Is our Universe a simulation?

A bunch of geeks think they proved that the Universe can’t be a simulation. There is an interesting reddit discussion about their proof. Even though I think the premise is overly simplistic, I particularly liked this comment thread for pinning the debate to a few historical contexts:

OB1556: Imagine you are a shadow cast on a wall. You move when the figure that creates you moves, yet you mistake your motion for freedom. You begin to wonder where light comes from, what lies beyond the wall, why you fade at dusk. You take the darkness and brightness around you as clues, building philosophies of contrast and geometry; but no principle of shadow can explain the lamp. The laws that govern your world are born of absence, they describe how much light you lack, never what light is.

To you, illumination is only the shape of your disappearance. The shadow begins to observe itself more deeply. It notices that it stretches when the light lowers, shrinks when it rises, vanishes altogether when the source moves behind it. From these cycles, it constructs a cosmology that existence is flux, that being and non being alternate in sacred rhythm. It writes doctrines about contrast, invents metaphors of density and form, and even speculates that perhaps there is an ultimate shadow; a pure, infinite darkness where all forms dissolve into unity; and yet, no matter how big its insight, it still speaks in the tongue of absence. It cannot conceive that what it calls dark unity is merely the failure of light to touch it. When it seeks truth, it turns toward deeper darkness, thinking that depth must mean proximity to the source, not realizing the irony that the source is not within the wall but beyond it.

The tragedy of the shadow is not ignorance, but confinement. It believes it is learning about existence, when in truth it is describing the contours of its prison. For the shadow, revelation is impossible unless the wall itself shatters, unless the surface that sustains its illusion ceases to be.

If one day, the wall were to crumble and the light to flood unbroken, the shadow would not awaken; it would cease. Its enlightenment and its annihilation would be the same event; and in that cessation lies the paradox the shadow could never fathom. For what it feared as death was, in truth, the dissolution of its distortion. The wall that once seemed to hold the world together was only the limit that defined its false existence. When the wall disintegrates and the light passes unimpeded, there is no longer a figure to cast, no surface to receive, no boundary to sustain the illusion of self.

The shadow had long mistaken its trembling edges for consciousness, its movement for will, its outline for identity. Yet all those qualities were borrowed from what it could never see, the unseen form, the light’s pulse, the invisible geometry of origin. When it disappears, it does not vanish into nothingness; it merges back into what was always there but could never be represented on the wall.

What was once a trembling silhouette becomes pure luminosity, unseparated from the radiance that birthed it, but to the shadow’s old logic (the language of edges, contrast, and silhouette) such unity would seem impossible, even catastrophic. For in the light there are no outlines, no opposites, no place for a shadow to stand and call itself I.

Thus the ultimate revelation is indistinguishable from erasure. The shadow’s final knowing is a surrender of knowledge itself, a falling away of the need to describe what can only be lived by ceasing to be what one was.

P09: Incredible. Did you come up with this or did you read it elsewhere? I am very much touched and enlightened by this reply.

OB1556: I used the shadow as an archetype for consciousness trapped in appearance, longing for the source that sustains it but cannot be seen. This is Plato’s cave, the Upanishads’ light imagery, Jung’s individuation and the Gnostic yearning for the true light beyond illusion. These are all esoteric transmutations, each have its own supersessions and limitations for sure.

ZCT2013: "Imagine you are a shadow cast on a wall." is a one path that can easily lead to fatalism or deism. Here is an alternate starting point: "Imagine your outward appearance, authoritarian promises of eternity and your daily existence are merely shadows cast by an occluded inner light." You only need to shift your focus inwards and peel away the cruft to find your true self, instead of grasping at unfalsifiable external loci of control, despair that you are only a shadow on a wall or keep erecting new walls around yourself. Of course, there is a third way as well :)

There also these more straightforward comments with which I do agree:

BC1: This whole simulation “theory” is just a placeholder argument. It literally solves nothing and changes nothing.
If life isn’t a simulation, the usual “big questions” exist: how did the universe begin, what’s out there, etc.
If it is, the same questions exist with the caveat of what’s outside the simulation.
We can’t ever fully prove or disprove a simulation any more than we can prove or disprove the existence of god.

Dasnihil: this is like NPCs in gta 6 proving that there is no world outside gta 6.