The Simulation Thesis

IS ANY OF THIS REAL?

In 2003, 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 reality. Hindu philosophers developed the concept of maya — the cosmic illusion — over 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 mathematics describing our universe are suspiciously computational. The Bekenstein bound — a theorem from black hole physics — implies that the universe contains a finite amount of information, exactly what you would expect in a simulation. Quantum mechanics reveals that particles don't have definite properties until observed — as if the universe only renders what is being looked at. The cosmological constants that govern physics are fine-tuned to one part in ten to the power of one hundred and twenty — the odds of that being random 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