Computer programs can crash, and we might be inside a computer program.

So how do we crash it?

Over at Scientific American they argue that we can overload the system by creating our own simulations:

The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

To me this fails because we have our own real world constraints of computing power and storage to deal with first. We would need unlimited computing power and storage here to stack overflow the system that runs our simulation.

My personal theory is that quantum mechanics, where we can only tell the status of a particle if we observe it, is an indicator of resolution limits of out simulation. Maybe if we observe enough quantum particles at once, we will either crash the system, or quantum mechanics will start acting differently, proving we are in a simulation.

Then there is the impossible to answer ethical question – is it wrong to crash the simulation? If we are not “real”, then no harm done. But if we experience life or even consciousness, despite not being real, should that be protected or even sacred?

Breaking the simulation would be like death, I expect. Once you achieve it, you’ll never know what comes next.

But if there is a restore point, would we as conscious individuals experience that reboot, or would be cease to exist?