Are we living in a simulation? The question that won’t go away

Some questions never go out of fashion. Others come roaring back the moment technology catches up with philosophy. The simulation hypothesis does both. It fuses an ancient suspicion—that reality might not be as it seems—with a modern plausibility: that all of this might be code.

Not just metaphorical code. Literal, executable code.

What began as Plato’s shadows on a cave wall now echoes in server rooms and physics labs. For all our advancements, we still don’t know whether reality is a physical substrate or a sophisticated illusion. And we might never know.

The idea gained contemporary shape thanks to philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose “trilemma” laid out three options: (1) intelligent civilisations never reach the point of creating simulations; (2) they reach that point but lose interest; or (3) we are almost certainly inside one.

The third option lands like a punchline—until you realise it’s not a joke. As computing power increases, and as our own simulations (from video games to virtual reality) become more immersive, the hypothesis becomes harder to dismiss. If it’s possible to simulate worlds, and if entities in those worlds can become conscious, then probability is no longer on the side of base reality. It’s on the side of infinite nesting dolls.

This isn’t just a parlour game. It touches physics, ethics, religion, and ontology. It asks whether the laws of nature are laws at all, or simply constraints in a system. Whether the speed of light is a universal constant or just a processing cap. Whether consciousness is emergent or merely the interface.

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Doubts pile up. Is the world too neat? Too rule-bound? Could that be a hint? Glitches in the matrix—cosmic anomalies, déjà vu, the strange predictability of chaos—become suspect. We start squinting at the texture of reality, like gamers noticing repeating tiles on a background loop.

But there’s a problem: the hypothesis might be unfalsifiable. If we are in a simulation, our tools for measuring that fact are part of the simulation. Proof becomes impossible. So too, perhaps, does disproof. We are left with a philosophical cul-de-sac: credible enough to entertain, but not to confirm. Is it science? Is it metaphysics? Is it theology with a GPU?

Still, the implications are profound.

If we are simulated, what does that do to free will? To morality? To the value of life? Do our actions still matter if they’re lines of code? Or do they matter more, precisely because we might be being observed?

Then there’s the ethical inversion: not just whether we are simulated, but whether we might one day do the simulating. If so, do we owe anything to our creations? What happens when we build realities populated with digital minds indistinguishable from our own?

And finally, the most human question of all: does it diminish our existence if it isn’t “real”? Or does it deepen the mystery, the beauty, the strangeness of it all?

Maybe the better question isn’t whether we’re living in a simulation.

Maybe it’s how we choose to live inside it.