Are we truly living in a simulation?

Graphic by Annie Liu

Which one would you choose?

What if you woke up one day and your entire life turned out to be merely a dream or some kind of a simulation? In other words, while you are real, you are surrounded by friends and loved ones created by your imagination. As a brain floating through an empty universe, you spend eons dreaming and forgetting, dreaming and forgetting, forever and utterly alone. Or perhaps you are just numbers on some future child’s AP Computer Science project, to be wiped out when they go to bed. 

In a huge thought experiment done in AP Lang,  dozens of seniors spent days putting forward such arguments and generally having their heads spin as they pondered the implications.

Nick Bostrom, a Oxford professor, claims humanity would go extinct before creating our own simulations. However, who’s to say we haven’t started our own simulations already and they’re playing out unbeknownst to us? What else do people use Sims 4 for? When I run my Sims 4 game, does that mean I’m creating a whole new world where I do end up at an Ivy League school? 

If we learn somehow that we are in a simulation, then everything “alive” now is not truly alive. Are vegetarians just wasting their time trying to protect life that is not really life at all? Is it time to try those all-meat diets all over TikTok? 

If, as many say, we are living in a simulation now, this is not an encouragement for people to YOLO the heck out of their lives and do anything crazy — after all, you don’t know if you’ll be able to leave this simulation. 

I heavily doubt Morpheus is going to show up in your dreams and offer you two pills. No one is going to become Keanu Reeves and break out of this matrix world. 

If I got complete confirmation that our lives are a simulation, I’d probably enjoy my senioritis to the fullest. After all, senioritis is basically our own mini simulation: Grades don’t matter much, teachers aren’t as uptight and you start doing crazy things like joining track because it’s the last time you’d ever get to do a high school sport again.

That being said, if you do happen to wake up from a simulation one day, always remember to choose the blue pill.