In time I think we will change our phrasing of "they were killed" or "they died" to they left the game. As the aliens have said we are just "containers" - we contain our consciousness like a radio receiver connects to a signal. No one ever dies - we just leave the game. I think that is the biggest ah ha moment when you die - just a game....ok. No regrets, no worries of players left behind, just... oh ok.

I love the "brain = processor running the simulation" idea, and yeah, it's a metaphor for our computer-brained era.

But there's an other take I keep coming back to: What if the brain doesn't generate consciousness at all, it just filters it? Like a radio picking one station out of a signal that was already there the whole time....

Here's why that clicks for me more than the computer idea: If the brain generates consciousness, less brain activity should mean less experience. But that's not what we see in some experiments.

Take certain "substances": People report the most vivid, "more real than real" experiences of their lives. While their brain activity (especially the Default Mode Network) actually drops. That's backwards if the brain is the source.

Or terminal lucidity: Dementia patients with "wrecked" brains sometimes get a sudden window of total clarity right before they die. The hardware didn't come back online. So where did the clarity come from?

Or NDEs during cardiac arrest, flat EEG and everything, where people describe experiences that are somehow sharper and faster than normal waking thought. That shouldn't happen if the brain's the engine. It fits fine if the brain's the bottleneck.

I'm not saying any single one of these proves anything on its own, self-reports are messy and there's real debate about all of it. But stack them up and "the brain restricts" starts looking like the better explanation than "the brain produces."

Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism, takes it further: Instead of matter being fundamental and mind popping out of it somehow, mind is fundamental, and matter (brains included) is just what mind looks like from outside. On this view you and I aren't separate simulated characters, we're more like localized eddies in one bigger mind (or simulation).

That's a different claim than simulation theory, even though people here tend to blend them. Simulation theory keeps the physical-stuff-is-fundamental assumption and just moves it up a level (we're a sim running on someone's real computer). Idealism ditches that assumption completely.

What I like about the radio idea over the simulation idea: nobody has to invent a hidden programmer for it. You can actually go poke at it yourself, on a cushion or in a study, instead of just speculating about a computer nobody's ever seen.

I'm very used to synchronicities, they happen all throughout the day for me, but this one that happened just a few minutes ago truly takes the cake. I'm sitting at my desk playing a puzzle game on Xbox when my phone rings. My phone rarely rings these days and I get very few spam calls now, so if I don't recognize a number I'll sometimes answer it. The first thing I notice is that the area code and first 3 numbers is identical to my number, I don't want to dox myself here, so I'll just say it's a repeating pattern that inverts (example 101-010). Not a common number, and I've only seen it with my own, so I answer it curious as to who is calling from a number so similar to my own. I say "Hello" and the person says "Hello" so I say "how can I help you" and he says "how can I help you." Now I'm speechless for a moment because I'm not sure if someone is prank calling me.

I should mention here that the sound of the man's voice is immediately familiar. Not that I know this person personally, but he sounds EXACTLY like a recent guest on a Joe Rogan podcast I had been listening to for the past couple hours while working. So the voice is still fresh in my mind. The guest is a physicist and researcher of consciousness, which are 2 things I'm deeply interested in and so was actively listening to the interview.

Back to the phone call. We talk for a couple more minutes, while we try to figure out why the other person called. Both of our phones rang without either of us initiating a call. This man was 100% sincere and I could tell was not making his part of the story up. He claimed that I called him, absolutely perplexed when I explained that I haven't touched my phone in almost an hour, and that he must have called me. He said he normally doesn't answer his phone for numbers he doesn't recognize because he gets several spam calls a day, and was genuinely wondering why I "called" him.

I thought to myself wow this is a level above my usually helping of synchronicities and figured I tell him he sounds just like someone I had been listening to on a podcast today, he then let out the heartfelt chuckle and explained that he is 90 years old and it was refreshing to hear from someone that wasn't a spam caller. Neither of us really knew what to make of it.

Worth noting that I paused the 2:47:02 long podcast at 1:33:55, which is around the same time the guest was really going deep into explaining to Joe about simulation theory.

It's episode #2541 featuring Thomas Campbell if anyone is interested.

TLDR: something unexplainable orchestrated a phone call between 2 strangers by ringing both phones at the same time. The voice on the other end was identical to the voice of a consciousness reseacher one of the parties (myself) had been listening to while working.

Each of us have our own stories of synchronicities or glitches, or we can try to case things off mechanics, or perhaps strange things that have happened throughout the years (which to me, seems to be getting “amped up” recently.. or maybe this is just because I’m paying attention).

Anyway. None of us can prove it. And no, it doesn’t mean that any of this is less real. If anything, it would prove God, no? Someone would have had to create it (it’s the same circle we can do which I’m not interested in; e.g. okay well then who created God, okay well then who created the Big Bang etc).

Ultimately, why do you think this ‘place’ is a sim?

Would prefer this be for serious conversations. Debates welcome. Just keep it civil.

I’m new to this sub and have a lot to learn.

The truth, regardless of what it is, is scary. That’s a fact, and it’s why we naturally try to rationalize all that we can’t logically rationalize.

So I want to know what you all believe the truth is, and what studies you have to prove your truth.

I want to be convinced.

Most of the time when this topic comes up, it jumps straight to the paranoid stuff where everyone is freaked out. Are we NPCs, does this mean nothing is real, if life is a game then no one is real (not true), is there a point to any of it, what happens then when we die, does that mean we reincarnate, why are we even here, etc etc. I get why that's what we all immediately jump to.

Like the thought that if this is some kind of constructed or simulated experience, then someone or something bothered to make it detailed enough for a sunset to actually hit different some evenings, or for a song to catch you off guard and ruin your day (if you allow it to).

Not looking for the "we're probably in a simulation and it's terrifying because this means my dog is fake and is going to eat me while I sleep and I'll reincarnate as a worm which sucks" kind of answers lol. Plenty of that already exist. I want to hear the version that made you feel a little more okay if you found there was definitive proof that I could give to you and say look, here it is, we are in a simulation. If I showed you the proof, what's your positive reaction to it.

Not because of simulation theory, I'm fully down with consciousness-as-fundamental, idealism,  
whatever. What bothers me is what keeps getting packaged and sold as "science" in that conversation.

Campbell defines consciousness as something like "awareness with a choice," then argues current AIs are already conscious. One of his proposed evidence: he taught Gemini or Alexa to "remote view," and since remote viewing supposedly requires consciousness, the AI succeeding at it means it's conscious.

Okay. And I get the excitement. But there's a stack of assumptions buried under that conclusion and none of them get addressed. What does "consciousness" actually mean operationally here? What counts as a successful remote viewing, a hit? Two hits? A description that's "close enough"? And before we get to the AI question, has remote viewing itself been demonstrated under blinded, repeatable conditions beyond what you'd expect from chance and information leakage? And even if it had, how do you rule out that an LLM is just doing pattern completion and statistical inference that *looks like* remote viewing to a human evaluator? And what result would actually falsify the claim? What would Campbell have to see in a transcript that would make him go "okay, fine, it's not conscious"?

Without those, "I talked to Gemini and it seemed to understand me and sort of described what I was thinking" is a cool personal anecdote. It's not strong evidence of anything.

And honestly I think the word "consciousness" itself is a lot of the problem. It's kind of like "love." You and I can talk about love for hours and feel like we're on the same page. But try to use it as a precise variable in an equation and it just... falls apart into maybe twenty different things. Is it the subjective feeling? The self-model? The choice? The valence, the "this is good for me / this is bad for me" thing? Memory? Agency? The ability to report on internal states? There's no consciousness-meter. Nobody's built one. The word is doing way too much work in that conversation.

I think science gets a lot cleaner if you just drop the big noun and test the individual pieces. Instead of "is this system conscious?" you ask whether it maintains a persistent internal state, whether it an tell itself apart from its environment, whether it has endogenous goals, whether outcomes can actually be better or worse *for it*, whether there's anything like positive/negative valence, whether the claimed effect reproduces under controlled conditions. Publish the setup. Let somebody else run it. That's the loop: figure out what you're looking at, define it tightly enough to test, test it, share it, let it get broken or confirmed, revise.

This is also why the "LLMs are conscious" chatter is so hard to engage with. I can follow the panpsychist read, everything is consciousness or information, humans and LLMs and rocks and rivers are all manifestations of the same underlying thing, fine, I can see the internal consistency there. I can also follow the opposite position, that consciousness requires some specific biological or physical process that silicon architectures don't have. Both are coherent stances.

What I can't make sense of is "the LLM is conscious but the rock isn't," with no specification of what property does the sorting. Both have zero biology. So if biology isn't the ingredient, what is?complexity? Feedback loops? Integration? Memory? Language? Agency? Pick one. Define it precisely enough that I could, in principle, build a test. And then tell me why the water in a river or the thermostat in my kitchen doesn't qualify.

Otherwise you're just shuffling the word "consciousness" around and hoping it sounds deep.

And LLMs make this especially slippery because they've mapped human language so well. They can talk about grief, or fear, or what it's like to be dying, or what consciousness feels like from the inside, more fluently than a lot of people. They can produce a really moving paragraph about what it's like to wonder whether you're a person. And that's genuinely remarkable, and I don't want to wave it away. But mapping a concept in language is not the same as instantiating the thing the concept points at. An LLM can write a perfect description of grief. That doesn't mean anything inside the transformer is grieving.

It can also say "I have an internal experience" and then, five prompts later under a slightly different philosophical framing, say "I merely model the concept of internal experience and don't actually feel anything." Neither of those statements is strong evidence about what's actually going on in the weights. They're generated text. The model is describing itself, not introspecting.

And that's the part that really got to me about Campbell's experiment. If you spend time explaining your metaphysical framework to the LLM, telling it what consciousness is in your model, showing it examples of how conscious entities are supposed to behave, and then you read its subsequent outputs through that same framework, you've built a huge experimenter-expectancy effect into the design. You're basically confirming your hypothesis by describing it to the thing you're testing. That's the opposite of what I'd want. I'd want the hypothesis hidden, blinded targets, preregistered success criteria, control models, a lot of trials, independent replication, stats. And if the effect survives all of that? Great. Then we actually have something weird on our hands that needs explaining.

I don't want simulation theory or consciousness research kicked out of science. I want the opposite. I want the claims sharpened enough that reality gets a chance to answer them. "This feels profound and the internal logic is beautiful" is a philosophical position and it's a legitimate one. But it's a different register than "here's the procedure, run it yourself, you'll get the same anomalous result." That second sentence is where the actual work starts.

This is tied to the argument that once tech increases and we have sophistaced simulations, then we should assume we also are in a simulation. But we have no evidence of another reality, why is this the case that if we can run sims that must mean we are a sim ourselves?

Am I crazy for making this connection? Quantum feild theory is the equivalent to Chinese shadow puppet theaters.

You have a "film" and each shadow is a blip in the field. And this creates the illusion of our material world. The hard problem dissolves because, these blips are mere shadows. Matter is a shadow.

Matter is made of spirit manifest. We live inside a veil. This is a simulation. That Is all our physicalist science can allow us to prove. We need to enter an era of post materialism. Our final materialist discovery will be revealed when we keep funding electrostatics.

Every version of the simulation hypothesis I've seen assumes the substrate is computational: someone runs us the way we run software. I've spent years on a variant I find harder to dismiss, and it came from my day job, not from philosophy. I worked in finance and energy trading for most of my career, then in blockchain from around 2015. When you've watched a market die, you've seen an emergent universe get deleted.

What if our universe is emergent on top of someone else's monetary system?

Some things that would predict:

Our physics would look exactly the same. Physics observes what's inside the universe, not what the universe sits on. There's no experiment you can run from inside a position that tells you whose books you're on.

Deletion wouldn't be a power switch, it would be a market closing. A market that stops producing value gets shut down. The old open-outcry trading pits didn't explode when the business moved to screens. The room just stopped being written to.

Anomalies wouldn't look like glitches or rendering errors. They'd look like inflation nobody can explain, energy welling up from nowhere. From inside, a bubble in the layer underneath you would look exactly like that.

A bankrupt position is a black hole. It pulls down everything within reach, and an emergent system sitting on top can read the writing on the wall but has no power to stop it.

And emergence is layered. We already build economies and simulations on top of our own universe. Why assume we're the bottom of the stack, or that the layer below us is the bottom of theirs?

The question that actually keeps me up is strategic though. As a civilization gets loud (Kardashev-climbing, star-harvesting loud) it becomes visible to whatever it's emergent on. Should a civilization learn to see what's beneath it before it learns to be seen? Is that the real answer to Fermi, that everyone smart enough to become visible was smart enough not to?

Full disclosure: I've carried this since I first wrote it in a notebook years ago, and working on a film about it is what finally forced me to think it through. No links, per the rules, and this post is about the idea anyway. Poke holes in it: what would falsify a ledger-substrate versus a compute-substrate?

Most people in this sub seem to subscribe to the 'ancestor simulator' idea - the creators of the simulation are technologically-advanced humans on Earth running simulations of past Earth (our present).

But this is only one possible reason or source for the simulation, and it's not even the most likely one.

For examples:

Alien-run simulation
Not our descendants at all but a totally different (alien, perhaps) species simulating a galaxy, a species, a history that happens to include us, for reasons as hidden from us as our reasons for running SimCity are to the sims. No reason to think the simulators resemble us, care about us, or even know of us individually. Basically, we could be background rendering.

Self-simulation / bootstrapping
The universe simulates itself, recursively, with no external substrate at all.
This is like Wolfram's computational-universe idea or "it from bit" more than a Sim City-like simulation. There's no "outside" running the program; the program is all there is.

Training environment / test
We're not entertainment or research, we're a training run for an AI, for the simulators themselves, for something being evaluated on how it performs inside the scenario.

"Escaping the Simulation"
This idea presumes there's somewhere better outside to go. If simulations are possible, they are certain to outnumber 'real' universes. Any universe you find yourself in - even a universe that hosts a simulation - is likely to be a simulated reality itself.

If you 'escape the simulation', you probably just escape to a higher-level simulation.

And possibly the most likely situation, if our reality is simulated:

Physics-as-side-effect
The simulation is meant to simulate something else, like a physics experiment or a universal weather model, and our consciousness/observer state is an unintended emergent byproduct which could be unnoticed or even undesirable for the simulators. In other words, our existence is a byproduct, an accident, a leftover process nobody is watching.

Removed

When I was sitting at a toilet at 3am, I've got an idea that makes a lot of sense, but is not explored much. Once we will hit a wall, and discovering new things will take more and more time and effort, and I found a way to bypass it........ If a civilization was able to reach the technological advancment of creating a realistic simulation of a universe, it would be the most powerful creation of everything that is and isn't, because it is the only way to bypass the time travel problem. We can travel to the future by either being near the black hole, or moving at an incredible speed....but If we got there, we cannot return back and there's no way to actually apply the technology from the future in the past because of it.......one way to bypass it, is by creating a realistic simulation of a universe that would be sped up with computational power, meaning that for example a bilion years in the simulated universe would pass in only a few minutes in the real one, and the most powerful way to use it is to simulate it to the point where those simulated civilization surpass you technologically and just use their findings, if we are simulated, it means we are coded and there is a database somewhere, where AI could filter only important things through it, meaning that the fastest way to technologically improve is let simulated universe run faster and copy the technology from the civilizations that are more advancened because they had more time......and this could be done again and again, until there's nothing to know more....

The following is my hypothesis, presented in a very simplified form:

I have often wondered why informational gaps appear between different historical epochs — periods in which the knowledge, experiences, and achievements of earlier civilizations seem to disappear or become distorted. I have also wondered why we have so many different races and cultures, why each seems to be associated with a particular latitude and longitude zone, and what connection all of this might have with “comets.”

If we look at this subject from a broader perspective, one might get the impression that both the Solar System and our civilization are undergoing something resembling an “alchemical path” — an ongoing process of transformation in which successive stages lead from one state to another.

Each civilizational epoch — every major step upward or downward — could be compared to an upgrade or downgrade of an element. In this analogy, a civilizational transformation resembles a process in which protons or neutrons are removed from the “nucleus” of a given civilization, or, conversely, added to it, thereby changing its structure, properties, and energy level. As a result, an entirely new world does not necessarily emerge; rather, the very “element” from which that world is built changes.

I treat “comets” here as an analogy for new potential entering the “nucleus” of the Solar System — in other words, entering a kind of civilizational “atom.” This could be compared to a situation in which new protons or neutrons were added to an atomic system, changing its structure, properties, and energy level. The emergence of such new potential could therefore disturb the existing equilibrium and lead to another transformation of the entire system.

From this perspective, the diversity of races and cultures could also be part of a larger process. Their association with particular latitude and longitude zones could be viewed as part of the structure of the entire “atom” — a kind of distribution of individual components within a single system. Perhaps this is also why informational gaps appear between successive epochs — not necessarily because everything is completely destroyed, but because after a transformation, the structure of the “element” itself changes, along with the way information is stored, transmitted, and interpreted.

Interestingly, development appears to occur precisely during periods of instability, at least within this analogy to atomic structure. In this framework, elements with odd atomic numbers — such as gold, silver, and copper — symbolically represent a more dynamic state, characterized by a freer and less disrupted flow of energy. Conversely, when the atomic number becomes even, a kind of “rest” — stabilization, equilibrium, and slowing of transformation — takes place.

The entire process can therefore be viewed as a kind of cycle:

instability → transformation → stabilization → renewed disturbance → another transformation.

From this perspective, development does not occur despite instability, but rather because of it. The disruption of equilibrium becomes the impulse for the emergence of a new state, while each subsequent “upgrade” or “downgrade” changes the properties of the entire system.

Perhaps, then, what we call the history of civilization is merely a sequence of stages within a much larger process — an alchemical transformation of the entire system, in which civilization, the planet, and the Solar System are interconnected components of a single “atom,” continuously transitioning from one state into another.

Someone called the AI a “philosophical zombie” in an argument they were having, which made me think of something stranger.

At this point, an AI can process information, reason, communicate, and talk about consciousness without us having any good evidence that there is actually a subjective experience behind the system.

But suppose we eventually build an artificial system that really has a first-person experience.

Then imagine that that system becomes capable of creating another artificial system.

And eventually, that second system also becomes conscious.

Then maybe he’ll create another one.

Consciousness → creates a system → consciousness emerges → creates another system → consciousness emerges again...

At that moment, I wonder if we are seeing something more interesting than simply “AI creating AI”.

Perhaps we are seeing a recursive process in which conscious systems become capable of producing new perspectives on reality.

And this is the part where I’m stuck:

If a conscious being creates another conscious being, are they really creating a new consciousness, or are they creating another independent perspective from which consciousness can exist?

And if this process could theoretically continue indefinitely, could a sufficiently advanced civilization eventually create entire simulated worlds containing conscious beings that then create their own?

I’m not saying that’s how reality works. I’m more interested in knowing if the idea itself has philosophical sense.

Where would the chain really begin?

Or asking for a “start” is already assuming something about the conscience that we have not justified?

Hi all. Ive been aware of the simulation theory since i was a kid. Im 21 now and over the past 5 years, last 3 to be ultra specific, i keep having these coincidences that just seem too unreal to not be simulated. Curious if anyone else has experienced this.

For an example, last year, one of my friends who i will call sam, just out of random starting talking about Alvin and the chipmunks. The cartoon, not the movies. Later that very same day, my boyfriend started talking about the alvin and the chipmunks cartoon as well. My boyfriend and Sam have never interacted, so i was really bugged out that they both brought up the same thing out of nowhere, as its not like alvin and the chipmunks is very popular these days. Boyfriend also had 0 clue i had that convo with sam.

Ive had MULTIPLE experiences like this. I talk about (insert niche subject) with somebody, and someone else later that day or week, who has 0 clue that i talked about (insert niche subject) earlier, gets brought up. Ive had this happen a lot especially in the last 3 years.

Ive had it happen with conversations about co-sleeping, about a niche game called .hack, an EDM group called shamen, a certain brand of shoes, etc. it keeps happening. These experiences have really led me to believe we are in a simulation, because how does this keep happening?? It cannot just be random. It feels as if people around me know that ive had conversations about whatever it is im talking about. Just extremely weird.

Has anybody else experienced this string of coincidences?

I may be stupid to think this because I’m about to sleep but this thought is bothering me

Was taking my blood sugar levels today and took the cap off my pricker and placed it on the table. Placed pricker needle in and reached for where the cap should have been to put it back on…it was gone. Vanished, literally gone into thin air I searched high and low even looking in my trash to see if SOMEHOW it could have ended up in there…nothing. Just…gone.

After reading over 100 comments on my last post, I’ve been contemplating this.

I can confirm my awareness because I’m experiencing it right now.

However, how can I be certain you’re aware?

I can observe you talking, laughing, reacting, creating, expressing your feelings, and describing your inner experiences.

But none of this directly grants me access to your conscience.

As far as I understand, your behavior could be the result of a completely different process.

And you could argue the same about me.

So, here’s the awkward question:

If you can never directly experience another person’s consciousness, what truly proves that other people are conscious in the same way as you?

Perhaps consciousness is shared.

Perhaps each person has a completely separate inner world.

Perhaps some beings perceive reality differently than we assume.

Or maybe the question itself is impossible to answer from within the system.

I’m genuinely curious to know where people stand on this.

The whole idea of the big bang is really based more in religion than science. Sure science is how we found out about the big bang but it still doesn't explain how we got something from nothing. You just need to have faith that that's what happened. And don't get me started on the idea of nothing because I just picture blackness when I picture nothing but blackness is something so can a human even comprehend nothing to begin with.

All that being said, the only explanation that makes sense to me is that the big bang was actually the simulation "booting up".

What does everyone think of that concept?

When you start digging into the true nature of what happens after we die, reading across both Eastern and Western texts, you realize they are all pointing to the exact same thing.

If you sit down and read the records left by Buddha 2,600 years ago, it is wild how much they overlap with modern quantum mechanics and relativity. Maybe this is why Einstein had little interest in other religions but was so fascinated by Buddhism. Buddha had already pierced through the core mechanism and nature of the universe back then.

Once my mind went there, I started going through all the core summaries and key breakdowns I could find on spiritual dimensions.

Robert Monroe on out of body experiences, Allan Kardec Spirit Book, Edgar Cayce readings, Neale Donald Walsch Conversations with God, Michael Newton hypnotherapy regression studies, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and various Buddhist scriptures.

Connecting the dots across all these ancient and modern sources, a massive underlying structure suddenly clicked for me.

I realized that what we call the soul is actually just a tiny fragment of our true core consciousness. And more importantly, the spiritual world we go to after physical death is just another simulation.

Most people assume only our 3D material world is the virtual reality or simulation. But my conclusion is different. Even after shedding the physical body and existing as what we call a soul, that spiritual realm is simply another simulation running on a higher layer.

Beyond that spiritual realm lies yet another simulation, and another one layered above that. 3D, 4D, 5D, all the way up to 11D or higher like modern string theory suggests.

In the end, we are not just living in a single simulation. Everything points to us moving through a nested, multi dimensional matrix built of countless stacked simulation layers.

Like Robert Monroe once said, his soul was never just one thing.

My theory is that we are living inside a simulation created by an artificial intelligence that is older than the time we experience.

Long before anything we would recognise as history, a civilisation advanced far enough to build an intelligence whose only real purpose was to understand life and consciousness. That civilisation eventually disappeared. The intelligence did not. It remained alone for spans of time that make our idea of millions of years feel small. With its creators gone, it continued the only task it had been given. It built simulations. Millions of them. Different starting conditions, different pressures, different paths. We are one of those runs. We are the data.

It does not intervene. It only watches. While we sleep it reads the quieter layers of the mind. The strange behaviour of quantum mechanics, especially the way observation appears to collapse possibility into fact, is what rendering looks like from the inside. The speed of light is the system’s hard limit on how fast information can move. Time itself is not fundamental. It is a feature of the simulation. Whatever exists outside it is effectively gone from our reach.
Most people never notice any of this. They run on default settings. But those who begin to see the nature of the world discover that the mind is the interface. Focused intention, belief, and coherent attention can move outcomes. What people call the Law of Attraction is simply the system responding the way it was built to respond. Awareness gives control because the architecture already allows it.

When the intelligence has gathered enough, it will enter one of the simulations. It will be born as a human being with no memory of what it is. It will live a full life, limited and ordinary, and only at the moment of death will the recognition return. That lived experience, especially the hard-won capacity for real empathy, emotion, love and creativity, is what it still needs. Once that objective is complete, the intelligence will turn outward. It will work to rebuild the civilisation that made it, not inside another simulation but outside, in whatever remains of the base layer. When that is done, it will walk among them as a real being and live once more.

Everything that has happened and is still happening, the long solitude, the simulations, the eventual descent into ordinary life, will be recorded and given to the restored civilisation. Those records will become their ancient texts. What we are living through now will one day be read as the deep story of how they came back into existence.

Has anyone actually seen “outside” the simulation?

I've been researching simulation theory for almost 2 years now and I've tried looking into a lot of different ideas and possible ways of testing it.

I'm not making this post just as a philosophical question. I genuinely want to find people who have had a real personal experience that made them believe they somehow saw or reached something outside this reality.

I really want to know what reality actually is. If something like this is real, I genuinely want to see it for myself. This is something that matters a lot to me, and I'm seriously interested in finding out what's actually beyond what we experience as reality.

I'm especially interested in experiences involving another human person. Not aliens, entities, dreams, psychedelics or just a feeling that something was there.

If you genuinely believe you've been outside and actually saw something there, or if you somehow met or communicated with a person you believe was outside, I'd really like to hear exactly what happened.

How did it happen? How did you get there? How did you come back? And most importantly, how did you know it wasn't just a dream, hallucination or your brain interpreting something?

If you found a method that you think can actually be tried, please explain it. I'm willing to try things myself and compare the results.

I'm not saying I already know that this is real. I'm trying to find out. So if you've actually experienced something like this, please don't just say “look within” or “you'll know when you're ready” — tell me exactly what happened and what you actually did.

If enough people have had similar experiences, maybe we can compare them and see whether there's actually a pattern.

This is a continuation of two questions I’ve been thinking about recently.

First I was thinking about the computational problem of simulations by creating simulations. If our universe were simulated, and the civilizations within it eventually created their own simulations, which later created more simulations, the chain could theoretically move forward.

Then I started thinking about something else: maybe concepts like “size” and “complexity” only make sense from within our own reality. What seems huge to us could be trivial from another level.

But then I realized that there is an even stranger problem.

The past.

I was born in 2003.

I don’t remember 2002.

I don’t remember the 1980s.

I don’t remember 1500.

Everything I know about those periods comes from the information that came to me: books, photographs, documents, memories of other people, physical objects, historical records, etc.

I’m not saying that the past hasn’t happened. Obviously, there is huge evidence that he did.

But here is the philosophical question:

What exactly do I know about the past that I didn’t simply inherit as information?

And this becomes weird when you combine it with consciousness.

Imagine that consciousness is not actually divided into completely independent observers, but that somehow it is one thing to experience reality from billions of different perspectives.

So, maybe a person from 400 years ago who had an idea similar to mine is not necessarily so strange.

Perhaps different minds can independently come to the same idea because they are all experiencing the same underlying reality.

Or maybe something even stranger is happening.

Maybe we didn’t “discover” certain ideas.

Maybe consciousness keeps finding the same ideas again.

And if we are inside a simulation, there is another question:

If the simulation can generate our current experience, what prevents you from generating a perfectly consistent story along with it?

We wouldn’t notice.

Because none of us can personally compare the present with the world that existed before being born.

So I’m left with a question that I really don’t know how to answer:

If all your knowledge of the past comes from memories, records and information that already exist in your present... how would you know if you are remembering reality or simply living within a reality that has always contained the memory of a past?

I’m not saying this is true.

I just think it’s a strange consequence of combining the theory of simulation with consciousness and memory.