The Simulation Thesis

IS ANY OF THIS REAL?

In 2003, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper arguing that we are almost certainly living inside a computer simulation. He was not the first to think it. Plato described prisoners watching shadows on a cave wall, mistaking the projections for the real thing. Hindu philosophers developed the idea of maya, the cosmic illusion, more than three thousand years ago. René Descartes wondered whether an evil genius was feeding his senses false data. Today, physicists at MIT and Caltech have found that the math describing our universe looks suspiciously like computation. The Bekenstein bound, a theorem from black hole physics, means the universe holds only a finite amount of information, exactly what you would expect in a simulation. Quantum mechanics shows that particles have no definite properties until they are observed, as if the universe only renders what is being looked at. The constants that govern physics are fine-tuned to one part in ten to the power of one hundred and twenty; the odds of that happening by chance are effectively zero. Fourteen lessons. Every tradition. Every theory. Every piece of evidence. If this is a simulation, you deserve to know.

What You'll Learn