If we live in a simulation, proving it might be impossible. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to find proof, and not a day goes by without me actively looking for it.

For me the most likely proofs will be either:

a) the simulation’s internal logic breaking down – some customisation that doesn’t ring true

or

b) an easter egg – some little conceit from the designers that nobody is supposed to find

If the designers figured we would never land on Mars, or ever create cameras good enough to see the planet close up, then perhaps they slipped in a serial number?

The original NASA pic is here:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00907/mcam/0907MR0039700340501405C00_DXXX.jpg

I would prefer finding similar on Earth, where it can be visited and beyond dispute.

Roughly a decade ago, I was travelling through the south-west of the South Island, NZ.

There weren’t many people about, and there wasn’t much to see or do. Just harsh nature and some road.

I parked at what was the southern most accessible (by car) point, and when for a 15 minute walk to the beach. I was completely alone. I had been thinking about the we are not real concept quite a bit…

At the beach, convinced that nobody was nearby, I yelled to the sky: If this isn’t real, show me a sign!

I had been thinking that UFOs were shown only to those that wouldn’t be believed, and only in isolation. So the powers-that-be had a great opportunity to do the same for me.

Nothing happened.

I hiked back to my hire car, figuring I was an idiot, and not expecting to think such thoughts again. At the car park was now a second car. No people were around, but the car’s licence plate stood out – it was custom and it said DAZIGN. The Sign!

For a few minutes I thought something extraordinary had occurred – I asked for a sign and received it. However, elsewhere on the car’s exterior were words about the business – a hairdressing company. The name fitted the industry. I figured that if I were to wait for the car to leave, and follow it, I would realise that it was nothing to do with me and my quest. For the powers-that-be to create this business just to respond to me seemed unlikely.

Just like the craziness of going back in time and affecting the future – introducing a car, person and business into the current simulation would have so many butterfly effects that I couldn’t see it being feasible. Showing me a UFO on that lonely desolate beach would have been far easier…

That licence plate was just a freaky coincidence 🙁

According to Wikipedia:

Paranormal is a general term (coined c. 1915–1920) that designates experiences that lie outside “the range of normal experience or scientific explanation” or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science’s current ability to explain or measure

Scientists expect that anything paranormal can be explained by science, eventually. And if we lived in a non-virtual world, that would make sense. However, a simulation could involve factors that are not represented in the physical world…

Take karma, for example. Many people, myself included, believe that (crudely stating) if you do good deeds you accumulate karma points, redeemable when you need them. In a video game, your karma would not actually appear in the physical world – it would be tracked in the background, in the code.

Perhaps the key to discovering the true nature of our non-reality is via paranormal phenomena? That which seems to be a factor in our world, with no connection to physics?

Such phenomena includes:

• Ghosts
• Psychic abilities
• Telepathy
• Out-of-Body Experience

On a personal note, I am starting to believe that there is a (weak) force in play in our world called Care. Basically the more you care about the a being, object or outcome, the more likely that it will exist the way that you like it. Not the ridiculous art of manifestation, but rather affecting change by 0.0001% – so small that an individual can only make a difference when they odds of a negative outcome is equally as small.

Example: in a thunderstorm your favourite tree is vulnerable – it could be struck by lightning. The scientific odds are 1 in 100,000. But because you care about the continued existence of that tree, your weak Care force adjusts those odds down to say 1 in 98,000. It is real, it is conducted behind the scenes (in the software but not in the physical world), and it is not significant enough to be proven scientifically.

What I like about Care, as opposed to telepathy and ghosts, is that it is based on intent. If a large enough experiment could be conducted, perhaps something could be proved.

I imagine a life-or-death medical operation that has a well-proven 50/50 chance of success. Show the operation live on TV and the general public should project care towards the situation. The odds should improve. Run the experiment enough times and the survival rate could improve.

Even if I am wrong with Care, perhaps one day an experiment will be created that can prove that there is cause and effect that exists outside the physical world. Yes there is the “spooky action at a distance” of quantum physics, but I’m thinking something the layperson would understand and accept.

Let’s find a force that is acting outside of the known laws of physics.

The short answer is this:

If man on Earth ever progresses to the point where they can create Earth (and everything on it) simulations so good it is hard to tell them apart from the real world… then they’ll presumably make many of them and the odds of us being in the one real world is slim.

Here’s a more elegant way of putting it, from Nick Bostrom:

At least one of the following three propositions must be true:

1. Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation