Do we live in a simulation? The answer is definitely yes. Welcome.

Every active human brain is processing information which is coming from outside of it. Which the brain organizes into an illusion that the human thinks they live in. This way, everyone lives in their personal simulation, produced by their own brain.

This still leaves a bunch of questions unanswered:

  • Is that simulation nested inside some other simulation?
  • If so, how many levels deep?
  • If not, is the main simulation directly fed to the brain by some outside agent?

While those questions are seemingly impossible to answer with the current level of human knowledge, the fact that every one of us lives in their own simulation suggests me a few thoughts.

One of them is that because everyone has their own simulation, as opposed to a shared one, we don’t actually dwell in shared reality. Even if objective reality exists (physics is unclear on that one), for every human it’s still transformed into a unique hallucination. And even in the brain-in-a-vat kind of situation, there’s still no guarantee that everyone is fed the same exact “reality”.

Our perception of reality is uniquely shaped by our brains through whatever we have learned as part of our cultural upbringing. And then internally displayed in a manner that is uniquely distinct for everyone. Which we then communicate to each other using ambiguous symbolic concepts. So misunderstanding each other shouldn’t really come as a surprise to us, humans. The mere fact that there are people who can agree on at least some common statements and understand each other at least partially is already a miracle.

The diversity of our cultures and backgrounds seems to produce a ground fertile with misunderstandings. Yet, at the same time, diversity is an evolutionary advantage. As biologically, so I believe is culturally. If we all behaved and thought in exactly the same way, I think humanity would have ceased to exist. It wouldn’t take long between the time everyone commits the same mistake and the time everyone suffers the same dire consequences.

I think it’s one of the most important challenges we face as a civilization of increasingly interconnected simulations: how to maintain diversity of opinions while understanding and respecting each other’s right to think differently.