What is the academic reasoning behind believing we live in a simulation?
In: Technology
The one I have heard thrown around before is that over the next decades and centuries computing power will increase on a scale that will make it very easy for us to run simulations similar to how we perceive our universe and reality right now.
And since this lays in our future you might for a moment consider that we are already living in such simulation ourselves as once you are open to the possibility of such simulations existing in the future you can’t just brush of the possibility that we are in one.
In short, there are 3 possibilities:
1: humanity (or any other species for that matter) never decides to run simulations of reality because either they decide it’s too cruel or we never achieve the computing power.
2: humanity or other does run simulations but we are the real ones. In this situation the world we live in is the one that in the future will run simulations of reality and thus we still live in reality.
3: we are living in a simulation run by humanity or other
The idea is that when these simulations are run, there will be lots of simulations run and the ‘realities’ within these simulations will also run simulations, and then those realities will run simulations etc etc. This means that if simulations are run then there will soon become millions if not billions of different simulations.
So if we go back to our 3 possibilities the first possibility is still possible, simulations of reality require huge computing power we don’t have yet and may never have. The second possibility requires that we live in the one real ‘reality’ out of millions of simulations, this means that this possibility is incredibly unlikely. This leaves the last possibility which is that we live in a simulation.
IMHO, (layman here) is that there is not a “belief” that we live in a simulation. It is a philosophical position that we cannot rule out by our reasoning that we are not living in a simulation. There is nothing we know of (by observation or reasoning) that contradicts this position. This does not imply belief or support – simply it is something that cannot be ruled out.
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