With our rapidly increasing technological advances we will soon have the capabilities to create a realistic simulation of the universe and all the life in it. It would be under complete control of the programmers behind it who could literally do whatever they please with it. This leads me to the question, are we living in a computer simulation without knowing it? It may seem very far fetched and improbable but what is stopping it from being true, certainly not technology. Knowing that we will soon be able to accomplish it ourselves there is no reason not to believe that someone before us reached the same level of technology and that they started us and that we are now their experiment. Even beyond that, we may be the simulation of a simulation and then we will create another leading to a never-ending chain of simulations. This would mean we are not only at the mercy of the people directly above us but those above them and all the way up the chain to the beginning.
It can be a scary thought to some to think that we are under complete control of some one who could change anything they like about us or our world. If they wanted they could even delete it all. Of course that would probably not happen, at least not until we have served whatever purpose we were created for. We could be a scientific experiment used to research almost anything. Or we could be here only for entertainment. Just part of a game, much like The Sims only more advanced. Every part of every situation created by a user to watch how we handle it and react to it. Our personalities set by the user to see how certain people act. Perhaps we are here to be watched like a television show. Much like shows that we watch but not filmed using real actors and not scripted. It is a show made through the simulation of a world where artificial intelligence(each of us) chooses what it will do. It would be reality television only a lot more real. Viewers could choose what or who they watched. They could go very local and watch a single person or family live their lives. Or they could go more global and watch as things like wars play out. Maybe even to a universal level to see how different planets and galaxies interact with each other, assuming there is life outside ours in this simulation.
Or maybe we are each a part of our own simulated universe where we are the only real thing and everything and everyone around us is simulated. Maybe everyone in your reality is just a complex computer program responding to the actions you take in your life, all meant to study you. Then, maybe one day you will wake up and realize it was all fake, all created as a test to see if we should be allowed to enter the real society. Maybe right after birth everyone has to be entered into this simulated world in order to test our ability to successfully live in society with the rest of the world. Then, when we die in what we currently see as reality we are brought into the actual real one. This life you are living now would all play out over a short period of time then your real life starts or, if you fail this test, you are killed. Possibly there could be two societies and your entry depends on how well you live through your simulation. One for the good, a heaven-like place, and one for the bad, a hell-like area. This could be a perfect way to go about creating a Utopian society since anyone who would ruin the peace and happiness of the world for others would never be allowed into the elite society. Or maybe this life all just a dream and you will wake up one day and remember none of it. It was all just your mind at work during a night of sleep.
The idea that our world may not be as real as it seems brings up the idea of the “meaning of life”. If we are indeed part of an experiment, we are only here to live our lives and help to better science in a world we will never know. Whether we support or reject the hypothesis behind the project we will all help in the research. However, neither us nor our children will ever get to benefit from this as we do not live in reality. This is better then the idea that we are here just for entertainment purposes though. Knowing we aided in scientific research is a more comforting thought then to believe that we will all live and die solely for the entertainment of others. This would make everything we do in this life completely irrelevant to the real world that created us.
Also, the potential that we are living in a simulated world for whatever reason, if any, can help to explain the widespread belief in religion. For example, our idea of “god” may just be a programmer who designed us and created the world around us. This person could have added the idea of a superior being for his enjoyment and to watch the world he created worship him. Or an explanation for the many different religions of the world could be that each religion represents a different programmer and their ideas. This could also explain the many races of the world. Each programmer may have been designated an area and told to design a race of people to live on it. They would have had to been given a basic layout to ensure that all races were the same except for minor details left to the programmer such as skin color, language, and other various race specific attributes.
While all of these ideas could realistically be true we will never be able to truly prove or disprove either that the world around us is real or all just a simulation. Any effort to find an answer to any question related to the issue will only lead to more questions and a never ending quest leading nowhere. All we can do is live this life to the fullest because as far as we know it is our one and only shot at life.
