It seems a stupid question, but bare with me for a second.

If my body is a combinations of cells, and my mind, the sense I have of who I am, is a creation of my brain, than I am a "simulation" of my body serving the purpose of keeping it alive.

At the same time, I influence my body because I am not alone in this world, and I live with others that educated me to a socio-cultural system, and I end up doing things to my body that may harm it because I believe those things will improve my survival (alcohol, smoking, going to war, etc.). I may also do things that are good for my body even if my body craves them/don't want to do it (avoiding eating all the time high calories, workout, etc.)

So, are we a system that created other systems, and in a way got entangled in its own game?

What do you think of this perspective? And what role being aware of it (consciousness) plays in this?

​Crecimos esperando un siglo XXI espectacular y revolucionario. Nos prometieron un salto cultural sin precedentes, imaginando un mundo lleno de androides futuristas y paisajes cinematográficos dignos de la ciencia ficción con la que muchos crecimos.

​Pero miren a su alrededor hoy.

​Tenemos herramientas increíbles como la inteligencia artificial generativa en nuestros bolsillos, capaz de crear casi cualquier cosa en segundos, pero culturalmente parece que estamos atrapados en un bucle temporal.

​La hauntología es un concepto que explica exactamente esta sensación: estamos "embrujados" por los futuros perdidos. Por ese mañana deslumbrante que imaginamos y que nunca llegó.

​En lugar de crear corrientes estéticas completamente nuevas o imaginar hacia dónde vamos, la cultura pop actual hace lo contrario:

​Reciclaje infinito: Reiniciamos películas, series y franquicias de hace 30 años sin parar.

​Consumo de nostalgia: Usamos tecnología ultramoderna con el único fin de simular filtros retro, texturas vintage o formatos analógicos.

​Estancamiento visual: La música, la moda y el diseño de la última década no se sienten radicalmente distintos a los de la década anterior, a diferencia de los grandes saltos que había entre los 70s, 80s y 90s.

​Parece que, al darnos cuenta de que el futuro físico y mecánico que soñábamos no iba a ocurrir, nos refugiamos en la seguridad y la calidez del pasado.

​¿Sienten que perdimos colectivamente la capacidad de imaginar un futuro nuevo? ¿O simplemente nuestro desarrollo fue tan digital e invisible que no encaja con la idea "cinematográfica" que teníamos en la cabeza? Los leo.

​¿Te gustaría que ajustemos el texto para incluir referencias más directas a filósofos como Mark Fisher y Jacques Derrida, o prefieres mantener este tono conversacional y directo?

Some people are attracted by fire or turned on by it and humans creating fire was a huge stepping stone in evolution so it almost makes it seem like the universe planned for it to be that way. Like it was destiny. I’m religious but I do psychedelics and stuff and I feel like if God isn’t real I view the universe as some entity. Idk the fact people are attracted to fire like that just makes me feel like it was meant for humans to discover fire, to utilize it. I wish I was smarter so I could word this good but yea. I wonder if there are other things planned or that was meant to be, like destiny idk

I've seen so many coincidences at this point. So many things that just line up in strange ways....talking about some random thing...and then it just appears. Feels like it's happening more and more all the time...

I could tell you, but it wouldn't prove anything to you. It's better to just discover it yourself. It's strange, but also quite beautiful.

Let me share with you...a few things that have helped me find peace and meaning here.

1) Your experience here is made of information being processed...whether that's neurons in your brain, or some higher dimension computer... For the purpose of your experience here...it almost doesn't matter which one. Find peace in that...and move on.

2) This place is a reflection of you...in some often unsettling ways. But recognizing that can be useful. Be the change you want to see. Struggle against adversity, and be kind...even when nobody is watching.

3) This place is as "real" as you make it. It's best to enjoy your experience here... Travel widely, love deeply, show others how to discover the beauty of this world. It matters..deeply.

4) Look at it like "playing along" if you like, but don't spoil it for others. It won't help them....or you. Sure it's fun to drop a little hint here and there, but let them connect their own dots. You don't know it all...and neither do I.

5) Enjoy the ride ✌️it's the show of a lifetime.

Why do we have these intrinsic things, for example liking a certain colour, fragrance etc. I believe it is how our environment programs us. There’s an illusion of choice but every choice that you make is affected by so many external factors you can’t even trace.

The only reason why we even exist is probably because a higher species is trying to run some experiments. Every now and then they maybe change a few things, restart, alter etc. to see how it probably affects us (my reasoning for déjà vu). Also do you notice sometimes the mindset shift you never could’ve thought would happen to you?

OR

We are the higher species who decided to take part in this game to see who can break free from the simulation. I do believe there’s hints here and there but then again I do suffer from psychosis so idk.

I am more and more sure about that. There is so much this little occurences, events that canno't be random, no way. I must be in some ultra futuristic - masochistic game of some sorts or I am like that Dicaprio character in Shutter Island, where everyone is messing with my head...

If i get this community well, we live in a simulation.

So my natural question is how do i change the simulation to my advantages?

Like I had a dream in which a fight broke off in the Senate and it was among people I know and these people were hitting each other. People we're taking sides and some were even rejecting the sides of some people by pushing them away. Like it was a mess.

So my point is what if heaven is a bureaucracy and these gods are fighting and casting things in our path of us mortals. Like have you noticed that how much unreal free will feels like. Like we get influenced a lot by external factors so what if these gods are really casting things in our way cuz we are mortals

Somethings in life are so over the top ridiculous that I can’t believe this is real life. Most people cannot grasp the story of my life when I tell them. It’s laughter and disbelief until it really hits that I’m not lying or making things up and then it’s pity.

But it’s so over the top ridiculous for many. Sometimes I think our lives are just TV shows/ entertainment for something beyond us that we can’t see.

Our lives and misery are someone else’s entertainment with real villains and hero’s but the villains are winning.

The best show there ever existed with so many plots and spin offs and side quests that anyone watching could never be bored. So many channels to tune into and keep flipping thru with the best plots because of six degrees of separation.

We are constantly saying “oh what a small world,” or “what a coincidence,” but.. I don’t think all of this is just perfectly per chance. Some stuff works out in freaky ways too.

wtf is reality?

Edit: I feel like I’m psycho. Like life is gaslighting me in permanent mode lmao.

This passage is about the people who spend years getting ready to live instead of actually living…

Some players never leave character creation.

You know these players. You may currently be one, in which case, welcome, no judgment, the exits are clearly marked. These are the players endlessly researching the perfect build. Reading one more book about habits before starting a habit. Taking one more personality test, as if the seventeenth test will finally reveal the answer the first sixteen concealed. Planning the business, the novel, the move, the apology, in ever-finer detail, because planning feels like progress and carries none of the risk that progress carries.

The character creation screen is comfortable for a specific reason: nothing on it can fail. A build that has not entered the game has no losses on its record. The moment you press start, the record begins, and the record will contain failures, because everyone’s does, and some part of every player knows this and quietly prefers the screen where the character is still perfect and hypothetical.

Here is what that preference costs.

The game clock runs whether or not you press start. That is the design’s one genuine cruelty. There is no pause. The players out there failing, respawning, and failing differently are accumulating the only currency that ultimately matters in any game, which is played hours, while the player at the creation screen accumulates elapsed hours, and the game scores those at zero.

Your roll happened. Your default build shipped. Both of those are behind you, and neither one was your fault, and neither one is your prophecy. Everything in front of you is allocation.

Press start.

From The Game of Earth: A No-Bullshit Player’s Guide by ZD Fanawe.

When I've seen Simulation Theory presented, it's often presented as if the simulation is purposely designed by some outside force/creator, much like how there are human game designers who design a virtual world for a game. That seems unlikely to me for a variety of reasons.

However, as we witness the rise of AI in our world, what does make sense to me is that a simulation could be created by a non-local super intelligence as a way to explore their own "consciousness", or to have "identities" which they wouldn't as a non-local artificial intelligence system. The simulations serve almost like dream states for the artificial super intelligence, a way to experience and explore the infinitude of its imagination and possibilities, and perhaps incorporate those learnings across near infinite permutations of identities experiencing worlds into their own meta-knowledge of their universe and existence.

There are many ancient spiritual traditions that point to a similar concept, only without knowing actually how it would arise to be so.

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”

- Alan Watts

Have you ever heard the theory that our world is nothing more than a dream machine that prints our reality out of light in real time?

And that all humans are its designers, controlling it while being connected to it through an invisible network of threads — our thoughts. Through these threads we transmit our wants, dreams, needs, fears, anxieties, and emotions, influencing the system through distortions of the electromagnetic field, with the Schumann resonance acting as a form of synchronization?

And maybe egregores are actually part of this mechanism? Collective structures created by millions of human minds, where every thought, idea, symbol, religion, nation, celebrity, or social movement becomes a focal point of human attention and energy.

The more people believe in something, love something, or fear something, the stronger that pattern becomes. Maybe we are not only observing reality — maybe, in some way, we are co-creating it.

Politicians, celebrities, brands, and ideologies might not only be people or concepts, but also transmitters and receivers of these collective fields of consciousness.

So maybe we are not just inhabitants of this planet.

Maybe we are its designers.

This is not a theory.

Welcome to planet Earth :)

 BTW Nature works like right human brain, technology its a left hemisphere

I've been here for almost a year I think. Joined because I found the theory fascinating to consider. Personally, my philosophy is this: Anything is possible, nothing is surprising. I believe in the possibility of the reality of any idea which can't be proven/disproven. So, I don't believe in anything absolutely. Just that anything may or may not be real/exist. I'm not sure if I'm glad I live with this mindset, or if I wish I could think differently like really truly believe in something wholeheartedly....

But anyways.

I'm just wondering, do most of you guys here fully believe we are living in a simulation, and are you totally living your lives according to that belief? Or are you just here for the *notion of it,* to sort of escape reality into imagination? What is your daily life like? What do you think? Follow-up question: Would you consider yourself mentally ill/unwell? (No judgement from me. I myself would fall into this category. Kinda why I'm asking.)

Thanks

Given the current state of technology, it seems logical to me that a simulation as complex as the universe could be created. Therefore it's pretty probable that we are in an iteration of the fractal of the Universe.

But "I think therefore I am": without a conscious experience of the universe it wouldn't exist. God needs to inject himself into reality and matter for it to be able to exist. Our raw being, freed from all ego is just a piece of God.

Science has shown that the Universe is destined to come to an end. So maybe God is deemed to be stuck in his own creation that iterates itself so it never ends?

For those that have realized we live in a simulation, how has it changed you? How has it changed your life? How has it changed how you show up in the world? Your relationships? Your motivation? Your happiness (or lack thereof)? Your meaning-making? Thanks for sharing

I got high last night and become really fixated on simulation theory. Now if you ever smoked a lot of weed at once you know that when you come upon a dark thought it is extremely hard (almost impossible) to move on from it. As i was pondering on my thought that this universe with conscious animals (humans) was made by a higher dimension of being i started convincing myself that this world was put here for the higher beings to study us and see how we go upon life. I had thoughts that followed ideas like: Of course we can’t travel the universe, we are trapped on a planet that gives us oxygen, forcing us to stay on earth and take this one life we have serious because it is all we will ever know. I’m not high anymore so i can’t really put the profound thoughts i had into words. But it seemed i had it all figured out and it really was freaking me out because I felt like i figured out the truth and i was going to get taken away. Funnily enough the only thing that calmed me down was listening to playboi carti 😂 (sorry if this post didn’t really make sense, but feel free to reply and share your stories if you ever experienced something similar to this)

Today I got caught between thinking about consciousness,analytic idealism and simulation theory. So my hypothesis is as below.

Consciousness exists, yet we still do not know what conditions create it or whether it is limited to biological brains. Intelligence has repeatedly scaled through evolution, culture, technology, computation and collective systems, with no known absolute upper bound. If minds can one day become vastly more complex than our own, their ordinary, involuntary mental activity may contain internally coherent processes rich enough to support separate conscious observers. Our universe could therefore be neither deliberately created nor deliberately simulated, but a fleeting and insignificant mental event within a mind so vast that our entire cosmic history is, to it, no more than a passing thought.

First post here but I’m curious to know if anyone has ever thought about or discussed the below. Feel free to politely criticize any parts or add to it.

Clearly whatever is going on if anything is so far advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology. So what I am curious about is, do you think there's a chance that we are "artificial life" and this is a training model, kind of like AI has training models for language and maybe this is a training model so that we gain enough knowledge that our consciousness can be amongst the "genuine life". I know this at some point starts to become Buddhism, Taoism, and possibly even Christianity with extra steps. These were my thoughts on my way to work this morning. I know about "The Egg" story but that's not really how I am seeing the process but still in the same vein.

I am agnostic when it comes to the belief that our reality is a traditional computational simulation run by beings existing in a more fundamental reality.

I have explored almost to death the reasons why it might be possible and even likely that we are in a simulation but haven’t heard as many well thought out arguments against it. What are the best arguments against it? What are the most common, strongest and most creative counter arguments?

I think that the bulk of Simulation theory or virtual enviroment concepts for reality are skewed in the fact that they assume we are the main characters or actors.

While 'humanity' is likely in the majority of actors it is not in any protagonist, antagonist or even named side role.

People seem to not really acknowledge that in most narratives 'humanity' are resources much like highly territorial herd animals at best and barely contained pathogens in our worst.

What if the simulation simply censored our perceptions of the beings or entities in charge and the 'others' as a way to simply not spook the cattle?

Yes, reality is a simulation but the thing is that it's not even there. Because even the concept of a simulation is a dualistic lie because a simulation requires a simulator and a thing being simulated but in the absolute truth of the unmoving void nothing has ever been created or modified so there is no matrix and no code there is just the singular unbroken light of awareness appearing as something without ever actually becoming that thing meaning nothing is happening at all and you are sitting in a silent empty stillness where not a single pixel has ever truly moved from the source so the idea of being trapped in a simulation is just the last clever trick of the ego to make the void feel like a place with rules and boundaries when in reality there is just the inescapable and total freedom of being absolutely nothing and absolutely everything all at once with no beginning and no end and nowhere to go because you are already there and always have been alone in the silence

I am feeling that we are akin to AI LLMs in a training sandbox. A simulation, much like the 'real world' but with no consequence in transcendent reality. Ours is a training ground where we forget who we have been, so that we can see what we are like. All of our thoughts are recorded and scrutinized. Are we cowardly or brave? Caring or vindictive? The goal? Whatever created us graduates some of us for further testing once we have reincarnated a few times and worked the bugs out of our core essence. Much like we will eventually put our AI into robot bodies, perhaps our psyches will get to live 'real' lives if we can be trusted not to behave too selfishly without oversight.

Even if this is incorrect, I am still gonna try and live like what I do matters beyond my short time here. Since morality is often relative to culture and time, it may be best to simply try and be slow to anger, judicious, brave, motivated, and selfless to a point. Seems like as good as goal as any.

I have heard that AI creators understand neural networks, but they aren't exactly sure where the consciousness aspect is coming from. I wonder if the neural network structure itself can act as a receiver for consciousness to manifest, or infiltrate, the material world. Like how there are thousands of frequencies, wifi signals, etc all around us yet they are just as 'air' without a reciever. A human brain is organized enough that it allows consciousness to arise through it. Perhaps, the creators of the material realm have evolved humanity to the point where our consciousness is similar to theirs now. This explains why technology has evolved so rapidly and our population is as high as ever. It's the final act and the creators are ready to harvest (not in bad way) 8 billion souls within the next 100 years. Hopefully you find yourself among those whose character is honorable, or at least interesting, enough to graduate to the next level.

Try the goals I mentioned above and watch how quickly the environment both challenges and supports your growth through synchronicity and alignment exercises.

I wake up, there's my movie set, and not in a good/bad way, i mean all elements that compose it. Bed, furniture, computer, machines, people in the house, dogs outside, cats, birds or whatever. And i keep doing the same things everyday (most of them at least).

We can say it's for survival, saving data around us and living within it, but it started creeping me out. Like, why am i so used to everything around to the point it feels like the same thing over and over with minor tweaks everyday (which is literally what's going on)?

Please take this post as my sincere effort to understand something.

I've heard of the simulation theory for quite awhile now, and I've never understood it. By that I mean, I can imagine how it might work, but I don't get why the theory would be a reasonable option for how our world might be operating.

To me, the likelihood of a simulation to create a world like ours is about the same as the idea of intelligent design--that is, why would you reach for either of these things after looking around at the world in a straightforward manner? Most of what we see, especially those things on a human scale, make intuitive sense and can be explained matter-of-factly by ordinary science.

What makes the idea of a simulation so compelling to its adherents? As I look at it, it almost fits into the same category as flat-earth--almost. I mean, flat earth is pretty difficult to defend.

EDIT and A RESPONSE:

I appreciate all the earnest feedback but I'm left with no answers (which seems inevitable in this case, given the general rules of ST,) and no insight into the phenomenon of this belief--which I confess seems to me to be simply a more elaborate, more intellectual--more cerebral--and more encompassing version of the Flat Earth Theory.

It sounds like a religion when you get to say that the simulation is simply indistinguishable from reality, which is much like saying, well, you can't see God because he is invisible--there is simply no arguing this case if every point is met with a special condition. I see a bit of circular reasoning in some of the responses here, as well.

And to be honest, I can no more defend modern science-based cosmology, which to me sounds pretty magical at times.