Simulation Theory
Modern Simulation Theory Daddy Nick Bostrom is a Swedish philosopher who spent most of his career at Oxford, where he founded and led the Future of Humanity Institute until it closed in 2024. He focuses on big existential questions, like the risks of advanced AI.
His paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” was published in Philosophical Quarterly in 2003. It’s about 13 pages and free on Bostrom’s site, simulation-argument.com. It’s very readable, mostly plain English with one simple formula:
Fraction of simulated people =
(f × N) ÷ (f × N + 1)
If f × N is large, the answer gets really close to 1, meaning almost everyone is simulated. For example, if 1% of civilizations make it and each runs 1,000 simulations, f × N = 10, so about 91% of all people are simulated.
Simulation Theory (or hypothesis), is the proposal that everything we experience in our everyday reality including our planet, our physical bodies, and the universe is an artificial, high-tech computer simulation.
Like in the Matrix?
In The Matrix you’re a real person. Your body is lying in a pod, and machines plug your brain into a fake world. Taking the red pill means waking up in your actual body.
In Bostrom’s version: there’s no body anywhere. You are the code. There’s nothing to wake up to. (How devastating).
So The Matrix is closer to “brain in a vat” than true simulation theory.
Why is this a thing?
The Speed of Light: Serving as an absolute speed limit in the universe, it mimics the maximum processing or rendering speed of a computer system loading data.
Quantum Mechanics: Subatomic particles exist in multiple probability states until they are observed or measured, resembling how video games only render environments when a player looks at them to save memory.
Pixels of Reality: Concepts like the Planck length (the smallest possible measurement of space) could act like pixels or a fundamental resolution limit for our universe.
Is this a new idea?
No. People have always suspected a deeper, hidden truth. In Hinduism, the concept of Maya holds that the world is an illusion, a veil over the true reality, Brahman. Buddhism teaches that the separate self is an illusion, and the Diamond Sutra compares all of existence to a dream, a bubble, and a flash of lightning. In China, Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, then woke up unsure whether he was a man who’d dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he was a man. In Greece, Plato described prisoners in a cave mistaking shadows on a wall for the real world. The Gnostics believed a lesser god built the material world as a prison to keep our souls from remembering where they came from. Descartes wondered if an evil demon was faking everything he experienced.
Hinduism
Buddhism
Zhuangzi
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
Around 375 BC in Athens, Greece, Plato wrote The Republic, a dialogue in which his teacher Socrates sets out to answer one question: what is justice? Along the way, in Book VII, Socrates tells a story. Prisoners are chained inside a cave their whole lives, facing a blank wall. Behind them, a fire burns, and objects carried past it cast shadows on the wall. Since the shadows are all they’ve ever seen, the prisoners believe the shadows are reality. When one prisoner breaks free, he discovers the fire, then the world outside, and finally the sun, and realizes everything he knew was only a projection of something more real. When he returns to tell the others, they don’t believe him. Swap the cave wall for a screen and the fire for a computer, and you have simulation theory, written 2,400 years before Bostrom. Plato’s question is the same one we’re still asking: what if what we experience is a rendering of reality, not the real thing, and what would it take to turn around and see the source?
Descartes
Gnostics
Hans Moravec
Philip K. Dick
An American sci-fi writer (1928–1982), and probably the most obsessed person ever with the question “what’s real?”
You know his work even if you don’t know his name. His stories became Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. Almost all of them involve fake memories, fake worlds, or people who aren’t sure if they’re human.
In 1974, he said a pink beam of light hit him and downloaded information straight into his mind, including a medical fact about his son that turned out to be true. He spent the rest of his life writing thousands of pages trying to make sense of it (published later as The Exegesis).
In 1977, he gave a speech in Metz, France, saying we live in a computer-programmed reality, and that the only clue is when something changes, like déjà vu.