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It's as meaningless as the question whether there is "a god." If our universe is indeed somehow embedded in an outer universe, at what point does that make it a

It's as meaningless as the question whether there is "a god." If our universe is indeed somehow embedded in an outer universe, at what point does that make it a "simulation" vs. just being the underlying mechanism from which the known universe emerges? It requires imagining some "beings" that are running the simulation to which you can ascribe human qualities like intent to create or intent to deceive. Without them, it's not a "simulation," it just is. The simulations that we create are subject to the physics of this universe, so they inherit fundamental limitations like finiteness and boundedness of everything. If we then find that some aspects of physics seem to obey the same principles, that's evidence for exactly nothing. Furthermore, the host universe could be literally anything and may be subject to completely different limitations. It's an unfalsifiable and thus meaningless idea.

DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
> inherit fundamental limitations like finiteness and boundedness of everything This, in my opinion, while true in principle, does not have to become visible to the simulation (from inside the simulation). For example, we cannot build a true Turing machine because we can't supply it with an infinitely long tape, but we can always get a new roll of paper and paste it back-to-back to the one being used, thereby creating an arbitrarily long tape. This process can't go on forever, but if you are sure you can erase and re-use some old tapes (e.g. because they're sufficiently far from 'now' and your machine will only backtrack so much and ultimately advance to the same 'future' direction) it's conceivable to have unbounded non-periodic processes on finite hardware.