping in the exact same way after all).

[0] https://xkcd.com/505/


You're focusing on the details of my examples too much. In our universe, you cannot create a system of any kind unaffected by the world around it, this is a fundamental law. No system you build can be entirely isolated from the world around it. You can isolate it in this way or that way, but you cannot entirely prevent interaction with the outside world. A computer is not some magical foam that insulates software running on it from the universe if the programmer so desires. If you run a program where some entity inside is even capable of investigating that it is just inside a program, there will be indicators, period. That is in our universe. It doesn't matter if it is a computer or some other method of running the simulation, from inside, there will be detectable effects to any entity that tries to investigate enough.

In a universe where this is not true, that is, systems can emerge that are entirely isolated from the rest of it, even so far as not having to obey the physical laws of said universe, that would be the stable state of emergent systems within that universe. Systems generally would not interact with one another. So even if an entity in that universe could construct a simulation of some kind, and the universe around it had no impact on it whatsoever, it would not be able to observe the simulation and so it would be either pointless or not a simulation at all which both amount to the same thing.

I should note, I'm not saying that we aren't in one, I don't think we are but if we are, it is fundamentally falsifiable and if the more we understand our universe we see no indication of it, that means we aren't in one.


> You can isolate it in this way or that way, but you cannot entirely prevent interaction with the outside world.

The mere fact of some interaction happening does not automatically let you answer the question whether you're in a simulation or not. The whole point of simulations where you can inspect them from the outside is some kind of interaction, but it doesn't mean that an entity inside the simulation is able to determine what's going on outside. Just that the simulation is observable makes it not isolated in the sense that you're using, so yes, you're right, but at the same time it's not very relevant to what I was talking about. A simulated Game of Life field isn't isolated either.


It's a trendy narrative.

The argument goes like this, summarized: if ancestor simulations are possible then there are more ancestor simulations than real worlds. Therefore it is highly likely you're in an ancestor simulation.

First, we forget the importance of the word "ancestor". Dive into the details if you like, but suffice to say this word was not included in the initial argument for no reason. Second, it is unfalsifiable by definition. Third, it is inconsequential unless it is detectable. Finally, and this is a subjective claim, it would appear that something much more interesting is going on with regard to this whole existence thing than something as small minded as an ancestor simulation.


We are obviously in a simulation, at least two layers. The fact that we are built up from a set of consistent rules and atoms, basically pixels, rather than an open and free canvas, is direct proof of one of these layers. The second is that every single experience a human has is inside the brain rather than "out there", as it's a model synthesized from raw sensory data. You can't directly experience "out there".

The question is not whether we are in a simulation, but rather is there an experiential reality outside of this simulation, or did the simulation pop into existence from nothing.


Thought-provoking thoughts. How would an “open and free canvas” work? How would “being out there” work (experiencing something without being an observer)?

I mean, reality might be just what it is even if it feels and looks like a simulation.

How living outside of the simulation would feel? Could we tell it is not a simulation?


This whole argument is meaningless because the term Simulation isn't well defined. In the narrowest sense, you could define simulation as "human-like creatures running computer-like machines that we're part of, just like the Matrix". In the broadest sense you can define simulation as "The universe follows a set of fixed physical laws, and we are part of that"

While the former is just ridiculous, the latter is pretty plausible. When people are answering this question they can imagine any definition of simulation they like.


Why do the majority of the people in the world think the universe was created by an all powerful deity? It’s the same phenomenon. Wanting to believe in something because it strikes a chord despite an absence of evidence.


OP asks: why so many people are now convinced that we are living in a simulation?

Not whether we think we do or don't.

Which is a quite different question.

For my 2 pennies, whether or not it makes a difference (as mentioned in simulation argument) does itself not matter, all that matters if people think it matters (it is, after all, entirely in our head at this point). Does it create a disassociation effect where counter-intuitively a constructivist approach allows is to see the world more positively (positive, as in positivist). And if not, are poll answers blunder or is there no disassociation of self determination.


This is all name magic. Anyone can call reality a simulation. Computation is substrate independent, so there is literally no difference, functionally, between a Turing machine made of sticks and one made of bits. My VMWare-based Windows doesn’t worry about whether it is running on “real” hardware.

It’s like when people ask “what was before the beginning?” The answer is something that can’t possibly matter; can’t be settled and wouldn’t matter if it were settled.


Half of the internet probably believes in God. Does that surprise you?


...which is most likely the other half. Combine the two and widen the definition of "God" to include "BOFH" and you get a near 100% of believers on the 'net.


These two belief systems are compatible. Both groups believe everything was created by some higher being, who might be watching us right now.


They are not compatible but comparable. Religious people tend to believe in a certain creator and creation while considering other creation stories/myths to be either false or incomplete - i.e. they consider other religions to be incompatible with their own. Those who honestly believe we are living in a simulation - which probably won't be that many people in total as the 'simulation myth' is as of yet mostly a philosophical construct - can mostly be categorised together with deists in that they consider observations and rational reasoning to be sufficient to conclude the existence of a creator who designed and/or started the simulation [1]. This only goes for those who truly believe the hypothesis of the universe - or at least our part/view of it - being a simulation, not for those who just take up the subject to spin a yarn or impress others with their supposed erudition.

[1] this is a deep rabbit hole to go down into: did the creator actually design the simulation or did he only start it to while away some time on his gaming system? Is this a first-level simulation or is it a simulation inside another simulation, either as part of some sort of experiment or just as a mini game inside the game just started by some pimpled green-skinned lizard-boy on his Game-o-Saurus?


Some people feel that there's a hidden, unprovable reality beyond what we can perceive, which dictates the things we cannot explain in our own reality. Religions are features of basically every human culture; "simulation theory" folks are of this mindset, but it's couched in the language of technology, rather than theology.

I work on soft real-time simulations as a career, so I think this reality being a simulation is exceedingly unlikely.


One argument I've encountered says that if, in the future, we are capable of creating a simulation where the laws of physics are pretty much the same as of the 'real' world and the entities within it are conscious, then it's probable that we are already residing in such a simulation, operated by someone else.


This is interesting. A tangentially related argument I saw online deals with the complexity of the simulation in distant regions of the universe, as in, if you could somehow make it slowdown in a locally controlled experiment compared to the fullspeed simulation somewhere else, you could prove the universe is "instanced" (think MMO areas/servers), at least for specific parts of it.

Edit: what if blackholes == instance crashes? o_O


I'm personally agnostic on whether or not we're in a simulation. However, some say the "Double-slit experiment" is perhaps proof we are in some sort of simulation. Particularly the part where particles/waves behave differently only when they are directly being observed.


I think it's fun thought to play with from technical perspective. How would you make an ethical simulation with limited processing power in 1000 years?

- Dark energy would make it less compute-intensive towards the end of the simulation. If you knew where your observers are you could simulate less and less over time, while also reaching an ethical endpoint for the simulation

- and with Double-slit experiment, we kinda know that universe knows when things are observed

- Cosmic Microwave Background would hide a lot of signals further away, giving a possibility of aggregating or dropping signals further away from observers

- Diffraction Limit would limit the resolution of observations we can make from further away, limiting the resolution of the needed simulation.

- Quantum uncertainty principle would be easy way to make the simulation non-deterministic by just adding some jitter / variance.

I might have written some things that are wrong. Also it doesn't really answer your questions as this doesn't really lead me to believe we surely live in a simulation, it's just something I like to think about sometimes.


Pull the ol' entity system and only simulate things "close by" (or raise the granularity of simulation for things further away). What do I care about a metane molecule in Alpha Centauri but its contribution to a bigger, planet-spanning or galaxy-spanning effect? Same idea.

Edit: this has an obvious issue: if (when?) humanity (or rather the most ubiquitous "observer" species, whatever it is) "saturates" the cosmos, these optimization opportunities will get rarer and rarer. If it leads to localized "slowdowns" of physical phenomena then we'll have positive evidence of the simulation hypothesis.


I wouldn't trust that people clicking yes actually believe we live in a simulation. There's a funny aspect to joust about that, to pretend you believe it, even discuss that you believe that, even if to your core, you don't.


Not to advocate for the "is it edgy?" angle of the conversation, but I have a problem "believing" (ha!) that most of the religious people today actually believe in a creator (religion != faith). One can be religious insofar as tradition is concerned and ignore the spiritual angle completely. Others can believe in a grand spiritual power and plan behind all things while not having any rituals of their own.


> One can be religious insofar as tradition is concerned and ignore the spiritual angle completely

There's a third aspect to it, which is following the spiritual aspect of it while not actually believing in a creator/actual divine entity (see for example Christian atheism^1).

I go regularly (albeit less so in the past few years, since covid made me lose the habit) to church while having developed my belief into only a "metaphorical god" and the idea of Christ. The main thing I get from it is the spiritual aspect of it. It feels nice being into that kind of meditative space, into the idea of unconditional love, endless forgiveness, absolute empathy.

My experience of practicing christians is that they're on a spectrum when it comes to how literally they believe, from not at all, to metaphorical at every level, to people who actually think there's a grey-bearded guy in the clouds. Those last ones are not marginal by any means and constitute the core of the hardcore flock (it's much easier to wake up on a sunday morning (or even in the week) if you think that you punishment for missing mass is hell).

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism


>Two thirds of adults globally (64%) report being happy

I think the idea that this reality is a simulation gives people comfort that all their problems are not real and there's a reality somewhere else which is more fair?


One of the biggest mistakes people make thinking the simulation theory is the idea that the "host universe" resembles anything like ours or has any of the limitations that our universe has.

It doesn't.


> Why is the night sky dark if there is an infinity of stars, covering every part of the celestial sphere?

Because of stellar dust? I'm not sure what makes this a paradox. There's a well-known explanation.


I thought this as well. The answers seems very obvious, so I began to wonder if I’m missing something and it’s actually not obvious.

Yet even if the dust was mostly local, it would still block out light from infinity. Assuming it’s thick enough. But presumably the dust wouldn’t only be local; it could even be worse in other parts of the universe. Essentially we just don’t live in a perfect vacuum. There’s a bunch of crap blocking the light.

I suppose at some point in the history of the universe, there was probably less dust and it actually was much brighter.


The problem with dust is that in an infinite universe, the dust would have to absorb so much light that it would become so hot that it would glow, eventually just as bright as the stars.


Oh, so my guess actually is naive then. But is it true that it would have to glow? Could it not depend on the ratio of light to dust, so to speak? Or is it inevitable that the dust would always eventually increase in heat until it glowed?


Sorry for the belated answer - but yes, it is inevitable. Black body radiation means everything in the universe glows.

This whole thing is just a problem with an universe both infinite and old, though. In a young universe, the dust might still be cold enough (yet still hotter than it is in reality), and in a finite universe, there could be a steady state as you described.


Better still, in a young expanding universe (that still may yet some day contract) the visible horizon includes less than it once did as the mean distance between matter has increased.


I think it's because the expansion of the universe is happening faster than the speed of light. So the light from the far regions can never reach us.

The universe could well be infinite, but the Hubble volume is pretty much finite...

If it was only dust, it alone would not explain the darkness due to re-emission of light (as other commenters pointed out).


This is how it's done - https://bit.ly/simulation-proof-script


> Just like computer code, it must be transmitted precisely. if it’s missing one letter, it won’t work.

LLMs are quite forgiving in that regard now.


I find the idea super unnerving. It means there is the possibility that your consciousness could be trapped in a virtual prison Black-Mirror style for an eternity.


This whole simulation thing is fun, but that people genuinely believe that baffles me. I guess this is why religions exist.


Are there any other options available? Like, what is it all if not a simulation?

Religion can be seen as a special case of God’s simulation


I think if you added a third argument of how many people don't actually care...the numbers would be surprisingly high! That being said, whoever did build this simulation did pretty well :D


People who believes in simulation is more likely to vote with extra interests.


Old conversation I once witnessed online years ago:

"It won't let me see the article without filling out a survey."

"I enjoy being a 19 year old Black woman with a PhD on such surveys." -- Male with PhD in his 50s, either Caucasian or ethnically Indian (as in the country), iirc.


IIRC, in the early days of the web, a vastly disproportionate number of people claimed to live in Beverly Hills.

Some here may be too young to remember it, but there was a television show at the time called "Beverly Hills 90210". Guess which zip code would immediately come to mind for people who didn't want to use their real one.


Why do half of Internet users click random answers to stupid questions?


My favorite exchange on the topic from "Matter" by Iain M. Banks where one character explains their argument, based on morality, for why he believes they are living in the base layer of reality and not a simulation:

Xide Hyrlis: "War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale."

Choubris Holse: "Of course, your god could just be a bastard."


There's a difference between a simulation and a computer simulation. If our world is contained in a vastly more advanced world that we don't know about, I doubt they'd use something as primitive as computers.


Heh, you do realize that we live in a quantum supercomputer that computes at 10^50 Hz/Kg and 10^34 Hz/Joule?

The wave particle duality is just a min-decision/min-consciousness optimization.

Church-Turing thesis has no sign of being wrong - the maximum expressiveness of this universe is captured by computation.

The most complex theorems of the generalization of mathematics, computation, are actually about what would happen in formal systems, which physical systems are... So high complexity truth is... Simulcrums like Truman Show. Have fun, ahh


since bots are programmed, they can argue they 'live in a simulation'...

seems you're at about 50/50 human traffic :)


Because philosophy, computer science, and cosmology aren't taught anymore. It was a fad for a year because of the big mouths of certain billionaires.

tl;dl: There's no way to know so it's a thought experiment that has no pertinence to reality.


Here's my systematic answer about 'questions'. First, broadly, a question is either falsifiable, or not. Even if it is hypothetically falsifiable, if it's not falsifiable in some reasonable time frame, or within some agreed upon framework for determining the "right" answer, then it's effectively not falsifiable. I think this question about if we're in a simulation is not falsifiable at the moment.

As an aside, if the question is falsifiable, then you don't want to simply ask people what they think. Asking people questions is usually a waste of time. Setting up an accurate poll is really hard. Even in good faith, anonymously, people will answer based on social norms and expectations. Knowing if you have an accurate population to poll is really hard, too. I think it's more reliable to set up a scenario where people can bet money or other another resource on the answer. You have to define how the "right" answer will be determined, and time box it. Assuming you set this up well, you might get some approximation about what people actually think about your question, and how confident they are in their assessment. It's still not foolproof, but it's meaningfully closer than just asking them.

For a question that's not falsifiable, or that you can't pin down a way to determine the "right" answer, such as if we're living in a simulation or not, there will be a small margin of people who will refuse to answer either way. A question that's not falsifiable is not a question at all. It's source material for fiction writers. This is a very small sliver of the population though. Most people will play along.

Among the remaining population (which is most people) you will get two broad groups. One doesn't think very hard about the question at all (if they did, they'd realize it was not falsifiable, and so kind of silly). These folks will split roughly along the proportion of the prevailing society at large. They're just answering whatever seems the most fun or heartwarming to them. It might be interesting to know, though. It'd tell you which way the "wind is blowing" so to speak.

The second group will actually think about the problem, and suspend their philosophical apprehensions about non-falsifiable questions, and kind of mull it over in their heads. They'll be willing to consider arguments. They might even (shudder) search the internet for articles or videos about it. The most you can ever hope for is that some of these folks have actual credentials or education in the field your question relates to, so their answers might actually even be credible. You won't know if they're credible or not though. And even if they have credentials, you probably don't have any way to judge the credibility of their credentials. But even still, they've given it some though, and are answering with a bit of investment. You'd probably like to know how this population sees the question, as it's the closest you can get to a "right" answer, given that the question is not falsifiable.

Here's the rub though. You have no way of separating the people who answer flippantly from the people who answer with some modicum of thought put into it. You can't know if somebody is trolling you, or a subject matter expert with decades of applicable scientific knowledge. And you can't judge a person's decades of scientific knowledge if (just as one example) their job depends on them answering a certain way. There are so many unknowns involved, that the proportion answering the question one way or another is basically noise. If I told you that half of people think gremlins are real, or that the God of the Bible is real, or that aliens are among us, I haven't really told you anything at all. It'd be like saying "I took this six sided die, rolled it, and it came up a 3. What does that mean?"


A more pithy version of my two cents...

Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left. - Jane Austen (1775 - 1817), Persuasion, 1818

From http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Jane_Austen/


this is a case for making-more-comfortable delusion.


Because we do.


says who?




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