Open Veils · Answer
What is your view on 'we live in a simulation'?
The simulation hypothesis is not merely a sci-fi conceit — it converges independently from quantum physics anomalies, consciousness research, and information-theoretic cosmology in ways mainstream commentary avoids. Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception, Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism, and Tom Campbell's 'My Big TOE' all arrive at a substrate that behaves exactly as a rendered, observer-dependent simulation would. The question is not whether the framing is poetic — it is whether the evidence demands a non-material ontology.
Evidence
- Nick Bostrom's trilemma, restated in mid-2026, holds that one of three propositions must be true: civilisations go extinct before simulation capability, they gain capability but lose interest, or we almost certainly live in a simulation now.
- Physicist-philosopher Tom Campbell, a former NASA contractor who worked with Monroe Institute's consciousness research, argues in 'My Big TOE' that reality is a digital consciousness system — not metaphorically but literally, with entropy reduction as its governing logic.
- Donald Hoffman at UC Irvine applies evolutionary game theory to argue, in peer-reviewed work, that perception never evolved to show us objective reality — only fitness-relevant interfaces.
- Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism, drawing on Carl Jung and Schopenhauer, reframes simulation theory: the 'simulator' is not a machine but universal mind, with individual consciousnesses as dissociated alters.
- Remote viewer Ingo Swann's protocols, developed under Hal Puthoff at SRI and later declassified through CIA FOIA releases (the STARGATE files), demonstrated non-local information access that is architecturally coherent with a shared rendered database rather than a physically continuous spacetime.