Over the years there have been claims of evolution, there have been claims of creation of the universe resulting from the big bang and from the religious aspect which is the creation story and in all of this one thing that remains constant and unchanging is the fact that curiosity plays a major role in most of the human endeavors.

Curiosity has been the reason for the major advancement in technology, the way we communicate, the way we process food and all of that – curiosity has basically given birth to discoveries and it the same light curiosity has brought up this salient question – Are we living in a simulation and is the world real?

Looking at it from various points of view we discover that there are valid arguments in favor of both questions.

The answer to these question has for long remained a mystery to all of the human race, the time has gone by and there has been no definite answer to the question but people have been busy with their various hypothesis. Each day someone comes up to give us reasons why he or she believes that this universe is not real and as they come with their claim there is someone else countering by saying that the universe is indeed real and things are just as they are.

Is there some reality?

It could be that we are being deceived by this reality and the truth is that all of this is an illusion. It could be that there is no such thing as reality and that everything we know, we are meant to know because our mind has built the illusion. A man once said that we are merely part of a community of minds, everything that occurs and the way we perceive life is all in the mind and that tends to say a lot.

Take the money, for instance, it is only paper but yet many kill for it as it has been given so much value – people kill and have fights about mere paper because of how much value they believe it possesses. We live by the mind, we do things because we think them first – researchers have not been able to prove that the earth is not real but speculations have refused to die regarding the issue.

Some people have strong beliefs that we may be living in a simulation – a computer simulation, a technology that makes what is not real seem real enough for us to believe it. It is very difficult for many of us to believe that we are living in a simulation as every single cell in our body rebels against it.

The feel of the breeze against your skin, the way your taste buds tingle when you eat and all of that are just too real to be a computer simulation – and because of it all we all rule the simulation talk as balderdash and conclude in our heads that the universe is real. 

We, however, cannot dispute the power of technology and its ability to create games that are realistic enough to momentarily make us believe that they are real, virtual reality is also one of the many results of how far technology can go and think about the universe in this light is enough to make you think again.

For many years, scientists have been thinking over and over in continuous circles – it will happen that one day the universe will be real and then the next there will be a new reason to doubt it.

Elon Musk and Neil DeGrasse Tyson thinks we might live in a simulation

Elon Musk believes that we might be living in a simulation but there have been some claims that indeed the computing power is very powerful and it is very capable of creating a mini world where each sim can be controlled or programmed to do one thing, it is, however, impossible for the world to be a simulation as the number of atoms it would take to create this reality and all the components that makes it what it is far greater than the number of atoms we currently have moving about the universe.

No proof has been given to either one of these claims but these claims did not just come to be, they have been since the days of the great philosopher Plato who along with many other colleagues believed that the universe is not a reality but rather it is an illusion.

He was not the only one from his time as about two thousand years ago, Pythagoras thought of numbers as non-material essence that brought about the physical world.

Physicists have been said to confirm that we do not live in a computer simulation, they have concluded that it is impossible to create something as infinite as our universe on even the largest of computers but even with this realization some physicists believe that it is going to be forever impossible to prove whether or not we are in a simulation as every piece of evidence we are able to retrieve my in itself be a simulation and every single thing we think might also be a simulation.

It could be that all of this process of trying to figure out what is real from what is not might just be us acting out a program where we are supposed to do exactly that and in the end, we will still have no legit answer that has been bugging minds for ages.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium set the odds on a balanced scale and stated that he believes the chances could be very high and he pointed out that the same way we are superior in the area of intelligence to chimpanzees, in that same light it is very probable that there is a being out there that is far more superior than we could ever dream of being in the area of intelligence and in the eyes of such a being we might just be mere idiots.

Some final words on reality vs simulation

He said that for that reason he believes that our lives are just made up for the purpose of another’s intelligence.

There is no coming to a conclusion on any of this, there is no proof that the world is real and there is also no solid evidence that it is not.

There is however that one thing that cannot be argued about and that is the fact that real or not, our lives are merely what we make of them.

Every life on the planet might be a simulation or not but as it is none of it matters as much as how we live every moment.