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The story
The “simulation hypothesis” — the idea, put forward by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and others, that the universe we live in might actually be a computer simulation built by an advanced civilization — became a hot topic on 5ch’s Nanademo Jikkyo board (a general live-discussion forum). The hypothesis counts NYU’s David Chalmers and theoretical physicist James Gates among its supporters, and has even been the subject of international symposiums. But the thread split along familiar lines: a fundamental objection that “you can propose it, but since it can’t be verified or falsified, it doesn’t actually explain anything,” alongside technical gripes like “it violates Occam’s razor” and “it ignores the storage capacity a simulation would require” — all mixed in with jokes about filing a bug report with whoever’s running the simulation.
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and fellow researchers have proposed the so-called “simulation hypothesis” — the claim that “the world we live in is probably a simulation” — and it’s stirring up plenty of discussion.
The hypothesis has also drawn support from NYU philosophy professor David Chalmers and University of Maryland theoretical physicist James Gates, among others, and
has been debated at length across multiple international symposiums.
Source: simulation-argument.com / Original paper here
What people said
Either we are inhabitants of the base reality that will eventually gain the ability to build such simulations ourselves,
or we are inhabitants of one of the billions of such simulations already running
(in which case, naturally, the inhabitants of the simulation have no idea they're in one).
What's the point of building such a massive, pointless empty stretch of space?
Whoever coded this simulation must be an idiot.
it's not like it really affects us unless whoever's running it actually makes contact.
It can't answer the basic 'so what?'
Isn't this basically just the theory behind holographic universe cosmology?
It's nothing more than speculation about a bare possibility.
And those articles claiming 'X is proof we're in a simulation' don't make sense either.
but mere humans probably aren't capable of grasping something like that.
No matter how hard Mario grinds away inside the cartridge, the manufacturer — basically God to him — just thinks, 'Huh, hope this one sells well.'
I've got a bug where my hair keeps disappearing. Any ETA on that patch?
Seriously, they need to stop messing with Ohtani for entertainment.
Don't go handing a throwaway character a full sense of self, you idiot!
but for ants like us,
there's no way to fathom something on that scale.
but short of that, it really doesn't change anything.
Quantum weirdness gets pretty close to that.
'Violates the laws of physics' might just mean we haven't fully worked out this world's physics yet.
And whatever counts as a 'bug' is only being judged by this world's own standards anyway.
Fantasizing about glitches is basically just time-machine talk at that point.
since there's no good reason to assume some higher being running a simulation exists in the first place.
Occam's razor itself has never actually been proven.
Not being able to prove it's wrong doesn't make it true.
seems fixated on things like computing cost and Planck-length limits from modern science, while ignoring the storage medium a simulation would actually require.
It ought to have to prove its starting premise first — that a higher-level world could simulate a universe cheaply, and that everyone up there would even want to.
A simulation wouldn't necessarily be an extension of the computers we use today.
An intelligent species' storage doesn't need to be centrally managed — each individual could just carry their own.
Even here on Earth, a single person went from handling 10MB to multiple terabytes in just a few decades, so stretch that out over billions of years and storage capacity stops being a real constraint at all.
Isn't that basically a new tourist spot?
If they'd built that in, it'd kill the realism and be boring.
But for us worldly types, driven by raw desire and clinging to this world, there's no way we'd ever recognize it as a simulation.
Ha, found a bug — you posted that same reply twice.
Background and key points of the debate
The simulation hypothesis rests on the trilemma Professor Bostrom laid out in his 2003 paper: civilizations either (1) go extinct before becoming advanced enough to build such simulations, (2) become advanced enough but lose interest in building them, or (3) actually build them — in which case we are almost certainly living inside one. Framed as a probability argument rather than a flat assertion, it leaves room for the third option without insisting on it. That distinction is exactly where the thread split: some argued that since the hypothesis can be neither verified nor falsified, it “never rises above speculation,” while others tried to read quantum indeterminacy as a sign of “the simulation lagging.” Questions were also raised about the premise itself — why assume a higher being would even want to simulate a universe in the first place (the Occam’s razor objection) — laying bare the gap between the hypothesis’s appeal and its unfalsifiability that drove the whole debate.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanademo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Oxford Professor: ‘Sorry guys, this world’s probably a simulation’.”
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