Few scientific ideas have leapt from philosophy seminars to dinner-table debates as quickly as the claim that our universe might be an artificial construct. The simulation hypothesis promises a mind-bending twist on reality, suggesting that everything from the Milky Way to your morning coffee could be running on someone else’s hardware. I set out to trace how serious thinkers frame that possibility, what new mathematics and physics say about it, and why, even if the cosmos is coded, our choices might still matter.
What experts actually mean by “living in a simulation”
Before arguing about whether we inhabit a cosmic program, I need to pin down what that phrase is supposed to mean. In its modern form, the simulation hypothesis claims that what we experience as the physical world is in fact a high fidelity virtual environment generated by an advanced civilization, with our minds implemented as information processes inside that system. Philosophers describe this as a scenario in which an underlying “base” reality runs a detailed model of another universe, so that for the simulated inhabitants, their apparent laws of nature and even their memories are products of computation rather than fundamental matter, a framing that is laid out in overviews of Simulation and in more technical discussions of nested worlds and “posthuman” technology.
Public fascination with this idea has been fueled by popular science coverage that treats reality itself as a contested concept, tracing how a 2003 paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom at the University of Oxford helped move the topic from science fiction into mainstream debate. That work, which Bostrom later expanded in talks and interviews, is often cited when technologists such as Elon Musk argue that future societies could create countless virtual histories, making it statistically plausible that we are already in one of them, a line of reasoning that has been summarized in accessible explainers on what a simulation would entail.
Bostrom’s trilemma and the seductive statistics
At the heart of the contemporary debate sits Nick Bostrom’s “simulation argument,” which I see less as a claim that we are simulated and more as a logical fork in the road. In his original paper and later summaries collected on simulation-argument.com, Bostrom proposes a trilemma: either almost all civilizations at our level of development go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage, almost no posthuman civilizations are interested in running detailed simulations of beings like us, or we are almost certainly living in such a simulation. The structure of that reasoning is unpacked in community write ups that describe how the Simulation argument uses probability rather than physics to corner us into choosing one of those options.
Later commentators have tried to put numbers on that fork. A Columbia University professor, David Kipping, for example, has been cited for using Bayesian methods to suggest that, given Bostrom’s premises, there might be roughly a 50 percent chance that we are simulated, a result described as “nearly a coin toss” in a social media summary of how Statistically minded cosmologists test the argument. Bostrom himself has reiterated in interviews, including a long conversation shared on Nick Bostrom discussion threads and in a video explanation on Simulation Hypothesis Explained, that his goal is not to prove we are in a simulation but to show that if advanced civilizations run vast numbers of “ancestor simulations,” then by simple counting, most observers with experiences like ours would be simulated rather than biological.
Why some scientists think the universe is too complex to fake
Not everyone accepts that statistical framing, and in the last few years, several physicists have argued that the entire premise collapses once you look closely at what it would take to compute a universe like ours. One line of criticism focuses on raw resources: even with exponential gains in computing power, our best simulations of fluids, galaxies or climate still fall far short of the richness of everyday experience, a gap that a physicist writing about why we do not live in a simulation highlights by comparing current simulation capabilities with the complexity of human consciousness and quantum fields. Another critic, Scientist Tim Andersen, has argued that if entropy and information are equivalent, then encoding every physical detail of a universe would require more information than the universe itself contains, a claim he lays out in a piece bluntly titled as showing it is physically impossible for us to be living in a simulation, where he leans on thermodynamic limits to argue that a computer big enough to hold the cosmos cannot exist inside that same cosmos, a reasoning he expands in his Scientist essay.
More recently, a team at UBC Okanagan has gone further, claiming a kind of mathematical proof that our universe cannot be a simulation at all. Their work, summarized in a research release describing how New results use Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and related ideas about indefinability, argues that any fully consistent and complete description of a universe like ours cannot be generated by an algorithm, so a computer program could never capture every true statement about reality. A popular account of the same study, framed under the claim that simulated universes are impossible, quotes the authors as saying that scientists confirm we are not in a simulation because the universe is too complex, a conclusion that a Scientists summary links directly to a statement from The University of British Columbia. A separate explainer on the same UBC Okanagan work, which appears in a Physicists prove style release and is echoed in a video titled “Physicists Prove That Universe is not a Simulation,” reinforces that message, with the video’s host expressing surprise that a group of physicists has managed to settle the question using simulation arguments about mathematical structure.
The counterpunch: new laws, new math and “glitches in the Matrix”
Yet even as some researchers declare the simulation idea dead, others are busy reframing it with new tools from physics and information theory. One provocative proposal, described in a feature on a Mind blowing new law of physics, suggests that the universe might obey a principle that looks suspiciously like an optimization rule in a computer program, leading the author to ask directly, “Are we living in a simulation?” Advocates of simulation theory also point to phenomena that feel like “glitches,” from the pixel like granularity of space at the Planck scale to the probabilistic nature of quantum events, a cluster of hints that a Santa Fe Institute post on Advocates of simulation theory lists alongside the uncanny effectiveness of mathematics in describing nature and the concept of quantum indeterminacy. In more informal corners of the internet, enthusiasts even treat the universal speed limit at the speed of light as evidence of a processing cap, an analogy spelled out in a computer science forum where one commenter argues that such a limit is evidence of a simulation.
On the more rigorous side, Santa Fe Institute researcher David Wolpert has introduced what he calls the first mathematically precise framework for one universe simulating another, arguing that many popular claims about simulations break down once the concept is defined carefully. In a research announcement, he describes how the framework challenges the belief that deeper levels of simulation must be computationally weaker than the levels above them and even allows for the possibility that a universe capable of simulating another could itself be perfectly reproduced inside that simulation, a result that the institute summarizes as a simulation framework that reshapes the debate. A social media post promoting the same work emphasizes that Wolpert’s model suggests a far stranger landscape than earlier arguments, including scenarios where a universe that simulates another can itself be simulated in a mathematically exact way, a twist that the Santa Fe team highlights in its description of how the new mathematical framework undermines intuitive hierarchies between “real” and “virtual” worlds.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
