“This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.” - Philip K. Dick
We are living in a simulation. Maybe. At least some people (not crazy people) believe it is a possibility.
It sounds like a sci-story (The Matrix probably comes to mind) to say that we are software emanations in a vast, unimaginably complex computer simulation. But it is not a new idea created by someone like sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick (PKD). The ancients thought about it. Philosophers have considered how real things in front of us might be. In the 18th century, British empiricist George Berkeley talked about immaterialism.
A TED-Ed lesson on simulation theory physicist Zohreh Davoudi (animated by Eoin Duffy)
PKD (who I have written more about on another website) uses the idea of our reality being a simulation. But we would need to be able to step outside of the simulation to know there was a simulation.
Davoudi talks about ways we might fall through the cardboard universe. If our universe is made of code, there are probably glitches, which means that whoever is the "simulator" controlling the code, it would need to make corrections. That's where the complicated science enters.
Philip K. Dick theorized "The Matrix" in 1977 when he wrote about that we live in a "Computer-Programmed Reality.”
Are we prototypes? Is our solar system a project of another advanced civilization - or God? Do they want us to figure out the simulation or would they be trying to shop us to figure it out?
Further down the rabbit hole:
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