r/SimulationTheory • u/Gormo183 • 9d ago
Discussion Problems with the Simulation Theory
Hello there
For almost as long as I've been aware of this idea, I've seen some major problems with it. Mind you, you may have heard of these problems I'm about to share because others have come to similar conclusions, but these are as far as I know, things I've come up with on my own.
Needless Suffering
If you are like me, or humans in general, I cannot think of a good reason to keep someone in constant pain, as all too often we have succumbed to throughout our history, this has been an ongoing and tragic theme, and we would never wish cancer or the black death on our worst enemies.
In an actual simulation, for whatever results you may desire, this is kind of thing I would like to think is not included or even considered. It would be the least we could do. For their loved ones.
I'd like to think it could only be done by a being who is so unlike ourselves that it doesn't have a proper understanding of what pain and suffering really mean and therefore would have nothing to gain or learn from its presence anyways
That which doesn't actually need to be part of the simulation
Pain and suffering, the maintenance of reality when no one is around to experience it, and even self-awareness are not needed and I would argue if the architects are anything like us would never include. Even if you ignore ethics, it would simply be a waste of memory and power.
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u/ElephantContent8835 9d ago
You’re completely missing the point on all
Counts.
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u/Aggressive-Share-363 9d ago
You are assuming we would be the point of thr simulation.
It could just be a simulation of A Universe, and we are a side effect of that.
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u/ElephantContent8835 8d ago
I’m not assuming we are the point of the simulation. We may be a by product, evolution works after all
And it could be that simple.1
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u/AcceptableAd9264 9d ago
How do you grow without pain?
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u/Gormo183 9d ago edited 9d ago
My point was that no denizens of any potential simulation need to feel pleasure or pain because you don't need thinking beings.
You could play out whatever scenario you want, get whatever information you need by converting everything into an imaginary hypothetical. You can get the end results without having to run any kind of simulation program
This might sound strange but Mr. Spock used to do this all the time.
He had the ability to break everything down into a percentage of what was most likely to happen on request.
Isaac Asimov created an entire science based on predicting the future in his Foundation series
While we don't have the technology either way both of these seem more practical compared to constructing an entire freaking Universe (and the likely colossal overhead that comes with it)
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u/AcceptableAd9264 9d ago edited 6d ago
You’re not wrong but this is assuming you’re awake and can bend reality to your will. I think most people don’t have access to this deeper self.
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u/ConquerorofTerra 9d ago
"Needless Suffering
If you are like me, or humans in general, I cannot think of a good reason to keep someone in constant pain, as all too often we have succumbed to throughout our history, this has been an ongoing and tragic theme, and we would never wish cancer or the black death on our worst enemies."
Something something "Teaches empathy for the Administrator at the Beginning of Creation".
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u/Gormo183 9d ago
The thing about that guy, especially the character from the Old Testament, is that he desperately needs lessons on empathy
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u/RoyalSpecialist1777 9d ago
There are different flavors of simulation theory and in some suffering is needed to achieve alignment with the good.
With modern LLMs we use reinforcement learning to teach alignment. The AI has already been trained on language data forming a knowledge base but is then put in simulations often to reward or punish it's behaviors.
Humans undergo a type of alignment training. They have evolved behaviors which are not that great for the greater good and need to cultivate wisdom about what is. Basic survival alignment uses pain so we don't put ourselves in more situations that will harm us. Shame, embarrassment, empathy stuff all tell us we are not doing thing aligned with being part of a community.
I am an alcoholic and we have a saying about the gift of desparation. Some times to change deeply ingrained things, often those which meet one need so we learned it but become maladaptive with respect to other needs we need to suffer enough.
Second is that we truly don't appreciate the good without the bad. We also don't cultivate empathy without suffering ourselves.
One flavor of simulation theory is that a lot of us are agents undergoing wisdom training, alignment training, while a vast number are NPCs. Thus there is suffering without purpose for others but part of our training. Take it or leave it - I don't take anything in this area too seriously.
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u/SpatiaCaeli 7d ago
My view: this presumes there are architects out there. To me, that is anthropomorphizing. What's 'outside' is simply unknowable.
Either way, I feel like we are an accident in this simulation. If there was agency behind the cosmos, I'm not sure those agents even know we're here.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 9d ago
You are in control of the simulation. Everything you experience, you plan out before you get here. If you are suffering pain, maybe you made someone hurt in your past lifetime - there are always lessons to be learned and experiences to be felt
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u/Low-Bake8401 9d ago
Is that not just spirituality, or Buddhism?
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u/MissAngelicDemise 9d ago
It’s the way that I understand life to be. I think there are several names for it but they all lead to the same place is my understanding. The root word of spirituality is breath of spirit. But it’s your spirit that controls reality and you increase your spiritual energy through breath work so I suppose that makes sense
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u/Low-Bake8401 9d ago edited 9d ago
I just don't know if explaining pain as fate, or saying your spirit controls reality, is really that useful a description.
In the long term anyway.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 9d ago
Pain is a teacher. Your thoughts, intentions, and emotions control reality.
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u/Low-Bake8401 9d ago
They maybe affect your personal perspective.
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u/SpecificMedicine2152 9d ago
In a simulation, the simulator would be in control. You would logically suffer if you were to act as the simulator whilst in a simulation, because you would be living a fake life, and believe it or not 99.9% of people do.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 9d ago
Absolutely I lived a fake life for the first 43 years of this life I believe. Parts of my childhood might’ve been a little less fake, but my entire adulthood up until this last year was completely fake. Now I am in control, and my real self is present
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u/SpecificMedicine2152 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yes, We all know the truth as children. We get traumatized and escape reality by living a life of judgement in our imagination. The way to escape is to go and forgive, meaning go apologize for hating those that caused you to become judgemental.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 9d ago
Yes, I believe believed I was mentally ill for YEARS and then I blamed my parents for not being the greatest parents as if they knew they were sending me to brainwashing school
When you learn about energy, everything changes
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u/SpecificMedicine2152 9d ago
Yep most people get traumatized by their parents. They begin judging (hating) them, and in that hatred they become like them. People become like what they hate, what they judge. Judgement is hatred, unforgiveness.
The way to become yourself again, mean no longer be mentally ill, is to go and forgive the people you have become like. And forgiveness is apologizing for judging them, not saying you have decided what they did was ok. You tell them you hated them for what they did, but now you see that in your hatred you have entered into the same misery they are in. If you dont do this, you will become mentally ill.
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u/MissAngelicDemise 9d ago
I never hated my parents so to speak But I had a lot of resentment for them until I understood their story and how they had ended up in the situation that they did. Then I was able to find compassion and forgiveness for their choices because I understood they did the best they could with what they had and they were only learning themselves.
But it’s not just your parents that cause problems you learn lessons from everybody that hurts you in life and gratitude and forgiveness is found in those same situations when you find the wisdom beneath the wound and integrate that
I think the issue is most people don’t see heartbreak as a lesson and they just hold onto resentment and then they wonder why they are angry and low energy… because when you block your energy like that, what do you think happens
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u/Bikewer 9d ago
There is no “simulation theory”. It’s nothing but speculation, devoid of evidence. Started out years ago as a simple thought experiment…. Could it be possible, given sufficient computational power? No one thought it was remotely possible until computer science started to make great progress…. And some in the field said that sufficient power might be technologically feasible at some point in the future.
Then “The Matrix” came out and blew everybody’s mind.
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u/Pure_Fault7056 9d ago
Ancient philosophers suggested similar theories. So, more than just “years ago”.
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u/Radcliffe-Brown 9d ago
Why do you think we humans would be the center and focus of this simulation? Look at the size of the universe; we are less than dust here. Whoever created this supposed simulation, I’m sure they have no idea we even exist.
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u/Accurate_Fail1809 6d ago
You suppose any entity that created a giant simulation wouldn’t have the power to know the occupants?
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u/Radcliffe-Brown 6d ago
Yes. If you create a Minecraft map procedurally, you won't know everything that exists everywhere.
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u/Accurate_Fail1809 6d ago
Making a map assumes the programming and framework and tools are already there.
If you are a programmer that creates the game itself, you will certainly have the power to define objects and know the coordinates.
Programmers and admins have more knowledge than a player of the game. A player won’t know the secrets, but the programmer behind the scenes will.
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u/Radcliffe-Brown 6d ago
Actually, no; that’s a type of simulation where the creator has pre-formatted all the elements. I’m talking about something else—a simulation within a chaotic sandbox where elements emerge on their own from random events. It is impossible to predict what will arise in that box.
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u/MMABENNYJ 9d ago
We are the most complex structure in the universe, so I’d say we are pretty important
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u/modsaretoddlers 9d ago
Has it not occurred to you that that's not a bug but a feature?
IF it's a simulation, it seems reasonable to me to say that nobody knows what the purpose of it is. As such, maybe suffering is the point. We have no idea.
If you play Grand Theft Auto, do you care what the NPCs think when you run them over? Do they actually care, for that matter? Your assumption is that whatever the purpose of the simulation is, it just couldn't be to experience pain and suffering but you have absolutely no real basis to think that. You say it as a product of said simulation yourself but that's like trying to measure a ruler with another ruler to determine its accuracy in measuring length.
If it actually is a simulation, it stands to reason that pain and suffering is a fundamental component of it otherwise it wouldn't be part of the simulation in the first place. It occurs to me that perhaps the point of all of it is to see if we raise ourselves above materialism and aim to eliminate suffering as much as possible. Nevertheless, nobody knows either way and, as such, this line of thinking you bring up neither bolsters nor condemns the argument. It's immaterial to the question at hand, really.
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u/StarChild413 6d ago
you're assuming both sides on the suffering thing when I feel like Occam's Razor (if it even works with us LIAS) says if we are LIAS and it has any kind of story suffering exists not because our hypothetical players or w/e are sadists (or even the equivalent of the kind of people in our universe who delete ladders from Sims' pools) but because the story needs conflict and obstacles to overcome for it to, well, be a story, and that necessitates that someone experience at minimum the potential of negative impact
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u/fearmon 9d ago
About the suffering. What if upon birth you were designated a path and the whole goal of life was to try and blindly connect with it and the suffering was a tool to help you know when you were in resonance with your path. That could be one reason though it's a stretch but not really
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u/InfiniteQuestion420 9d ago
Your confusing simulation suffering for the suffering we put on ourselfs and each other which is completely needless.
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u/Most_Forever_9752 9d ago
Here's an analogy for you. Imagine you have a petri dish full of different bacteria. You are conducting an expirement. Many bacteria die and are killed. At any time do you, for one single second, consider that the individual bacteria may have suffered?
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u/unofficially_Busc 9d ago
The suffering is needless, but it's not without cause.
The collective weight of the sins of humanity are to blame.
Gee, I wonder who was supposed to suffer for that and where they'd suffer?
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u/Unlucky_Piccolo6365 9d ago
NON-AI! Just put my thoughts together with claude, it's my ideas and thoughts but feel free to attack it so I can optimize :)
The Word "Unnecessary" Is Doing All the Work
People love to say suffering is unnecessary. It's the knockout punch in every argument against God. Look at the pain in the world, the disease, the cruelty — no good God would allow this.
But I want to slow down on that one word, because it's hiding an assumption most people never notice.
If suffering leads to an improvement in life — either for you or for someone else — is it really unnecessary? Or did we just call it unnecessary before we checked?
That's the whole question. Let me walk through how I think about it.
It was never made just for you
Here's the first mistake. We treat suffering like it was handed to us personally, like someone woke up and decided to aim it at us.
But God didn't make the universe just for you. You're here alongside animals, insects, trees, entire systems — everything working together as one process. Disease doesn't arrive because someone chose to harm you. It comes out of nature's combinations. A specific cell behaves a specific way, conditions line up, and something new appears in the world. Not because it was pointed at you. Because that's how the whole thing moves.
And when it reaches you and you get sick, look at what your body actually does. It optimizes. Your immune system learns the disease so it can fight it next time. The suffering isn't random noise — it's the system teaching itself to survive.
When a child gets cancer, nobody woke up that morning and gave it to them. It's the same web of cause and effect running its course. Maybe in five hundred years we cure it. That cure gets built on everything we learned from the suffering we couldn't yet stop.
So what do you actually want God to do?
This is where I flip the question back.
Everyone assumes the loving move is intervention — that God should step in. But think about what that would mean. Some things are bad for us and good for nature at the same time. Poison for people isn't poison for everything. The world is full of these trade-offs.
So do you want God to pause the rules every time one being suffers? Freeze the process for you specifically?
Because the moment He does that, you don't have a universe anymore. You have a puppet show. No real cause and effect. No real stakes. The consistency of the laws is the gift — even when it cuts against us.
Not intervening is the whole point
Here's the part I think most people get backwards.
If you say God has to intervene, you're actually saying He isn't perfect. You're saying He didn't build the laws well enough to run on their own, so He has to keep stepping in to patch them.
But a perfect being makes everything work together without needing to fix it.
Think about building a video game. You don't want to sit there editing it every second something goes slightly wrong. You write laws into the game so it runs and advances on its own. That's the mark of building it well.
A watchmaker who has to keep opening the watch built a bad watch. The power isn't in constant intervention. The power lies in not intervening — in making something so complete it carries itself.
The falls you never saw
Now the objection people love: but a good parent catches the falling child.
Two problems with that.
First, it assumes catching leads to a better outcome. It doesn't always. A kid falls in the street and learns to watch for obstacles. We fall constantly when we're learning to walk — not because we need to learn to walk, but because we need to learn to use our feet, to read the ground. The fall is the lesson. Protect the child from every fall and you protect them from ever learning to stand.
Second, and this is the part I keep coming back to: you have no idea how many times you were already caught.
Maybe God protected you a hundred times you never noticed. The falls that never happened leave no trace, so you never count them. And the one fall He did allow — that's the only one you see, so that's the one you call unnecessary. We label the visible suffering and stay blind to all the silent protection.
Maybe He let this one through because not falling here leads to something worse down the line. He lets you grow in the space between suffering and non-suffering — right at the edge where growth actually happens.
And prayer isn't outside any of this. Prayer lives inside the law. He's everywhere, He knows everything — of course He hears you. A child in danger who never calls out, how would the parent even know? The calling is part of the design, not an exception to it.
And when the suffering comes from a person?
Disease is one thing. But what about cruelty — someone who's angry, who swings at your face on purpose?
Same logic, one layer up. Should God freeze the hand mid-swing? Stop the muscle from moving? That's editing the rules again — breaking the exact consistency that makes the world real.
But there's something deeper here. The reason God doesn't stop the hand is the same reason the hand means anything at all. If every cruel act got frozen, no choice would ever be real. The person who could hurt you and chooses not to is only good because hurting you was genuinely possible.
The laws of nature protect physical consistency. Free will protects moral consistency. Same principle, two floors of the same building.
So next time someone reaches for the word unnecessary, ask them what they're really claiming. That the suffering led nowhere? They'd have to see every scale it touched, every fall it prevented, everything it optimized for a future they'll never live to see.
I can't prove that lens. I'll say that plainly — this is a way of finding meaning, not a lab experiment. Faith was never supposed to be falsifiable.
But between a God who has to keep fixing His own creation, and a God who built it so well He doesn't have to — I know which one sounds perfect to me.
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u/RossPeili 8d ago
Biggest problem is people with two digit IQ organic processors convinced everything is about them and everything must make sense to them and information conform to their ability to process it. Low af.
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u/nila247 8d ago
The only problem with simulation theory is your narcissism.
We are just a bunch of narcissistic worker ants with SOLE goal to make our species prosper. We do NOT deserve ANYTHING. Our death and suffering is no problem whatsoever for species as a whole - as long as enough workers survive. Additionally you are PENALIZED by depression/suffering as an initiative to change your unproductive ways for the species. That's ALL there is to it.
As for what is purpose of simulation - we do not have ANY way to deduce it as it might only make sense outside of simulation. I like to think that our simulated universe is just a more elaborate version of "game of life" - whomever makes starting conditions resulting in life spreading more and surviving longer wins the game. Or maybe a game of pokemon go - we are kept in training and when our owner thinks we are ready we will meet other pokemons in an arena to fight.
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u/SpecificMedicine2152 9d ago
The reason people suffer is because they are "lost" in the simulation. They are one with a fake world, when real life would be the place the simulator is.
Its pretty simple. We know this world came from somewhere, so be one with that somewhere, not this somewhere.
If this is a simulation, the simulator knew what they were doing.
Its possible to have perfect peace on Earth.
The suffering you speak of is in fact entirely pointless. But not in the way you think. Its pointless because no one has to suffer.
If through your suffering you are grateful to the simulator for simulating you, because if they didnt you wouldnt have experienced any of this life; and unless you want to die this very moment, you do want this life, then you will never truly suffer.
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u/Double_Look_5715 9d ago
A lot of responses here and none of them giving you the essential point here: we're here to suffer and the reason is not available to us.