Why I Think We're in a Simulation

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I think we’re living in a simulation.

Not the Matrix version. Nobody’s body is in a tank of goo somewhere while their mind runs around in a virtual world. I mean the whole thing. The universe, every particle in it, from the beginning of time to whatever end it has, is a running program, written by something we have no way to describe, for reasons we have no way to guess.

My position on this was a culmination of things across my life that started coming together about six years ago. I grew up with zero religion. In my 30s I became a born-again Christian and lived that life daily. But because I’m also a critical thinker, things began to fall apart with the teachings and belief systems of Christianity, and I found myself detaching, to the point that about ten years ago I pretty much abandoned it and became atheist for the most part. After that, my search for knowledge (including different viewpoints of Christian belief) led me to Buddhism, to Universalism, and then to the simulation hypothesis.

What follows isn’t an overview of that hypothesis. There are a lot of versions of this idea and trying to cover them all would be pointless. This is just my position, including the part I still haven’t settled.

The part I can’t settle

I go back and forth between two versions of this. I lean one way most days, but I’ve never been able to close the door on the other.

The first is that everything is programming. No ands, ifs, or buts. A human has a certain level of fundamental code inherent to humans, suited to its purpose in the simulation. So does everything else. A dog is programmed for its station, and so is a bird, a rock, water, an amoeba. A dog wouldn’t function with human programming and the reverse is just as true. Under this version we’re inside a highly elaborate simulation, not so much a “game” as an autonomous running thing, and every single part of it, start to finish, is code.

The second is that everything is programming except consciousness. Under this one we’re conscious beings that exist outside the physical layer of the simulation and belong to the whole of it. Something like the Law of One, where everything in the simulation is one, our consciousness sits at the top level, and it can be reset. Reincarnated, if you want the eastern religious word for it. Live in the simulation again, in whatever form the one consciousness chooses. Everything but the consciousness is programming.

Trying to put this into words is harder than it should be. Normally I do all right at typing out my thoughts, but this is different. It’s like a branch that keeps producing offshoots that produce more offshoots. It’s hard to follow one line of thinking without getting pulled sideways into another.

I’ll come back to which one I lean toward. First, the things that make me think any version of it is right.

The speed of light

Most people treat the speed of light as a cosmic rule. A street sign. No passing, speed limit, that sort of thing.

Look at it through the lens of the simulation hypothesis and it stops looking like a law and starts looking like a hardware limitation. A clock speed. Every digital system we’ve ever built has a cap on how fast a bit of data gets from point A to point B, and that cap isn’t a law of nature, it’s a property of the machine. The speed of light could be exactly that.

Then there’s the observable universe, the bubble beyond which we can’t see. The usual explanation is that the universe has a finite age and light has only had so long to travel, so there’s a limit to how far out we can look. That’s true and I’m not disputing it.

But notice how it works. That bubble isn’t a wall out there somewhere. It’s centered on the observer. Everyone gets their own, the same size, containing whatever is close enough for the light to have arrived. There’s no master view of the whole thing from outside.

If I were building a simulation and cared about resources, that’s how I’d do it. Don’t render a universe. Render what each observer can reach, from where they’re standing, and let the speed of light be the thing that enforces it.

The Planck scale

Zoom into a digital image far enough and you hit pixels. Our universe appears to do something similar. There’s a minimum unit of length (the Planck length) and a minimum unit of time.

A genuinely analog universe should be infinitely divisible. You should be able to zoom forever and never hit bottom. A universe with a minimum resolution looks quantized instead, and to me the Planck scale looks a lot like the pixel size.

I should be fair about what this actually is. The Planck scale isn’t proven pixelation. It’s the scale at which our current theories stop giving sensible answers, where general relativity and quantum mechanics can no longer be talked about in the same sentence. That’s a weaker claim than “reality is made of pixels.”

It’s still the point where the universe stops behaving like a smooth continuous thing and starts behaving like something with a floor. I don’t think that’s nothing.

The mathematical nature of reality

This is the big one for me.

Dig far enough into physics and you stop finding stuff. You find mathematics. The behavior of subatomic particles, the curvature of spacetime, all of it follows precise rules that can be written down.

Eugene Wigner had a phrase for the strangeness of this: the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. His point was that mathematicians invent structures for their own reasons, with no thought of the physical world, and then decades later a physicist reaches for exactly that structure and finds it describes reality to absurd precision. Wigner didn’t think anybody had earned an explanation for why that keeps happening.¹

The standard objection is that math is the language we built to describe regularities, so naturally we find it everywhere. We’re looking through a lens we ground ourselves.

Maybe. But that doesn’t tell me why the universe has regularities that precise to begin with, or why math developed for no practical purpose turns out to be the thing a physicist needed a century later.

To me that feels less like a discovery and more like a specification.

The falsifiability problem

The main objection to all of this is that it isn’t falsifiable. In scientific terms that means an idea has to be capable of being proven wrong, and the complaint is that this one can’t be.

A few tests have been proposed:

Looking for a computational lattice
Modified double-slit and quantum-eraser experiments
Constraining simulations through physics

Each has a problem.

The lattice test looks for the imprint of a discrete spacetime grid, on the reasoning that a simulation running under resource constraints would likely use one.² But that only tests whether our universe is being run on a particular kind of lattice. It doesn’t test whether our universe is simulated at all.

The second is a proposed test rather than an actual one, and it assumes the simulator must use observer-dependent, computationally economical rendering. Nothing in the hypothesis requires that.

The third comes from Franco Vazza, who argued in 2025 that a civilization operating under physical laws like ours couldn’t realistically run certain extremely detailed simulations of our universe.³ The trouble is that the hypothesis doesn’t require calculating every particle in the observable universe continuously.

So the tests don’t do what people want them to do. But I’d argue that something being unfalsifiable doesn’t automatically make it irrational, meaningless, or not worth discussing. Not falsifiable in a strict laboratory sense isn’t the same as sci-fi nonsense.

The plausibility of the whole idea isn’t fixed, either. It moves. It depends on what we learn about computation, about how consciousness actually works, and about whether advanced civilizations would have both the ability and the appetite to build these things. If some specific model starts predicting things about our universe that we then observe, we’ve stopped doing philosophy. We’re looking at blueprints.

The version I don’t use

Nick Bostrom’s argument doesn’t rest on physics at all. It’s a trilemma: either civilizations wipe themselves out before they can run ancestor simulations, or they develop the capability and choose not to use it, or we’re almost certainly inside one, because simulated observers would vastly outnumber real ones.⁴

That’s the version philosophers take seriously, and it’s cleaner than anything I’ve laid out here. I don’t lean on it because the whole thing depends on simulated people being genuinely conscious, and I don’t think anyone knows whether running the right computation can produce that.

Which is the same wall I keep hitting with my own two versions.

The obvious objection

Every age explains the universe with its most impressive machine. The Greeks had music and geometry. The Victorians had clockwork. And here I am, in the computer age, saying the universe is a computer.

That’s a fair criticism and I’ve thought about it.

Here’s why I don’t think it lands. Clockwork was a metaphor. Nobody could actually build a universe out of gears, and nobody had any idea what it would take to try. We can build simulations. We do it constantly. We know what they cost, where they cut corners, what a system does when it’s short on resources, how you fake a world convincingly for someone inside it. That’s not a fresh metaphor, it’s a capability we didn’t have before, and having it lets us ask questions nobody could have formulated in 1890.

Before we could build these things, the gap got filled with dogma and superstition, because that’s what was available. I’d rather reach for the tool we actually have than pretend I’m a neutral observer with no tools at all.

Maybe I’m doing exactly what the Victorians did. I can’t rule it out. I just don’t think the comparison is as damning as it sounds.

Where that leaves me

Honestly, I don’t think my position is that different in kind from someone grounded in science or someone grounded in religion. If anything mine sits closer to the religious end, and I’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.

The scientific person is 100/0. They value what can be proven and treat everything else as a placeholder until the data catches up.

The religious person is 50/50. Their belief is either true or it isn’t, and they choose the unprovable half.

Mine is 50/50 too. I’m not claiming otherwise. But at its base it just makes sense to me, and it offers more hope for existing after death than any religion I’ve come across.

If this is a simulation, then maybe we reset. Like a game. New life, or a different character entirely. Maybe we run the same one over and over. That sounds horrible to some people, but it might be exactly why we don’t remember a previous life. Every existence, possibly in the same time and place and circumstances, still happened. It just isn’t carried over.

I find that comforting rather than horrific. I wouldn’t want to remember a past life. The weight of it would be unbearable. And it doesn’t make this one feel less real. Sitting here writing this feels completely real to me, even if I’ve done it before.

Science offers the option of a cold conclusion, biological accidents in a dead universe. Religion asks for a leap into the unknown. What I like about this is that it gives me hope without requiring me to believe anything that contradicts what we actually know.

So which of my two versions do I land on?

Most of the time I land on the first. Everything is programming, full stop. It’s the simpler answer and the logic is less messy.

But I can’t dismiss the second, because of what David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness: the fact that we can explain everything the brain does without explaining why any of it feels like anything from the inside.⁵ That problem opens up variables that sometimes make sense to me and sometimes don’t, and it’s the reason I’ve never fully closed the door.

Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1002/cpa.3160130102. ↩︎
Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, and Martin J. Savage, “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation,” arXiv:1210.1847 (2012), https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.1847. ↩︎
Franco Vazza, “Astrophysical Constraints on the Simulation Hypothesis for This Universe: Why It Is (Nearly) Impossible That We Live in a Simulation,” Frontiers in Physics 13 (2025): 1561873, https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2025.1561873. ↩︎
Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–255, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9384.00309. ↩︎
David Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219. ↩︎

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