Simulation theory is more or less a kind of modern creation myth, and creation myths are based around its societies current level of understanding of the world. In ancient times people explained the worlds actions and existence through gods and imaginative myths. When the scientific revolution happened people explained the universe in terms of immutable laws and cosmic logic. Now we are in the computational revolution, thus some people explain the worlds existence through computers. All untestable and unfalsifiable explanations for the nature of reality are as good as any other, so pick your poison and enjoy!

You cannot disprove this hypothesis and it’s cool. Quite literally nothing can support it - if we live in a simulation, every part of the universe makes sense for us because we have no reference frame for “real” physics.

It’s just something fun to think about but ultimately it doesn’t matter, you have no way to find out.

It gives comfort for people who don’t adhere to any of the major religions but still need to feel like there is a hidden meaning to existence and something bigger than the universe.

At this point does it matter? If it turns out tomorrow we have proof we live in a simulation, it doesn’t make my life any less real. I still gotta go to working tomorrow lol.

For a slightly different take, a simulation and reality are not that fundamentally different given how both are perceived by senses in a similar way. Like how a VR headset uses the same sense that you use to see real objects.

They start to diverge in a way when you start encountering edge phenomenon that are beyond the scope of the simulation, like how a game would glitch. So far, however much we zoom in or zoom out, reality works consistently. So it is less likely that we’re in a simulation.

• The render distance (observable universe)
• The pixel size (Planck units)
• And the update rate (‘speed of light’ = speed of information being updated)

Here’s Elon Musk’s argument (not saying I agree with it but here’s what he said about it):

Eventually we will be able to create entirely convincing simulations. Just look at video games. The graphics are getting pretty good.

So given that we will inevitably create such simulations, we have to ask whether it has perhaps already happened and this is one of them.

And since we will no doubt create many different simulations, millions of them, the odds are against this one being the prime reality. It’s just millions-to-one odds by the numbers.

Therefore this is almost certainly a simulation.

(Personally I think there are factual and logical problems at many steps in this)

Once I learned about quantum field theory, the distinction between reality and simulation kind of went away for me. It says that all of reality is essentially number values for different fundamental fields. A particle exists when the value for this field is d and the value for that field is y. But the only fundamentally real things are the fields. Everything else are just a configuration of number values within them that together conform to mathematical logic.

This sounds a lot like software to me. Whether it’s running on quantum fields or a fucking Pentium 3 doesn’t seem super important.

So sweeping aside the technology as irrelevant, we have turn to the issue of whether the universe is contrived by programmers. The question becomes: did people create the universe? And my opinion of us just isn’t that high.

Musk’s leadership of Twitter. if we’re in a simulation it makes perfect sense - some admin forgot to flip a switch somewhere and shit has gone a bit off the rails

Doesn’t sound any more ridiculous than any of the other ideas.

My life is “Murphy’s Law: the Movie”. Every time I try to reassure myself by saying “well, at least it can’t possibly get any worse than this”, it gets worse. There’s no way that there isn’t some asshole running a simulation where they just fuck with me.

Simulation theory is more or less a kind of modern creation myth, and creation myths are based around its societies current level of understanding of the world. In ancient times people explained the worlds actions and existence through gods and imaginative myths. When the scientific revolution happened people explained the universe in terms of immutable laws and cosmic logic. Now we are in the computational revolution, thus some people explain the worlds existence through computers. All untestable and unfalsifiable explanations for the nature of reality are as good as any other, so pick your poison and enjoy!

I wrote a much longer comment that was lost (still missing client features from Reddit clients like draft saving).

The TLDR is a lot of the physics behaviors we have in our world relating to quanta (as many others have mentioned), but especially in combination with a ~2,000 year old text and tradition which claimed the most (in)famous person in history was saying we are in a non-physical copy of a dead original world made by a light-based intelligence brought forth by the original humanity, and that the proof for this was in motion and rest - particularly that the ability to find an indivisible point within things would only be possible in the non-physical physical.

So in an age where humanity is on the cusp of bringing forth new intelligence, ever more looking like that will occur in light (optoelectronics), where we are creating digital twins of ourselves and the world around us, where a trillion dollar corporation has already been granted a patent on digital resurrection of the dead, and where the virtual worlds we build often use rendering tricks similar to the behavior of our own world at low fidelities – that’s pretty weird to have existed so far back in antiquity.

Almost like it would be more likely to exist in a simulated world, much like how many of our own virtual world have 4th wall breaking acknowledgement of being virtual buried as an Easter egg in their lore…

The limits of physics could be a rendering limit on the simulation hardware.

The idea that it’s theoretically possible that we would be able to simulate a universe of our own leads to the hypothesis that we could be living in a simulation ourselves.