Simulation and Reality

Do we live in a simulation? The assumption we do is an ever growing opinion, and its entertainment has been seen in such popular movies as The Matrix. However, there is no evidence that we do. Instead, people are primarily basing their assumption on philosophical skepticism, particularly from the work of Renee Descartes. Their assumption is that, since they can doubt something by creating a circumstance where it isn’t true in their head, the real world can just as well be a creation from another thing. For example, because you can imagine that everything you see is a simulation, it means that everything could be a simulation. However, what you find is that any particular cause of “everything-not-being-real” conflicts with any other cause that may exist. What you are left with is an epistemological state of doubt, not an understanding or belief in the world being a simulation. Yet, everything we are and everything that happens comes from the world we live in. In truth, there’s no reason to doubt our reality as such.

The epistemological basis for believing in a simulation is errant doubt. It is to take the creations of a person’s mind as proof that something may exist. On this basis, however, one finds that one can create an infinite number of situations in which “the real world isn’t real.” For example, one may use Descartes’ example of an evil wizard controlling your mind or a trick of God to make you think otherwise. Then, the possibilities of how the world isn’t real explode. What this does is make any one explanation for why the world isn’t real as being infinitesimally likely, as well as contradictory with all others. There’s no reason for you to pick one over another, as there’s no exterior mitigation from the outside world to reference, so each one ultimately doesn’t matter as an explanation for why the world is real. What one is left with is merely the doubt of the world being real and not any one particular explanation as to why the world isn’t real. Any arbitrary assertion, which is what is being used to doubt reality, may only be used as an example and not a definitive truth itself.

Since one is only left with the epistemological assumption of doubt, according to the skeptics, one can never be sure one is outside a simulation, even if one were inside one and woke from one. If one were to suddenly wake from a simulation, one doesn’t have any more epistemological reason to think they’re outside a simulation than before. Any rules one creates for simulations have to be fallacious, since all of the basis of their knowledge of simulations comes from the simulation they came from, and there’s no reason to believe the simulation is true to reality. Their reasoning for the simulation, even in the case they were correct, merely sets them into a state of constant doubt, not a state of heightened truth or awareness.

Being able to imagine something as true doesn’t make it true or give it a possibility of being true. Only the world one sees, which is the basis of all of your existence, that even the people who doubt its existence hold onto every day, is real. The world is the source of everything you see and know with your mind. Your mind cannot function outside of the external world (there have been tests to confirm this). Even the fabrications about how the world isn’t real must have been thought up using the content from the world itself. One cannot take the world one experiences and doubt it based on arbitrary assertions.

The belief that we are all living in a simulation is fallacious. There’s no evidence to support this, and, according to their theory, you would doubt that evidence to begin with. What people who believe in simulations are actually doing is entertaining doubt as such. As such, there’s no reason for them to believe in a simulation over anything else. Each attempt to disprove reality is arbitrary, and trusting in one’s senses is the right thing to do.