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Is Reality, as We Know It, a Simulation?
And why this question is unanswerable
It seems to be fashionable right now to ponder whether we are living in a simulation. Tech moguls have been reported to do it in hot tubs. I’m doing it at 6 am in an Airbnb in Marin County, California. Before we begin, I think it’s really important to distinguish between two possible major hypotheses: (A) what seems to be happening is a simulation but “we” are not, and (B) everything that seems to be happening is simulated, including “us”. Let’s break these down a little, one by one.
Hypothesis A: This is Virtual Reality (VR)
In this hypothesis, somewhere there is an “real”, non-simulated organism that possibly contains something brain-like, a sort of “natural” processor that instantiates the sense of selfhood, a mechanism that receives input and produces output and also possibly witnesses that process and has a sense that it exists as a conglomeration of phenomena apart from everything else that seems to be happening.
In this hypothesis, either that brain actually exists inside what we think of as our head, or it exists in some other place and is wired up to an input/output interface, enabling it to experience a simulated reality. If the reality we experience is simulated, then what that root brain is…
