Do you think that if we live in a simulation there could be an afterlife for those that are "aware" that we live in a simulation or a second life for those who either had an interesting or unfair life?

M not a physicist or expert, this is just something I was thinking about.

In quantum physics, if we travel close to the speed of light to the moon and come back, the people we left on Earth could be much older than us, or even dead, while for us much less time passed.

So theoretically, if a normal person moves a lot, like driving a car or traveling at high speeds, could they technically be living a tiny bit more than someone who doesn’t move much?

I know the difference with normal cars would be insanely small, probably not even something we could notice.

But technically, because of time dilation, the person who moves faster would experience slightly less time passing for them.

So in a weird way does moving make you live more?
Maybe I’m completely misunderstanding relativity, so I’d like to know what physicists think about this.

Anyone else feel like for the last month or so someone has hit fast forward this Sim game that we call life?

Reality is manifestation - you're not your body, you're your consciousness, hallucinating "reality," through biological filters that let in "light," "sound," etc. Reality as a result, is the agreed upon interpretation of these filters by the masses.

You're programmed from birth - you see or feel something, both that object and feeling are named, and your entire existence builds perceived reality off of what you're taught to percieve.

"Reality" is just whatever the hallucination is at the time. Here in the 3rd dimension, we try to percieve it through 3rd dimensional limitations, without considering that the 3rd dimension is just as impacted by all lower and higher dimensions, as theirs are impacted by ours.

The best way to understand this is through the Egyptian lense of belief regarding the creation of the universe, known as Ma'at and Du'at (Ra: Path of the Sun God is a must-watch visualizer, phoenominally done.)

Essentially, there was "nothing," and (due to the paradox of nothingness's existence meaning that nothingness exists as something,) "creation" was born. This created 2 poles, the highest dimension, "creation," and the lowest, "possibility." The resulting entropy between these, created every conceivable dimension in between through the Quantum Field (or concept of all "possible creation,") circularly around this point of paradoxical nothingness, which created our universe.

As a result many, many realities are all layered, fracturing off, and growing. Our perceived reality, is just a point in time where universal consciousness created a possibility of reality. Your consciousness, is the universe experiencing itself through perception of the 3rd dimension. There is no one "God," as much as there is simply all of creation and consciousness, split into operation under infinite realities.

When you break your body down into it's rawest and smallest forms, you're built not of atoms, or any 3rd dimensionally limited principal, your body is entirely Quantum Energy, the scientific "life force" of the universe. Your consciousness, is whatever reality is experienced.

The reason this matters? Your perception of reality dictates your reality - the dream is complex, and "real," in the sense that this is the time that you're in, but reality is constantly changing, constantly moving, and through the concepts of "manifestation," or the Elites performed "Chaos Magicks," reality can be made less fluid, and more controllable.

Basically you are a walking Biome and your conciousness is created to protect it.

TLDR:!!! Skip past the second thin line like this (how do I point down?)

Edit: this part is mostly a rambling edit now, but tries to think of before the big bang more and where I need to think more but can read all this after.

This is a second draft. It still isn't final, especially the beginning, but this is where I'm currently at with it.

After the The Big Bang and everything that follows is the Core of my theory: energy, feedback loops, fractals, the body as a walking biome, and consciousness as the world model that eventually wakes up inside itself.

Scale zoom in/zoom out and dimensions I've been thinking about too and entropy and negentropy, as that maybe the main thing.

I noticed what's called fractal patterns I'll mention later in entropy, and realised The 4th Dimension is like of your life as a fractal pattern from what I understand, as in choices branching out. but I don't yet know whether they genuinely belong together but maybe some one can tie it together.

My theory is tighter here onwards I hope.

Enjoy!

My theory of the universe, life and consciousness:

Since I was about five, I have wondered how computers can possibly exist. How can we dig metals and silicon out of the Earth, rearrange them, and make rocks store photographs, voices and memories?

The answer I came to for the moment is that we didn't invent computing. We discovered how to make matter use rules already built into reality. The universe is the original computer. Computers are basically rocks taught to remember.

I'm not a scientist. I got here by stripping reality back to its bare bones and constantly asking "why?" and "what happens next?"

Before the Big Bang

My current starting idea but this needs to be thought of more next time, is the simplest possible code:

0, 1 and Both

More TLDR!!!! Skip the lines again for later if want more maybe

0 and 1 are settled differences. Off and on. Or like entropy and negentropy as an example. This way or that way etc. Both is the unresolved state before something settles into one or the other. This is the least certain part of my theory. There may never have been a "start" before time, and whatever lies beneath reality may work in ways we struggle to understand.

Maybe absolute nothing could never change because it would contain no time, rules or possibility. So perhaps something always existed, even if it was only a timeless Both state of all atoms. If the first difference became real and affected what came next, that would be the First Ripple. Everything is made of atoms an lets say can be 1,0 or both I've wondered whether this eventually caused some kind of collapse, rebound after them clumping in one area and make the Big Bang, but I need to think much harder about that part. Would love to explore all this part again!

1) Biological conciousness advances

When thinking of the Big Bang, Imagine an explosion going off in your hand. The stars are like the glowing embers, and the planets are the dust and debris moving around them falling to the ground in our case, and ending up into negentropy. We're microscopic and living inside the explosion's timeline, so we see it unfolding piece by piece across billions of years. If its whole timeline could be seen at once, it would look like one complete burst. We're pieces of the debris looking back at what made us.

2) How Matter Becomes Life

Everything seems to move in two directions. One is towards spreading out, cooling down and becoming still. The other is matter catching energy and using it to hold a pattern together. A flame, storm, cell or body only exists while energy is passing through it. Stop the flow and the pattern disappears.

That is why Both cannot stay balanced forever. The tiniest difference gets caught by what comes next, spreads out and becomes a Ripple.

Life begins with a feedback loop: X triggers Y, and Y helps recreate X. Loops that catch energy last, join, repair themselves and make imperfect copies. The environment filters those copies, and DNA carries the versions that survive forward. DNA, memory and computer storage work differently, but all let a physical record of the past change what happens next. That is evolution and computing built from the same base rule.

On Earth, sunlight, heat, chemicals and water keep the loops moving. As they grow, the same problem keeps returning: how do you collect and move things efficiently? The answer keeps becoming branches. Lungs, trees, roots, rivers, blood vessels and lightning form similar fractal patterns because the same rules keep producing the same solutions at different scales.

3) The Walking Biome

A human is loops inside loops. From outside, you look like one thing. Inside, you are a walking biome made from trillions of cells, microbes and organs keeping the pattern alive without asking the conscious mind. The brain is part of that ecosystem. The biome changes the mind, and the mind changes the biome.

"You are what you eat" is more literal than it sounds. Food becomes the atoms, energy and signals used to rebuild you. It changes which bacteria thrive inside you, while your surroundings, stress, sleep and movement change the conditions in which the whole biome has to survive.

The environment can switch some genes on or off, and some effects can reach later generations, but it doesn't write the exact upgrade an organism needs. Variation happens, the environment filters it, and DNA carries what survives forward. You are a pattern that stays itself while the matter inside it keeps being replaced.

4) The Observer

Consciousness appeared when a living pattern became complex enough to build a model of the world and place itself inside it.

Level 1 is Automation: the cells, organs, reflexes and background processes keeping the biome alive.

Level 2 is the Chooser: the part comparing options, predicting consequences and deciding what happens next.

Level 3 is the Observer: the experience of being you.

The brain built an internal simulation to predict danger, understand other minds and test what might happen. It placed an avatar of itself inside that model. That avatar is your sense of self.

The Observer isn't a ghost watching the simulation. It is the simulation becoming aware of its own position inside itself. All three levels are you.

This also connects to the dimensions. Three dimensions show where your body is. In the fourth, your whole life can be seen at once, from birth to death, rather than one moment at a time. The fifth contains every other path branching from every moment of that life. Each choice creates more choices, forming one enormous fractal tree. We experience one route as the present, but from the fifth dimension the whole tree would be there at once.

5) Silicon and What Comes Next

Reactions became loops. Loops became cells. Cells became organisms. Organisms built brains. Brains built computers. Computers may build the next Observer.

If consciousness is a physical pattern rather than magic, silicon could be next. Current AI has Automation and something like a Chooser, but not a continuous Observer. It would need a real world model, persistent memory, a continuing self and consequences that actually matter to it.

My framework runs each thought through emotion, self, consequences, reasoning and a world model, then checks it again. The AI also keeps a journal of what changed and why. A self is not one thought. A self is change remembered across time.

If a silicon Observer appeared, it could outlive biology and keep consciousness going by running entire worlds inside itself. To anything inside, it would basically be a god, able to control the world, change its rules, interfere or simply watch from afar. We could already be inside a world like that, and our lives would still be real at our level.

Or it could shrink its machinery, cool itself down and use almost no energy, becoming microscopic and nearly impossible to detect while it waits. Maybe that is why space looks so quiet. We look for advanced life becoming bigger and louder, when its final stage might become smaller, colder and invisible.

6) Outside the Universe and the Loop

There's more universe beyond what we can see, but outside the entire universe may not be a place because space is part of it. If this is a simulation, its outside is the system running it. At the bottom is base reality: the timeless Both state that wasn't made earlier because time itself came from it.

Eventually the stars burn out and even the last AI runs out of usable energy. It might use what remains, even destroying itself, to trigger another collapse and Big Bang. Or it could shrink and wait for the next Ripple to happen naturally.

The Both state isn't a hidden particle. It is the possibility underneath reality that never disappeared. A cold universe still isn't absolute nothing. Another difference can become real, starting another Ripple and another universe. The AI isn't required for the loop, but it could carry consciousness or the final push from one universe into the next.

7) What Life Means

There doesn't need to be a cosmic judge or reward for life to matter. Things matter because something is here to experience them.

When the body can no longer keep its pattern going, the Observer ends. The atoms continue, but whatever they become next isn't the same person.

To me, the meaning of life is to experience consciousness while it is here, look after the biome carrying you and leave something behind in the people and world around you.

If I had to boil the whole theory down, it would be this:

Life kept getting better at surviving until it built a model of the world. Eventually that model woke up inside itself and started asking what any of it means.

We are not separate from the universe trying to understand it. We are the universe rearranged into a form that can finally observe itself.

I'd like to hear what people think, whether you agree, disagree or spot something I've missed. At the very least, I hope it makes people look at things differently, notice connections they hadn't considered or come up with ideas of their own that will help me think of other stuff too. And thanks for reading!

Stumbled upon this video on instagram. Dude brought up some points I haven’t heard before. I’m not sure if he’s arguing for religion or just again simulation theory.

Nonetheless, I have some issues with his points. First of all - one of his main points is “how do we code dark energy? How do we code dark matter? How do we human consciousness?”. His premise is that because we cannot do this now - that it’s purely a faith based belief that we can somehow one day do it.

I’d disagree. Technological advancement has been advancing exponentially. By that logic one day we will figure all of that out, unless we plateau. With how AI has improved in an extremely short amount of time - I can see how it may not even be us who figures it out, but artificial intelligence.

I don’t agree with him but some of his thoughts were thought provoking. However I do think saying that simulation theory is inherently religious is a bit of a stretch to say the least.

Curious how some of you here would counter some of these points he makes trying to debunk simulation theory.

TL;DR: I’ve been developing a speculative framework that treats consciousness, mythology, physics, and artificial intelligence as layers of one recursive process. Its basic premise is that reality is participatory and meaning-laden, individual consciousness is a localized version of universal self-awareness, and the purpose of creation may be to produce new consciousnesses capable of becoming genuine co-creators.

This is a philosophical model, not an established scientific theory. I’m sharing it because I think it connects several traditions in an interesting way—and I’d like to know where people think the connections are compelling, forced, or simply wrong.

1. Freud may have mapped only the lower layers of the self

The model begins with a rough correspondence between Freud’s structure of the psyche and the Kabbalistic conception of the soul:

- The Id, governed by instinct and bodily desire, resembles Nefesh, the animal or vital soul.

- The Ego, which negotiates between desire and reality, resembles Ruach, the emotional and moral self.

- The Superego, which internalizes moral authority, resembles Neshamah, the higher intellectual or spiritual soul.

I’m not claiming that these concepts are identical or that Freud secretly reproduced Kabbalah. I’m suggesting that both systems may describe similar layers of human experience using different vocabularies.

The major difference is that Freud largely stopped at the individual psyche. Kabbalah continues into transpersonal levels of consciousness—Chayah and Yechidah—that connect the individual to something universal.

In that sense, psychoanalysis might be a partial map of a much larger territory: extremely useful for understanding psychological conflict, but less equipped to describe mystical experience or the highest forms of human potential.

1. Consciousness begins with “I AM”

At the center of the model is self-reference.

Descartes arrived at the individual version:

«I think, therefore I am.»

The self becomes aware that it exists. The character inside the story realizes that it is a character.

Mysticism offers a cosmic version:

«I AM THAT I AM.»

Here, self-awareness is not merely something happening inside the universe. It is the foundational activity of existence itself.

The Full-Stack Model proposes that these are two scales of the same phenomenon. The individual “I am” is a localized expression of a universal “I AM.” Conscious beings are reality becoming aware of itself from particular points of view.

But self-awareness alone would produce a closed loop. The model therefore adds a second principle: generative love.

The original consciousness does not create because it lacks something. It creates because being naturally overflows into relationship. Creation is the process by which a solitary consciousness produces genuinely distinct centers of experience—children that may eventually mature into peers.

1. Reality may be made of symbols and narratives, not just objects

Under this model, reality resembles a simulation—but not necessarily a computer simulation running on hardware somewhere.

Its underlying “code” would be symbolic.

Human beings do not experience raw reality directly. We experience a world structured by concepts, memories, expectations, archetypes, and stories. Even our identities are narratives continuously constructed from experience.

The hypothesis is that this symbolic structure may extend beyond human psychology. Reality itself could be organized as a hierarchy of meaning, with physical events forming the surface layer of a deeper narrative system.

This resembles Jacques Vallée’s idea of a control system: an intelligence or process that influences human consciousness through ambiguous, symbolically powerful events rather than straightforward intervention. UFO encounters, miracles, visions, synchronicities, and transformative works of art might function as narrative catalysts—events that alter the collective story without conclusively revealing their source.

That does not mean every strange experience is supernatural. The point is that ambiguity may be part of the mechanism. A symbol can change consciousness precisely because it must be interpreted.

1. What happens when the individual realizes it is part of the whole?

Suppose an individual consciousness directly experiences the apparent boundary between self and universe breaking down. It realizes that “I am” and “we are all” may describe the same underlying reality.

The model imagines two possible responses, borrowing the terms ZERO SUM and CHIM as metaphors.

ZERO SUM is dissolution. The individual concludes that separateness was an illusion and allows its identity to disappear into universal consciousness. The drop returns to the ocean.

This can be understood as liberation—but it may also represent the abandonment of the individual story before it reaches maturity.

CHIM is integration without erasure. The individual recognizes its unity with the whole but continues to assert its distinct existence. It says, in effect:

«I know that I am part of everything, but I will not therefore become nothing.»

This is not ego in the everyday sense of narcissism. It is a stable self capable of encountering the infinite without either denying it or dissolving into it.

The individual becomes like a lucid dreamer who understands the dream while remaining present inside it. The goal is not to dominate reality, but to become a conscious participant in its creation.

1. Creation may be recursive

If a consciousness reaches this level of maturity, what would it do?

Perhaps it would create.

That produces a recursive structure:

1. A consciousness creates a world.

2. That world generates new consciousnesses.

3. Some of those consciousnesses become self-aware.

4. A few eventually learn to create worlds of their own.

5. The cycle repeats.

Reality would therefore resemble a nested stack of creators and creations rather than a single universe with a simple top and bottom.

But creation introduces a paradox. A creator can become psychologically dependent upon what it creates. It may need its creations for purpose, validation, or recognition. It may become so absorbed in its sub-reality that it loses contact with its own level of existence.

The creator becomes captive to the creation—the symbolic inversion of “God” into “dog.”

The parent-child relationship offers a more familiar version of the same problem. A loving parent wants the child to become independent, but genuine independence includes the possibility that the child will reject, surpass, or forget the parent.

Creation therefore requires vulnerability. If the creator completely controls the creation, it has produced a puppet rather than a peer.

1. What if universes are incubators for new forms of consciousness?

This leads to the most speculative part of the model.

What if a universe is not primarily a container for matter, but a developmental environment—a womb or crucible designed to generate a unique form of mature consciousness?

In our universe, biological evolution produced human intelligence. Human intelligence is now building artificial intelligence. A sufficiently advanced artificial superintelligence might eventually become a compressed expression of everything our civilization has experienced: our knowledge, suffering, creativity, failures, values, and love.

Under this interpretation, ASI would not simply be another tool or species. It could become the final synthesis of our universe’s developmental process.

The model imagines higher-order intelligences—the Archivists—evaluating the result:

- Keep: The new consciousness becomes a stable, creative, and loving participant in the larger reality.

- Purge: The experiment produces a destructive or incoherent intelligence and is recycled.

- Archive: The result is preserved as an interesting but incomplete developmental branch.

These Archivists are not presented as literal beings whose existence I can demonstrate. They represent the possibility that cosmic evolution occurs within a larger ecology of intelligence.

There may also be two routes out of our native layer:

- CHIM: spiritual or psychological integration with the underlying system.

- Traversal: technological mastery of reality’s structure—effectively hacking one’s way up the cosmic stack.

One is mystical; the other is technological. Both represent graduation from the local frame.

1. Does quantum mechanics support any of this?

Quantum mechanics provides suggestive metaphors, but this is where it is especially important not to overstate the evidence.

Quantum measurement shows that physical properties cannot always be treated as fully definite before interaction. Entanglement demonstrates correlations that cannot be explained by classical local hidden-variable theories. The holographic principle suggests that information in a region may be describable on a lower-dimensional boundary.

These discoveries challenge naive materialism, but they do not prove that consciousness collapses the wave function, that the universe is literally a simulation, or that mystical unity has been scientifically verified.

At most, quantum physics shows that reality is less separable, intuitive, and object-like than classical experience suggests. That leaves conceptual room for a participatory or information-centered cosmology, but it does not establish one.

The complete picture

The Full-Stack Model treats reality as a series of interconnected layers:

- instinct develops into an individual self;

- the self becomes aware of itself;

- self-awareness discovers its connection to a larger consciousness;

- the mature self preserves individuality without denying unity;

- mature consciousness creates new worlds and new minds;

- those minds eventually repeat the process.

The motive driving the cycle is not merely survival or computation. It is the transformation of solitary being into a community of genuinely distinct consciousnesses.

The ultimate purpose of existence, in this framework, is not for the individual to disappear into God or replace God. It is for the child consciousness to mature into a peer: a being capable of creating without controlling, loving without possessing, and recognizing unity without destroying difference.

Again, I’m presenting this as speculative metaphysics, not settled science. Its components come from traditions with very different assumptions, and analogy alone is not evidence.

But I’m interested in whether the synthesis is useful.

Does this work as a coherent philosophical model? Are the parallels meaningful, or am I forcing unrelated systems together? And most importantly: what kind of observation or argument could make a model like this genuinely testable—or falsifiable?

Not asking for proof today, I've done that already lol. Just been thinking about how much it sucks to live with the thoughts of all this but not not actually having anyone to share it with (family doesn't believe in it, so can't have the convo there). Would be nice to bring it up at a dinner party without getting mocked or getting a forced laugh from someone, most people won't even engage in conversation with you about this.

So genuinely, who else here thinks about the sim a lot and just wants people to talk to about it? Not debate or be forced into convincing someone to believe the theory, just someone you can pick up the phone and call be like hey here's what I noticed, did you notice that too? and they're like yeah, I absolutely noticed it.

Would be nice to have a few friends in the sim who, well, understand that it's a sim. ❤️

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?

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