As humans we are hardwired for curiosity so it's normal to wonder if we are in a simulation. However it's illogical. A simulation is a human contruct, you wouldn't ask if we are living in a chair, pencil,etc.
I agree that when you try to think about it logically and from the point of view of probabilities, it seems highly unlikely.
It could all be a byproduct of a much too evolved pattern-seeking tendency in humans, a hypertrophied pareidolic complex (seeing patterns and meanings and connections in phenomena which are otherwise random and unconnected).
Even if humans ever do get to the stage of being able to simulate the entire universe down to the smallest atomic and chemical details, it would still remain a simulation, a simulacrum, which raises questions about how conscious experience would fit into it.
If a simulation is sophisticated and advanced enough to give rise to conscious and self-conscious beings within it, then the conscious experience itself cannot be a simulation, even if the content of its experience is.
If this is a simulation, it would need to be explained how there seems to be an epistemic and possibly ontological gap between the 'external world' which can be doubted, qua its being a simulacrum, and the consciousness experiencing it which cannot be doubted as existing, since doubting is a mode of consciousness itself (Descartes' cogito). If consciousness and the contents of its experience are both simulations running on a program, then the consciousness would also experience itself as a simulation -- its nature as a simulation of consciousness would be as apparent to it as the simulation of its mental contents (the external world).
If the simulation hypothesis is true, then everything is appearance caused by computer code, and there is no 'reality' against we can judge the appearance to be appearance (well, there is, but it transcends all possible experience as a forever-unknowable kantian thing-in-itself), in which case the appearance/simulation position becomes possibly incoherent (since the semantics of descriptive terms like appearance, bad, unjust, false etc depend for their meaningful use on a structural semiotic underlay of binary opposites like reality, good, just, true etc). You can't just claim that it's all a simulation if you have no idea what a contrasted 'reality' could possibly mean.
We know what 'appearance' means when a straight stick appears to be bent in water, because we know how optical illusions work and that under normal conditions a straight stick is perceived to be straight. We judge the appearances against an underlying order of reality which can be verified. But if the whole universe including conscious experiences within it is all simulation/appearance, then what is the underlying order of reality? It would be impossible even in principle to reach it, therefore 'simulation' loses its meaning, just as 'illusion' loses its meaning if it is claimed that 'everything is an illusion'.
If this is all a simulation, even our consciousnesses and their contents, then what could possibly be the reality against which the simulation has its status as simulation? And if this simulation is an exact replica of an external 'reality' such as to be indistinguishable from it, like a clone, then how can it meaningfully be said to be a simulation in the sense of a simulacrum? Doesn't the distinction between simulacrum/copy and original vanish and you're just left with direct experiences which can never transcend their ontological status as experiences?
The simulation hypothesis is possibly a red herring and false trail.
Then again, there is a lot of cosmological data suggesting that this is a holographic universe, a 3-D projection of quantum information encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary, so who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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You'd be surprised, some of the people who frequent this site sometimes
That is something that can be accepted as true and it's very hard to accommodate into your way of thinking. How do I identify patterns whilst knowing I have an evolutionary bias to be so good at seeing patterns, I have a tendency to see patterns that don't exist?
Indeed. I reference (as I often do) the original plot device of the Hitchhikers' Guide. The Earth as a supercomputer using living things and their emergent intelligence to figure out the ultimate question. What is the effective difference between an 'artificial' construct and a 'natural' one?
There is indeed growing evidence that our reality is the expression in 3D of more fundamental information, which may also exist in consecutive subspace dimensions.
This always entertains me:
