Two really smart guys who've been thinking about this problem for years post about it, are we living in a simulation?
Far as I can tell what they are saying is that if a simulated apple has all the characteristics of an apple, it's not a simulation but a real apple. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck so they believe we are living in reality.
really long article at link
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/we-...urce=mbtwitter
A Mind Needs The World
Finally, there is one more argument against the notion that we live inside a massive simulation of everything. Suppose that, against all odds, we were living inside a simulation made of something different from the now (in)famous “Musk base reality.” If this were the case, the simulated world would be the only world we could access. Such a world would have the properties of the world everyone calls the physical world. Such a simulated world would therefore be identical with what everyone calls the physical world. The base reality would be utterly beyond our grasp and thus it would be, with an unavoidable conceptual twist, immaterial to us. It is a bit like that old joke: after centuries it has been found that William Shakespeare’s plays have not been really written by William Shakespeare but by another man called William Shakespeare.
Either way, we live in a physical world, where physical is a catchphrase to refer to the world we live in. Once more, embracing an all-encompassing massive world simulation defeats its very nature. If the simulated apple replicates all properties of the apple, the simulated apple is the apple.
To recap, Elon Musk’s argument—that a) once we had Pong, now we have Doom, therefore b) in the future there is a very good chance that we will live inside simulated worlds (and this might be already the case)—is unconvincing because nothing links b) with a). They are different things, both empirically and conceptually. The world we live in is made of real stuff. Simulations are things made of the same stuff. Musk’s argument does not show that we are getting any closer to producing an alternative reality. Rather it shows that we are getting better and better at shaping the physical world.
In fact, games are becoming like little aquariums that flesh out with increasing accuracy a piece of the physical world. They are a bit like ultrasmart dynamic HDdioramas. In fact, dioramas are three-dimensional full-size or miniature models, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum. Dioramas are physical simulations. A virtual world is like a diorama only that it uses electronic colored surfaces rather than wood or plastic scale models. A screen inside a VR headset is an amazing piece of reality that, like a superfast chameleon, reproduces all colors and shapes. It is not an immaterial figment of one’s imagination. It’s a piece of matter with colors, mass, and electricity interacting with your brain.
If a simulated waterfall is not wet, why should a simulated mind think or feel? A mind, unless one believes in disembodied souls, requires a brain, a body, and a world. A mind without a physical world is a myth. And a simulated world is a myth too. The fact is that all minds we know of, human minds and possibly animal minds, are embodied and situated: they have a body and they partake of the physical world. We have never met a disembodied mind. We always meet bodies in the world.
Riccardo Manzotti is a Professor in Psychology at the Institute of Human, Language and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan, holds a PhD in robotics, and is the author of 50 papers on the basis of consciousness. His website is consciousness.it
Andrew Smart is a cognitive scientist and the author of two books, Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing and Beyond Zero and One: Machines, Psychedelics and Consciousness (OR Books).