Our experienced reality already is a simulation, according to its own internal story that the "showings" and "feelings" and "understandings" of such are dependent upon the processes of a brain and nervous system. That's further clarified by the belief that what precedes the mature operation of that biological system and what follows its termination (death) is oblivion, or actually not even that manifestation and cognition of nothingness. The latter thereby illustrating the normal state of what _X_ is to itself (i.e., an absence of all states / properties). That either oblivion or "not even oblivion" go unchallenged by most critical thinkers sympathetic to science and philosophical naturalism ironically allows the belief to be functionally equivalent to a fact (can be manipulated / appealed to as if the case). Now one might protest that (according to the internal story) the brain's simulation arises from analyzing and organizing information inputted to it from an "outside" source. That it is dealing with representation rather than just a shown and understood reality simulation that would otherwise seem to be about itself rather than trying to copy something beyond it (so to speak). However, unless there's a stipulation that a simulated reality cannot be representational, then it should count. Also, when finally ceasing to ignore the self-referential aspect of our experienced reality's "internal story", it may become apparent that its role / purpose as representation is not necessarily a given. Thus any potential of disqualification of the brain's simulation on those grounds can become suspect in the context of that avenue. Amanda Gefter: "As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions — sights, sounds, textures, tastes — are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it — or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion — we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like. Not so, says Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction...." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
We just dont know, but when you look at the video games, they are becoming more and more advanced and it really makes you wonder if we could be a simulation too and if everything, even this what im typing now, has been programmed.
That it's an interesting thought experiment, but little more than that. I'm inclined to see these kind of speculations as contemporary eruptions of philosophical skepticism, which dates back to ancient times. It's reminiscent of the idea in Descartes (and many others) that we might be dreaming everything. Adding computers to the speculation doesn't really add anything significant to the underlying problem. That's the problem of dealing with the possibility that we might be wrong, not only about particular things, but about everything. One of its implications is the denial of physical science, I guess. Our understanding of physical reality has physical processes and events occurring of their own accord, even if they aren't observed. Physical cosmology, geological processes, the evolution of life. If reality is a matrix-like "simulation", then none of that would have happened. All of the 'evidence' supporting our natural picture of reality would be illusory. In a way, it's like Bertrand Russell's suggestion that the entire universe might have come into existence a second ago, complete with all kinds of fake physical evidence and memories of a past that never happened.
At one time, most people thought the earth was flat. The question I have asked myself, if we now know that the earth is spherical, how was it possible for the majority of people, at one time, to believe it was flat ? One explanation is the available sensory input data. Way back when, the tools of science were very crude such that observation was more or less limited to the eyes and ears. This limitation in the possible data input to the brain, resulted in the brain inferring; simulating, the most reasonable conclusion based on the limited scope of the input data. It wasn't until people began to sail around the world, and the sensory data using the eyes expanded and the brain began to infer a new best possible conclusion; round. As science develops better tools, and new data appears, theories are modified or changed, since the brain re-optimizes, by adding the new data to the old data. This simulation affect, to use the topic term, is used by politics all the time. If you wish to discredit a person, you will fixate on a few data points and play these over and over again. You will also make an effort not to place this limited data, in the context of all the possible data. For example, one slip of the tongue can be replayed over and over, without placing this slip of the tongue, in the context of a life of positive public service. The result will be a narrow data input into the brain of the audience. Their brain will simulate reality based on this narrow data, causing many people to justify the most logical inference, from that data, which is that person is a social deviant. It is sort of like a magic trick, where there are hidden wires; extra data, which the audience will not see. This also happens in science. For example, how people are aware that the DNA double helix has a double helix of water, hydrogen bonded to the DNA, in the major and minor grooves, which determines properties DNA? In most biology textbooks, this water is a hidden wire, that allows DNA, which is inert by itself, to appear to have a life of its own. If you add the water, the brain will infer a different simulation. If we take away water and add any other solvent, the DNA stops working. But even with this data, available, this area of science prefers hidden wires that maintain the flat world of biology so it can't become 3-D.
