Simulation Theory: Are We Living Inside a Computer?

ARCHIVE FILE · Theory explainer. Key dates: 4th century BC, 1604, 1964, 1999, 2003, 2012, 2016, 2018. This is not breaking news. It’s part of the Redacted Weekly evergreen archive. We explain conspiracy theories; we don’t endorse them.

What happened

Simulation theory is unusual for this archive. It isn’t a cover-up story, there’s no villain, and serious philosophers argue about it in journals. It also can’t currently be proven or disproven. That’s exactly why it works so well as a late-night internet theory. (Customer support: unavailable.)

People doubted reality long before computers existed. Zhuangzi (4th century BC) dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Plato’s allegory of the cave compares people to prisoners who mistake shadows for reality; that’s the scene in our featured image, a 1604 engraving. Indian philosophy’s Maya, and Gnostic beliefs about a world made by a lesser god, both treat everyday reality as a kind of illusion. René Descartes’s “evil demon” asked how we could know a powerful deceiver wasn’t faking everything we perceive.

Science fiction brought in the computers. Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3 (1964) imagined a simulated city. It inspired World on a Wire (1973) and The Thirteenth Floor (1999). Philip K. Dick’s 1966 story about implanted memories became Total Recall (1990). The Matrix (1999) made the idea mainstream.

The footage

• “Is life a video game? | Elon Musk | Code Conference 2016”, uploaded to YouTube by the channel On with Kara Swisher on 2 June 2016; 3 min 43 s. It shows Musk discussing the simulation argument on stage. It’s a recording of an opinion, not evidence for the hypothesis. Credit: Code Conference / On with Kara Swisher.

Timeline

• 4th century BC: Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream; Plato’s cave (Republic).
• 1604: The engraving of Plato’s cave used as our featured image.
• 1641: Descartes’s Meditations introduces the deceiving demon.
• 1964: Galouye’s Simulacron-3.
• 1999: The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor.
• 2001: First version of Bostrom’s paper circulates.
• 2003: Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”, Philosophical Quarterly.
• October–November 2012: Beane, Davoudi and Savage post their lattice-test paper.
• June 2016: Musk’s “base reality” remark at Code Conference.
• 2017: Campbell and colleagues propose further tests.
• 2018: Tyson gives “better than 50-50 odds” to NBC News.

What witnesses reported

These are claims, not facts:

• We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
• Video games are improving so fast that simulations will become indistinguishable from reality, so we’re probably in one already.
• Strange experiences such as the Mandela Effect are “glitches” that reveal the code.
• Simulation theory has scientific support.

What the research found

What Bostrom actually argued. The abstract of the 2003 paper reads: “This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.” The reasoning: if even a few advanced civilizations ran such simulations, simulated minds would far outnumber real ones. The argument doesn’t claim we’re in a simulation. It says that if options 1 and 2 are false, option 3 follows. Bostrom keeps an archive of the debate at simulation-argument.com.