{"id":22230,"date":"2022-12-26T19:00:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-26T18:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencefocus.com\/?p=130788"},"modified":"2022-12-26T20:35:17","modified_gmt":"2022-12-26T19:35:17","slug":"are-you-living-in-a-simulation-the-strange-reason-youll-never-have-the-answer","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcsciencefocus\/rss_feed\/are-you-living-in-a-simulation-the-strange-reason-youll-never-have-the-answer\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you living in a simulation? The strange reason you\u2019ll never have the answer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Luis Villazon\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Monday, 26 December 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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There is no way to know what\u2019s outside of the simulation. This isn\u2019t just unknown, in the way that the existence of life after death, or parallel universes<\/a>, is unknown; it is an unanswerable question. Let\u2019s suppose that we are in a computer simulation, either created by a higher intelligence or humans in the future.<\/p>\n

Now\u00a0imagine that through some bug left in the code, we are accidentally able to step beyond the constraints of our programming and \u2018see\u2019\u00a0the simulation\u2019s\u00a0raw scaffolding, like Neo in\u00a0The Matrix<\/em><\/a>. How would you be able to decide whether this lay outside the simulation, or was still part of it\u00a0\u2013\u00a0as a joke or an\u00a0Easter egg, put there by programmers?<\/p>\n

Could you even definitively say that the columns of ones and zeros scrolling past your eyes proved that reality was a simulation at all? Maybe that\u2019s just what the\u00a0Universe is made of, once you zoom all the way in past the atoms and quarks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And even if you were able to unplug yourself and emerge blinking into the higher reality, how do you know\u00a0this is what it is? Perhaps there is another reality around that, and so on. If none of these realities are reachable except in our imaginations, are they real? Reality comprises the things we can measure; everything else is fantasy or speculation.<\/p>\n

Asking what lies beyond this reality is like asking who\u00a0we\u00a0were before\u00a0being\u00a0born. Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things in\u00a0Heaven and\u00a0Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy. But it may be the other way round. Humans are good at dreaming up things that do not exist, so you can\u2019t use your ability to imagine something as evidence for it, one way or another.<\/p>\n

Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n