In Some Cultures People with Schizophrenia Like the Voices They Hear

This brings me to a crazy idea - can we think of any test that would allow us to decide whether indeed somebody else is using those brains? I.e. if we hypothetically assume we are living in a kind of simulation/virtual world/etc., there might be some number of agents outside directly interfering with the running of the world and a person suffering from schizophrenia could be the one directly affected by such an actor.

If we are indeed in something akin to a "virtual machine", allowing our world to be "interrupted" at any time, outside tampered with the intent of directing events towards a desired outcome, can we somehow detect this kind of tampering?

If we assume there is a VM we are in, can we computationally recognize that by constructing some problem that can reveal the nature of our universe? In other words, leaving the assumption the world is physical behind and instead operating under assumption the world is actually computational.

It's interesting that some mystics or philosophers hint at computational parts, like the nature of time by Augustine of Hippo from 4th century AD(!), or Emmerich mentioning a "Google"-like search performed inside Godhead etc. I am curious what the various cultures discovered regarding such computability and if we indeed can bring pieces of mosaic together and test it out? Is what we call "magic" basically invoking some undocumented services of the world's hypervisor?

Related to meditation/mindfulness, I like to try to "get in front of" the inner voice. If I control it, I should be able to know what words it will use before it "speaks" them, right? I find if direct my attention to my inner voice, I can begin to sense the ideas and words just before they're internally spoken, but that attention tends to disrupt the normal monkey-mind rambling of words, or to cause me to switch to a more internal/less linear and concrete/more wordless mode of thought.

But in the end, other than what seems a relatively illusory sense of "control" over "the" voice, I'm not sure I understand the supposed difference between our internal monologue and "hearing voices", beyond the stigma or negativity of it (but doesn't most people's internal monologue get pretty negative sometimes?)

Listening to people talk about their voices, one is struck by the variety of the human voice-hearing experience. People experience many phenomena (Tuttle, 1902). They hear scratching and whispering and murmurs loud enough to hear but too indistinct to under-stand. They hear noise that resolves into voices, so that words seem to slough off cars as they pass. They are sometimes clear and precise about exactly what they hear and some-times frustratingly vague. They report voices they clearly identify as external and voices they hear in their heads but do not experience as their own thoughts and thoughts and images that seem neither internal nor external but feel somehow impressed upon their awareness from outside. They talk about recognizing a single voice that seems to come out of more than one person, and about real people who say things they hear, but are not the words those people spoke. (“I know you are not speaking words of sex,” one man said, “but when you speak, words of sex are what I hear.”) In each of our settings, people reported this broad range of phenomena.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Julian Jaynes]