Is reality a computer simulation? Does it matter?

There's an interesting short story that deals with just this line of thought: http://qntm.org/responsibility

Not really. Each time you create a simulation it is necessarily less complex.

These ideas may be fun to think about, but ultimately they're meaningless. It's certainly not a new idea that some being on another plane of existence brought our universe into being on a whim, and can modify the parameters of its existence at will.

If that's so, it's highly unlikely we'll be able to poke any holes in it. Nor is there any reason to believe our memories or any of history is real. Maybe scientists have poked holes in the simulation a million times, and each time, the supreme Code Monkey suspends the simulation, fixes the bug, and rolls back the state to before the hole was poked.

For that matter, it's silly to believe that our puny existence has even been noticed by whoever spun up the entire Universe.

Most of the questions that this premise supposedly solves are mostly based on fallacious reasoning. Why is the universe fine-tuned for us? What are the chances of this specific universe? How likely is it that intelligent life exists on our planet? You may as well ask what are the chances of your particular DNA sequence. Just because your specific genetic code is extremely unlikely doesn't mean it's impossible that you exist.

Ultimately, such an idea only raises more questions. So, say we are in a simulation. Now, how does the "real" world work? Where did it come from? How do we know it isn't a simulation?

If these are the answers that make the most sense to you, you've stumbled down the wrong path, and it's time to take a fresh look at the world.

> Why assume the author of this system is even aware of us at all?

Think about why we simulate systems. There are two reasons that I can think of to do so. First, to exist inside of it, like a flight simulator or Minecraft. Second, to observe the emergent effects, like Conway's Game of Life. Assuming we're in a simulation, we'd have to assume that we're in the second kind of simulation. (Now that I think about it, what we term as deities could simply be alien 'players' of our universe game. Other examples of the first I can think of are ridiculously over-powered humans like Steve Jobs or John D. Rockefeller or Genghis Kahn.)

Assuming we're living in a simulation of the second type, it's the emergent properties of these that make them interesting. Emergence means you can't make a predictive mathematical model of what's going to happen. If what you're after is something you can predict mathematically, then you'd just do that with an algorithm rather than run a much more complicated simulation. We do do things like make computers in Minecraft, but the size and complexity and overall 'seriousness' of our universe sort of implies that that would have been a design goal for our world, rather than some cosmic two-year old's science project.

It would seem to me that if you have the power to simulate the universe then you could probably model quantum effects mathematically. I mean, we already do with the classical laws of physics, though obviously not to that level. I would think that life itself would eventually top the list of research priorities for our supernatural creators. I'm not saying they'd be interested exclusively in human-like intelligence, but they already had billions of years to study cosmic physics. Why keep the thing running once life starts evolving if that's all you're after? Ethical issues aside, it would have to seriously impact the performance of your simulation algorithm, the same way that sort of thing makes our own games more complex.

I think the parent commenter more closely means meta-reality. There is sort of an ongoing debate in science/philosophy over whether our not our Universe actually computes at some level; it looks like it might, but there is no reason a priori for us to believe it does compute and doesn't just seem that way.

To claim that the Universe is a simulation means that it would be the result of some computation. Depending on your interpretation, this could mean one of two things: that the Universe does ITSELF compute, or that there is some "computer" which carries out a computation resulting in the Universe. The second is what I think the parent commenter is thinking about. In that case, where does this "computer" exist? It's certainly not in our reality. This would imply that there is some meta-reality that contains the "computer" which computes, and thus creates/contains, our reality.