A 2026 poll found 22% of U.S. adults called a simulation at least somewhat likely.

Derealization is felt unreality with intact reality testing—not evidence of a simulation.

Psychosocial factors correlated with belief in the simulation hypothesis are largely unresearched.

If reality is a simulation, isn't the idea that reality is a simulation itself a simulation? Then reality must be real — correct? If only it were that simple.

Every age builds its cosmology from its most advanced machines while keeping the old myths running in the background. The clockmakers gave us a clockwork universe; the industrial age, a body and psyche engine of classical forces; now, in the age of computation, quantum mechanics, and AI, a growing number of thoughtful people suspect reality itself is a very sophisticated program.

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. — Albert Einstein (1933)

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. — Albert Einstein (1933)

Nick Bostrom's argument is a trilemma: humanity likely goes extinct before a posthuman stage, posthuman civilizations rarely run ancestor simulations, or we are almost certainly in one (Bostrom, 2003) — which seems to presume what it sets out to prove. The cultural case is louder: Elon Musk puts the odds we live in "base reality" at "one in billions" (On with Kara Swisher, 2016); Neil deGrasse Tyson says the likelihood "may be very high" (American Museum of Natural History, 2016); The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) made it a modern myth of repression and freedom — waking from a deception into a harsher but truer reality. The hypothesis moves the opposite way.

Take it seriously less for what it says about the cosmos than about us — perhaps a way to relieve the hardest problems, existence, meaning, mortality, by supposing none of it is real.

Suppose it is correct. For daily life it changes little — try telling the gas-station attendant you needn't pay because nothing is real — except in one respect: living things would not be alive as we take them to be. David Chalmers resists that conclusion. "Virtual reality is genuine reality," he writes, and "Life in virtual worlds can be as good, in principle, as life outside virtual worlds" (Chalmers, 2022, p. xviii). His point is not that a depiction and a person are identical, but that a well-realized........

© Psychology Today