Sunday, August 24, 2025

while the idea that we live in a computer simulation is worth thinking about for fun, a serious analysis quickly concludes that it is thoroughly debunked by the work of kurt godel. the easy way to understand godel is that it breaks the idea that the model is reality, which was disappointingly pushed heavily by stephen hawking even after godel. hawking shouldn't have made that error, but it's basically his fundamental philosophical position, and it's entirely incoherent in a post-godel framework. that said, godel really just proved what the platonists imagined thousands of years earlier (but godel didn't realize it. he hated plato.). if we live in a simulation, then the simulation is a model; it's a computer program, so it has to be inconsistent or incomplete. this is different than what godel proposed, which is that any theory of reality is inconsistent or incomplete. godel proved that you can't build a consistent and complete model of reality. but, that is exactly what a computer simulation of reality would be, so it couldn't possibly exist.

even if you could find breakdowns in space time that you could prove you can't prove exist or don't exist, and yet can observe empirically anyways, which is what would be required to exist if we live in a simulation as per godel, it still wouldn't be enough to save the idea, because the model - the simulation - could never describe everything that exists. due to godel, if we did live in a simulation, there would necessarily have to be components of reality outside of the simulation that the simulation cannot describe, which is a contradiction in terms.

you should move on from the idea. it is easily mathematically debunked with basic predicate logic.