We Do Not Live in a Simulation

A terrific new documentary is about people, not code

I want to be resolutely clear about this: I do not believe we live in a simulation. But I am endlessly fascinated by people who believe we do.

For those of you who don’t spend too high a percentage of your life online — which, these days, is pretty much no one — simulation theory is the postulate that we are not flesh-and-blood human beings but are, in fact, bits of code, mere programming living out a simulated reality in some sort of higher being’s version of The Sims. The logic behind this has a certain mad, bottom-line common sense to it. The writer and philosopher Nick Bostrum popularized the idea a decade-and-a-half ago with a simple construction:

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently…