The case against reality: How I became obsessed with the simulation hypothesis

We all have pivotal moments in our lives that change us in ways that can only be described as a form of self-induced restructuring. Such moments create a metaphorical wedge in which the “before” version of you can no longer fully resonate with the “after” version of you. For me, this moment occurred while I was studying for my Masters at the University of Amsterdam and happened to stumble upon a book that completely flipped my world upside down. The Ego Tunnel by Dr. Thomas Metzinger is no ordinary book, and it is definitely not for the faint hearted. 

On Dr. Metzinger’s view, conscious experience is not only an internal construct, but an extremely selective way of representing information. This means that the self is a result of you mentally representing yourself as a representational system in phenomenological real-time. Reality is thus a tunnel, since what we see and hear, or what we feel, smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there.

What gripped me most, and I vividly recall gasping when first reading this book, is the notion that there is no such thing as a self because all that exists are phenomenal selves which appear in conscious experience. A phenomenal self is not a thing, but an ongoing process. This challenges everything that we know about a consciously experienced first-person perspective because it directly addresses and solves the puzzle of how subjectivity emerges out of objective events in the natural world.

Dr. Metzinger has embarked on a path few before him have walked—by building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind. It is so innovative and refreshing that I spent much of my early twenties in a persistent state of excitement simply due to his theories.

I wasn't one of those Matrix-loving conspiracy theorists who after a bong hit would raise questions like: "Is reality even real?". No. My quest has been far more related to two major epistemic targets: the phenomenal self and the emergence of a first-person perspective. If the self is thus nothing more than the content of the phenomenological self-model, then the first person pronoun "I" doesn't refer to an object like a ball or a car—it just points to the speaker of the current sentence because there is no thing in the brain or outside in the world which is us. We are processes. 

My understanding deepened further when I encountered Dr. Donald Hoffman’s simulation argument which posits that space-time is nothing more than a virtual reality headset which we use to interact with the world. By disentangling the observer from the observed, Dr. Hoffman, who has been studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain for three decades, suggests that our perceptions of an independent reality must be mere illusions because whatever reality is, we do not see it—we only see a user interface. 

I cannot encapsulate in words how thrilling Dr. Hoffman’s theory has been for me. I have spent countless hours and sleepless nights, metaphorically and quite literally tossing and turning with this idea that what we perceive is never the world directly since coded chains bind us to an artificial reality that operates in a similar fashion to a computer simulation. Every particle, every force is made of 0s and 1s. The math checks out. The physics makes sense. The evidence piles up. The simulation does not consist of object and subject, mind and matter or past and present in the traditional sense—it is all one system that is operating as a single piece.

In dreams, you can be in multiple places at once. In memories, you can revisit any moment. These aren’t illusions. They are mechanisms showing us how reality works when we look past the usual filters and break free from the limitations of both time and space. For example, the Many-Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics suggests that every possible outcome happens in different branches of reality. When we make a choice, we are only becoming aware of one particular branch and all the other possibilities continue in parallel universes, which occur at the same space and time as our own. 

Furthermore, experiment after experiment has shown that the particles which make up ordinary objects have no objective, observer-independent existence. For example, the double-slit experiment demonstrates how the very act of observing electrons changes the outcome of the experiment. If you have two slits very close to one another, it stands to reason that any individual quantum of energy will go through either one slit or the other. However, if you measure which slit the quantum passes through, it behaves as though it passes through only one slit: it acts like a classical particle. On the other hand, if you don’t measure which slit the quantum passes through, it behaves as a wave, acting like it passed through both slits simultaneously and producing an interference pattern. Quantum mechanics thus shows us that there are no public objects sitting out in some preexisting space at all—they exist only when observed.

Yet neuroscientists remain stuck in their ways, committed to physicalist theories of mind that keep them hundreds of years behind physics. Classical notions under Newtonian physics, where time is absolute and objects exist absolutely, must be questioned because the bottom line is that physical objects, including the brain, do not possess objective, observer-independent features. 

However, what I love about Dr. Hoffman’s theory is that he distinguishes between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. Dr. Hoffman illuminates how experiences of everyday life are reflective of the ultimate nature of reality, and thus they still matter significantly even if they are occuring within a computer simulation. A virtual reality headset does not make your experiences any less real to you, as the conscious agent. 

I’m not ashamed to admit that I have spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the simulation hypothosis and how our brains give rise to first-person conscious experience. There is a reason why it is aptly titled as the ‘hard problem’ in cognitive neuroscience. Yet I marvel at how quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localised in space until we observe them. Indeed, all roads lead back to the observer. To conclude, the nature and mechanism of conscious processing has become arguably one of the most intriguing questions in 21st-century neuroscience, but what remains clear is that our perceived reality is nothing more than a sophisticated digital construct rather than an objective truth.