I have never been religious. My parents weren't religious. I can't remember ever going to church outside of school activities (Christianity is alive and well with in Finnish school system), but going to church never bothered me. It was a break from normal school activities. However during junior high my friends and I figured that we could just skip the church stuff since there was no way to count for everyone present. I was also exposed to George Carlin at that time and there were other "Atheistic" influences (such as Penn Jilette) who seemed very reasonable or at least more reasonable than answers Christianity was offering.
However growing up loud Atheists on the Internet spoiled the term (and identity) for me. If you had asked wether I believed in God or not I would have said "no, but I would not say that I am Atheist either". I still took part in Confirmation, but I think it was more about greed for gifts and pressure to follow Finnish traditions.
I haven't really thought about religion in a while. I have intentionally avoided it, but lately I've been exposed to the concept again. I stumbled on Stoicism couple years back and it seemed reasonable and I found helpful life advice in it. Of course philosofies are not same are religions and are instead described as "a way to live a good life", but I feel like they occupy same region in at least my brain. From Stoicism I ventured into meditation and Zen Buddhism which in turn has serious hard on for meditation (which I've also found helpful in my life) and is much closer to actual religion than philosophy in my mind.
This was all just shitty effor to try to map out where I am aproaching the subject. TLDR: I am not religious, but I've found useful things from philosophy and meditation.
Central idea behind Simulation Theory is something like; if we assume that conciousness is natural phenomena i.e. it emerges naturally, say from a sufficiently complex simulation of human brain and we assume that humans haven't reached peak of what is technologically possible. Then it follows that it is possible that someone (or something) has already in the millions of years that the universe has existed reached that point and we could be living in a simulation.
Idea is that if simulating a brain on a level that creates conciousness out of thin air is possible at all then at some point it could be possible to run several such simulations on something as common as a smartphone then it is exceedinly likely that we - you and I - actually live inside a simulation instead of so called "base reality".
I feel like I've heard of Simulation Theory long time ago, but I can't really put my finger on it. However lately I've been exposed to this idea again first from George Hotz's interview on Briar Patch Observatory Podcast which referred to his South by Southwest presentation and on some level his points make sense.
Premise of Double-slit experiment first performed by Thomas Young in 1801 is that you have a board with two vertical slits on it and you fire photons at the slits one by one. You would expect to see either an interference pattern if light acted like a wave or two columns if light behaved like a particle. The controversial part is that we can observe both of these patterns. First we will see the interference pattern, but if we put a sensor at one (or both) of the slits to see through which slit the photon passes we stop seeing interference pattern and instead see two columns of light. Observing the behaviour of the photon affects how it behaves.
Hotz remarked (most likely jokingly) that this could be the universe running on power saving mode. i.e. Most of the time light acts like waves and thats good enough to simulate most things, but when the need rises the simulation consumes more clock cycles to simulate photons correctly when they are observed in a way where it matters. In essense that Thomas Young found a bug - an edge case if you will - from the code running the universe where we can cause photos to switch their state.
It would be silly to claim that this is proof that Simulation Theory is correct. In fact I agree with Hotz that Simulation Theory might very well be unfalsifiable. However from my time working and playing with computers and software this explanation hits close to home and sounds very plausible, assuming of course that rest of the Simulation Theory assumptions are correct.
I think this was the point that drove me over the edge to actually consider Simulation Theory. Immediate debunking of Simulation Theory is "who/what created the programmer of our universe?", but this same question is the end of all theories we currently have about our universe. Wether you believe in God or are hardcore Atheist subscribing to Big Bang theory you have the same exact problem: Who made God? or What caused the Big Bang?
I've not believed in God for so long that I've just accepted that the "Who made God" doesn't require any arguments to be seen as the question that completely unravels whole notion of Christianity as a religion, but I had never really paid attention to how ridiculous Big Bang actually sounds and just taken at face value: "yep there was infinite nothingness without space or time and then there was an explosion of some sort and matter and time was born".
Of course Simulation Theory does not answer this question either, but instead pushes the question up. We could be a simulation inside a simulation and that wouldn't change anything. We wouldn't be any wiser and ultimately should we care? If we could somehow communicate with the programmer or whoever is responsible for this simulation we would already know where we came for and why are we here, maybe we wouldn't like those answers since they could literally be "you are my school assignment and I will turn you off after I present you to my teacher".
This is why I an writing this. What if we are part of a simulation? What does that mean for us? The ultimate answer is: nothing. We should live our lives just as we have, however I don't think I am mentally there yet and I am hoping trying to write my thoughts down will make them clearer to me. Editor's note: and it sure helped. I even forgot to publish this after writing it
What does Simulation Theory say about free will? It would just be a decision tree of predetermined actions all the way through. Could this be seen as a reason to do whatever you feel like? As a way to push responsibility off to someone else? What is ethical and moral? Are those just arbitrary rules encoded to us?
I don't think I am at the end of this line of thinking by any means. I am still looking for my philosofy for life and I think this is just another stop on the road that I need to ponder more. I think these questions are the same ones humanity has been thinking about ever since we could think and probably will be thinking long after I am gone. What I'm doing is not deep or insightful for anyone else and probably in couple years I will cringe at these notes, but this is where I am now.