The reasoning for this thinking doesn't have to be religious. You could be in a coma and have simulated this reality within your own mind. Its only as big as you have envisioned (ie can prove).

Though my personal choice was It doesn't matter, I also have a leaning towards "yes" on religious grounds, maybe.

If you want to get an idea of what the philosophy is behind it, all you need to do is watch the trailer for The Truman Show, and that should answer all your questions. And, if you want to see alternate takes on the concept, then you have the retarded boomers who followed Q and formed a cult around Trump, and the idiots who unironically think "I am the only one who is self-aware of world, and everyone else is a mindless brainless sheep/NPC."


One word: entertainment. Or a simple way to get your thesis paper so your awarded your PhD.


But, this entire principle is dependent upon atheism for it to be believed and considered. In the Western religions, the simulation argument falls apart because it IS possible for ordinary people to be raised up to God(s)'s level through the work of a God. And, in the Eastern philosophy, the entire purpose of living, dying, and being reborn is to become "awakened" to the world around you and being able to ascend to the next plane of existence.

When you remove religion from the equation and start to look for a purely "logical" answer to everything, the first conclusion to arise is that humans are nothing more than sophisticated biological computers evolved from primates. And, once you get to that conclusion, you start going down the rabbit hole of Enlightenment Era thinking that has gotten the first-world into the identity crisis that exists today. You're already arrived to the conclusion of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, so what's the next logical step? To conclude that if humanity has evolved rather than created by a spiritual power, then arrives to the likely conclusion Nietzsche made with The Gay Science of the Madman running around screaming that "God is dead". This arrives to the ideology of nihilism that life has no purpose. But, OF COURSE, life has to have a purpose to it, doesn't it? No. If there is no God(s) and there are no spiritual plains of existence (Heaven, Hell, karma, purgatory, whatever), then there is nothing backing the reason why people do what they do. Even murder is nothing but socially engineered morality to it because the person murdered is just as pointless as the murderer, with any argument to the contrary beginning and ending upon the fact that it's opinion and semantics made by people who are also pointless. This then leads down to the various poisons prevalent throughout society. You have Herbert Spencer's ideology of "survival of the fittest", born out of Darwin's theories, that comes to the conclusion that the "ultimate purpose" in life is to be the last group standing and become Nietzsche's Übermensch (The "super man" ). Then you have Max Stirner giving rise to anarchism because, while "survival of the fittest" is nice and all, the only thing that really matters in life is what YOU want and anyone who gets in your way is simply an enemy, which leads to Ragnar Redbeard's Might Is Right. Or, if you want to "die with the most toys", then you arrive to Marx and Engels theories on Socialism, which detail that the party is the only God in the world who declares what rights people have, the preservation of the party is life's ultimate goal, and anyone against the party deserves to be massacred because they oppose the party's interests and are too stupid to be capable of changing their way of thinking in the first place.

And, once you start going down the rabbit hole of any one of those schools of thought, it's not that much of a stretch to also arrive to the conclusion that we're nothing more than plants in a terrarium, rats in a cage, fish in an aquarium. No real purpose in life aside to satisfy one's curiosity, with our existence ending once we all either die, reach the maximum capacity, or our observers grow disinterested and pull the plug.

There isn't an "exact philosophy" behind this "logic" because it relies on axioms completely grounded in the physics of our own known universe (which in this hypothetical, would be a mere simulation).

If we *are* in a simulation (and I'm not saying we are--as I stated earlier, it seems unlikely), then the hypothetical meta-universe would be incomprehensibly more complex. So complex, in fact, that simulating a universe of this scale wouldn't be that hard to do--the question of "Who has the power/time/ability/desire" would be simplified down to "who had the power/time/ability/desire to make video game worlds in our universe". In a sufficiently complex universe with sufficiently complex life forms, making our universe could theoretically be "only that hard".

Much of our physics is still experimentally determined. Why is the speed of light capped? Why is everything a discrete particle? Why do quantum waveforms not collapse outside of observation?

A hypothetical meta-universe could involve not just a different planck length (instantaneous light transference?), but it could even have truly continuous matter. The combination of the two would allow hypothetical computation incomprehensibly more powerful than what we have. People (and their spatial senses) could exist in seven or more dimensions instead of 3 (or 4 if you want to count time). There may have been no "big bang" there--the meta-universe may truly have always existed without meaningful growth or change. We really would have no idea.

The hypothetical philosophy that "disproves" this universe as a simulation relies on assuming that the physics of our universe is absolute. We know (and have proven!) that we couldn't simulate something as complex as our universe within our universe. But we *don't* know that a hypothetical meta-universe isn't complex enough to simulate our universe within it. And it's almost certainly impossible to prove anything to the contrary, since we can't even comprehend what it is we'd be disproving.