Are we living in a simulation?

Are we living in a simulation? The question sounds like a product of computers, artificial intelligence and The Matrix, but its central intuition is ancient: what if the world we experience is not reality at its deepest level?

The modern simulation hypothesis gives that problem technological language. Nick Bostrom’s 2003 simulation argument asks whether advanced civilizations might create huge numbers of conscious ancestor simulations. Long before Bostrom, Plato used the Cave story to ask whether people could mistake appearances for reality; Advaita Vedanta, a Hindu philosophical tradition, used the idea of maya) to question the apparent solidity and separateness of the world; Gnostic traditions described a lower cosmos shaped by a creator called the Demiurge; Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi used a butterfly dream to question certainty about waking reality; Neoplatonism described the visible world as flowing from deeper levels of being; and George Berkeley argued that reality is fundamentally mental.

These traditions use very different languages, but they return to a common question:

Quantum physics adds a modern dimension because its description of reality is already far removed from everyday intuition.

What is the simulation hypothesis?

The simulation hypothesis is the idea that everything we experience; people, planets, even our own thoughts, could be the output of an extremely powerful computer. Its modern form comes from Bostrom's 2003 paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, and it is far more careful than its pop-culture reputation.

Bostrom's move was not to declare us simulated. It was to set out a trilemma, a three-way fork where at least one branch must hold. He reasoned that if a civilization ever became posthuman (advanced enough to run vast, detailed simulations of conscious minds) it could create so many simulated people that a randomly chosen mind would most likely be one of them. From that, one of these three must be true:

The logic is probabilistic, not a proof. It does not tell us which branch is true. Bostrom himself has said he splits his confidence roughly evenly, which puts his personal odds of our being simulated at something like one in three, much higher than common sense suggests, but a long way from the popular shorthand that he thinks we are definitely in a simulation. The argument also leans on an assumption not everyone grants: that a mind can run on a computer at all.

Does quantum physics prove we’re in a simulation?

Currently no result in human quantum physics science, shows that we live in a simulation; though a few scientists have asked what such evidence might even look like.

The most serious attempt came in 2012, when the physicists Silas Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, and Martin Savage explored what would follow if the universe ran on a lattice, a fixed grid of points, the same trick physicists use to simulate the strong nuclear force on real computers.

Crucially, this is a proposal for how one might look, not a detection. Their work describes a possible fingerprint, then notes we have not found it.

A second popular argument misreads the famous double-slit experiment. The claim goes: the universe only ‘renders’ what is observed, like a video game saving effort, and quantum particles seem to behave differently when watched.

But in physics the observer is not a conscious mind, instead it is any physical interaction that disturbs the system, a process called measurement or decoherence. The notion that awareness itself collapses reality was largely set aside by physicists decades ago, even if it lives on in popular videos.

What did ancient religions say about reality being an illusion?

Ancient traditions used spiritual rather than computational language, but several asked whether the world we normally experience is only one layer of reality.

Advaita Vedanta is a Hindu philosophical tradition that teaches that beneath the many separate things we experience lies a single fundamental reality called Brahman. Maya describes the way ordinary perception makes the world of separate objects and identities seem completely self-contained. A traditional example is simple: imagine seeing a coiled rope in dim light and thinking it is a snake. The fear is real and the experience is convincing, but when the light improves you discover that you misunderstood what was in front of you. The point is not that nothing exists. The point is that our first interpretation of reality may not reveal what reality ultimately is.

This is why the simulation theory maya comparison is so compelling. Simulation theory imagines an experienced world that depends on a deeper technological level; Advaita imagines the visible world as dependent on Brahman, the deepest reality. Some Buddhist schools make a related distinction in a different way: everyday things function and matter, while their existence is understood as dependent on conditions and relationships rather than as isolated, permanent objects.

What did ancient religions and philosophies say about reality being an illusion?

Long before computers, many traditions taught that the everyday world is not the whole story, that what we see is a surface over something deeper.

In Hindu thought, the world of appearances is often described as maya, a veiling or a cosmic display over a deeper reality. It is subtler than ‘the world is fake’: an illusion, in this reading, implies a hidden real thing behind it.

Buddhism teaches something related but distinct, that things are impermanent and empty of fixed essence, without any claim that a maker built the scene. In fourth-century-BCE China, Zhuangzi told of waking from dreaming he was a butterfly, unsure which state was real: a question about how we could ever tell.

The Western lineage is just as old. Plato's allegory of the cave pictures prisoners who mistake shadows on a wall for the world itself. Gnostic traditions of late antiquity went further, holding that the material world is the flawed work of a lesser deity, the Demiurge, with a truer reality hidden beyond it.

Neoplatonism described reality as descending in levels from a single source, and centuries later, Descartes imagined a deceiving demon feeding him false sensations, and Bishop Berkeley argued that to exist is to be perceived. The table below lays out how each frames the same suspicion.

Plato's cave is often called the first simulation story, but it fits awkwardly. The shadows are cast by real objects, so leaving the cave means understanding the same world more truly, not discovering a fake one. Several writers argue that Gnosticism is the closer forerunner, because it describes a world that is a deceptive construct made by someone, however many mediums would look at Neoplatonism hearing the words “source” and “the One”.

Is simulation theory connected to spirituality?

The connection between simulation theory and spirituality appears in the shared idea of layered reality: the world we experience may depend on a deeper order that ordinary perception cannot directly access.

The connection between simulation theory and religion becomes especially vivid in Gnostic traditions from the first centuries of the Common Era. Some Gnostic movements imagined the material world as the work of a lesser creator called the Demiurge. Above this lower cosmos was a higher divine reality.

Human beings, in these traditions, could awaken through gnosis, meaning direct spiritual knowledge of their deeper origin. Read beside simulation theory, the resemblance is immediate: an inhabited world is generated by a power or intelligence that exists beyond the inhabitants’ ordinary horizon.

In Gnosticism the question is spiritual: who made this world, why are we here, and how can consciousness return to a higher divine order? In Bostrom’s version, the same layered structure is translated into technological terms: a civilization outside our world could generate the environment experienced from within it.

Neoplatonism, a philosophical tradition associated especially with Plotinus in the third century, imagined reality as a hierarchy flowing from a supreme source called the One, through Intellect and Soul, into the material world.

Centuries later, philosopher George Berkeley argued that reality is fundamentally made of minds and ideas rather than mind-independent material substance.

While today, several mediums who claim to be in contact with species more evolved than humanity, coming from other dimensions or even from other planets, or who are in contact with their own guiding entities, will tell you that there is something called the Source, or the One, or the Creator of All, or God, as human beings call it. They describe it as a consciousness from which all consciousnesses within the entire architecture of existence originate, not only the consciousnesses inhabiting human bodies, but also those inhabiting the bodies of other species throughout the universe.

According to them, each of these consciousnesses, when it chooses to have a human experience, decides to undergo that experience and simulates it: it constructs the physical body and lives through the simulation it has chosen to experience, according to certain themes it decided in advance that it wanted to explore. These themes may be pleasant, but they may also be dramatically unpleasant; nevertheless, they were chosen.

A final thought on consciousness, information and the layer beneath reality

If the universe were simulated, the deepest discovery would not necessarily be that reality is fake. It would be that what we call physical reality is implemented by something deeper.

Quantum physics already gives a powerful example of how a deep description of reality can differ from everyday appearance. At microscopic scales, physics describes states, amplitudes, fields, interactions, probabilities and correlations rather than the solid classical objects of ordinary experience. Simulation theory takes that gap between appearance and deep structure and asks whether the underlying layer could itself be computational or informational.

Spiritual traditions name the deeper layer differently: Brahman, emptiness, intelligible Forms, divine fullness, Soul or mind. Simulation theory uses computation and information-processing. Across these different languages, the recurring possibility is the same: the first layer we perceive may not be the last layer that exists.

If these questions pull at you, you are in old and good company. The same current has drawn people toward mysticism, meditation, and divination for millennia, not to escape reality, but to ask what lies beneath the surface of it. The maker, the machine, the awakening: for now, they remain a question to sit with rather than one to solve.

Research for this article uses primary philosophical texts or academic and scientific sources; social-media and forum material was not used.

Sources

• Nick Bostrom: “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” The Philosophical Quarterly 53(211), 2003
• David J. Chalmers: “The Matrix as Metaphysics” (published in Philosophers Explore the Matrix, Oxford University Press)
• Richard P. Feynman: “Simulating Physics with Computers,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, 1982 (CaltechAUTHORS record)
• Nobel Prize in Physics 2022: Bell inequalities, entanglement and quantum information
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Philosophical Issues in Quantum Theory”
• Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi & Martin J. Savage: “Constraints on the universe as a numerical simulation,” The European Physical Journal A 50, 148 (2014)
• PRX Quantum: “Quantum Simulation for High-Energy Physics” (2023)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Plato’s Myths” (Cave, Republic 514a–517a)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Classical Advaita Vedanta, Brahman and maya
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “The Theory of Two Truths in India”
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Zhuangzi”
• Cambridge University Press: Carl Séan O’Brien, The Demiurge in Ancient Thought, chapter “The ignorant Demiurge”
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Neoplatonism”
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “George Berkeley”