I was out the other night at Wymondham’s glorious pub, The Queen’s Head. Over some drinks, one of the guests acquainted me with the “simulation hypothesis”. I had never heard of this before. The idea is that we are all living in a computer simulation.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom popularised the idea. I am no expert (major disclaimer for all that follows), but the logic goes roughly like this. If humans continue on their current technological path, we will almost certainly create tech with such power that we can run realistic computer simulations of previous eras. So, there is a considerable chance that we are in one of those. The only way of denying it for certain is to argue that civilisation would die out before this technological advancement. (Quite unlikely, given the exponential rise of AI.)

Does that sound like logical sleight of hand? If so, prepare yourself for a shock: it is treated as a legitimate theory by sizable swathes of academia. Granted, not all contemporary academia is in great shape (see last month’s Lowe Down). But I was still stunned when a cursory JSTOR search revealed several papers that take this seriously. I immediately laughed it off as science fiction. Another theory bandied about this drunken pub meeting was that Osama bin Laden was an Arsenal fan. So, you know – pinch of salt.

Yet this hypothesis has been taken seriously by supposed “intellectuals” like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk, no less. (The simulation one, not the bin Laden Arsenal one.)

This theory made me think of the Outnumbered episode when Ben asks Pete (his dad) how they know they’re not part of someone’s dream. And Pete says:

“I can’t imagine anyone having a dream this dull, can you?”

Exactly! For all the exciting things that happen in the world, there are also the far more frequent moments where we sit about doing nothing. I refuse to believe that a futuristic computer programmer would genuinely sit through people’s nightly snoring on the sofa in front of the TV. They’d have long since unplugged us out of boredom.

There’s also the scientific pushback that the natural world is far too complex and varied to recreate with a computer algorithm. As Sabine Hossenfelder confirmed, proponents of the theory make “big assumptions about what natural laws can be reproduced with computer simulations, and they don’t explain how this is supposed to work. But finding alternative explanations that match all our observations [about the natural world] to high precision is really difficult.” Ethan Siegel has also called the theory unprovable by genuine science: “there isn’t any way to prove it; any ‘glitches’ we find or don’t find could be properties of the Universe itself.”

In other words, it’s completely unfalsifiable. That’s always a giveaway. It rests entirely on theory: pure faraway speculation outside any empirical realm. It’s little different to any other theory of a higher power that relies on faith rather than evidence. (Says the English student, I know! Hence why I’ve name-dropped my sources.)

This is not to say that people haven’t tried to prove it via the usual Internet claptrap that can be debunked in minutes. A video in 2015 went viral on social media that showed three moving vehicles in Xingtai being flipped upwards on the road by a seemingly invisible force. A YouTuber cited this as evidence of a simulation glitch “CAUGHT ON CAMERA”.

The real cause, it transpired, was a cable lying on the road caught in a street sweeper. The sweeper inadvertently pulled the cable taut, and it acted as a tripwire for the vehicles. Mercifully, nobody was injured.

The one thing I do find appealing about the theory is that it encourages us to question how much we genuinely know about the world. Humans can get overconfident very easily, and of course, one does not need a science degree to know that our perceptions can be extremely biased. A spot of introspection never harmed anybody!

But overall, there are several morals to this story. Don’t believe everything you hear at the pub. Believe nothing you see on the Internet. There is no evidence that we are in a computer simulation.

And for a good time – go to the Queen’s Head!