A new study from astronomer David KIP ING published this summer, and the Journal Universe argues that the odds we live in a simulation are just about fifty fifty. As you can imagine this has caused a bit of a stir scientific American broke down kipling's arguments as well as some responses to it, and some of the previous where he was building off of an a lot of it frankly goes a bit over my head, but I wanted to share some highlights at first for the less matrix inclined listeners. What exactly do I mean by the idea of living in a simulation basically that all of us are mere virtual beings existing if you WANNA call it that unknowingly in a massive computer simulation? Over the years many scientists have tried to uncover ways. We could prove whether this is true or not. But some of the work has also revolved around calculating the odds of US living in a simulation or whether we are simply in base reality that is to say that we actually exist and this isn't all simulated. Is. Worth noting there's a lot of debate over what the simulation actually means and how one even defines consciousness for that matter. I kinda like this interpretation from Neil degrasse Tyson that he shared on a recent episode of Star Talk Quoting Scientific American, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time much video game optimized. To, render only the parts of the scene visible to a player maybe that's why we can't travel faster than the speed of light because if we could, we'd be able to get to another galaxy said Chuck Nice the show's Co host before prompting Tyson to gleefully interrupt before they can program it. The astrophysicists said delighting at the thought. So the programmer put in that limit end quote. Someone Pretty. Wild to think about and apart from the Matrix movies bringing this concept to the mainstream most scientists refer back to a two thousand three paper by Nick. Bostrom in Oxford philosopher which quote the Magic, a technologically adept virtualization that possesses immense commuting power and needs a fraction of that power to simulate new realities with conscious beans in them. Given this scenario, his simulation argument showed that at least one proposition in the following trauma must be true. I humans almost always go. Before reaching the simulation savvy stage second, even if humans make it to that stage, they are unlikely to be interested in simulating their own in central, passed and third. The probability that we are living in a simulation is close to one and quotes. But more recently keeping whose paper I mentioned was published earlier. This summer collapsed those first two propositions into one because in both cases, there are no simulations and he used busy and reasoning to calculate the probability busy and reasoning quote allows one to calculate the odds of something happening called the posterior probability but I making assumptions about the thing being analyzed, assigning a prior probability and quotes. Using the reasoning with regards to the simulation kipling's calculation comes out to about fifty fifty. It leans slightly in favor of based reality in part because he says that even in a world where we can simulate reality as more and more of them are spawned the computing resources of each generation dwindles and eventually simulations aren't able to be hosted bought. The odds could change if we do actually invent the technology to simulate conscious beans at which point, it becomes almost certain that we are living in a simulation. And could we ever figure out if we're not real whom on Awadhi and expert on computational? Mathematics. At the California Institute of Technology says only if there's a finite amount of computational power because if it's infinite, it could create whatever degree of reality necessary to continue tricking. US. Essentially, there's a lot of complex hypothesizing going on in several different fields and you can read a little bit more about. The link in the show notes. But at the end of the day keeping goes back to Adams Razor, which says that simplest explanation is usually correct and in this case, the simplest explanation is that we're at based reality there is no simulation just the boring hard truths of our real existence. So take that as your red pill.