Some authors (like Nick Bostrom or David Chalmers) seriously postulate that we are the result of a computer simulation run by some external, advanced alien species.
I claim they are not imagining this seriously. If they were, they would end up in a psychiatric ward, catatonic with terror.
If you want to experience this specific terror for yourself, simply read Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story, “The Trouble with Bubbles.”
As a philosophical concept, the simulation hypothesis relies—as always—on the lazy trick of idealism. Trapped in the immanent, unconscious, and defective [Nature-Human] natural framework of spontaneous unaware thinking (that include Philosophy), “Thought” appears as something fundamentally mysterious because it cannot intimately relate to “Nature” (i.e., matter).
To totalize and unify Thought and Nature, these thinkers resort to the exact same lazy, automatic, and intellectually impoverished trick used by supernatural religions: they invert Reality. They claim that some characteristic of Thought is actually the initial, fundamental cause of Nature.
In this specific case, they project the ultimate stage of Thought—computing, the mathematical concept of the Universal Turing Machine—onto the origin of the cosmos.
Fundamentally, this is nothing more than low-Q (low quality as in Hifi) metaphysics. Instead of doing the real job—doing actual metaphysics, which requires diving into the Void and facing Terror—they immediately cling to the first easy idea available: raw idealism.
They would rather prefer the obviously absurd solution of inverting reality than face the Terror of the Void.
Fortunately, Reality operates with far more coherence than these lazy, low-Q thought experiments :
The title of this post is self-explanatory -if you think about it for a second- but let us spell it out: true randomness cannot, by definition, be coded.
If it is coded, it can be calculated, making it strictly pseudo-random. Because quantum randomness is proven to be true randomness by multiple quantum phenomena (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, non-locality, wave packet reduction, Bell’s inequality violations, and logically by the intrinsic probabilistic nature of the quantum wave function), our reality cannot possibly be a computer simulation.
In particular, the experimentally proven violation of Bell’s inequalities directly proves that there cannot exist any hidden determinism—such as a background computation—behind quantum phenomena.
One could still desperately argue that our alien simulators could “pump” non-coded true randomness using artifacts (like our quantum random number generators) and inject it into the simulation.
But doing so would immediately grant the simulation access to the true, non-coded essence of base reality, at which point the premise of a fully simulated, closed reality collapses.
Actually, quantum mechanics gives us a direct view of the non-codable, deepest random nature of our reality through a continuous logic that is perfectly consistent with the rest of physics. The idea of some external code run by an alien civilization is functionally equivalent to a supernatural, religious explanation of reality, and must be unceremoniously erased by Occam’s razor.
Lucky you! I faced the Void for you a long time ago. You will find a real, working metaphysical system here, but don’t bother clicking!
I know fore sure you won’t be interested, because you are not here for actual ideas. You are here for a substitute religion; you just want to rub your mind under some alpha-dominant perspective, and my system doesn’t provide that comfort at all… because it simply works.