Is the entire universe just a simulation ?

What it would mean

When pressed, most of the researchers gave their predictions on how likely the world-as-simulation scenario was. Davoudi wouldn't guess, Tegmark said it was 17 percent likely, Gates said there was just a 1 percent chance, Randall said effectively zero and Chalmers said 42 percent. (These estimates reflected a slightly higher likelihood than the guesses they gave just before the debate.)

Tyson likened understanding the universe to trying to figure out the rules of a chess game by just watching the pieces, as originally described by famed physicist Richard Feynman. "Pretty easily, you can say, 'Well, this piece moves this way; this one moves diagonal. You get that," Tyson said. "But later on, that little piece that jumped two reaches the other end of the board and becomes a whole other piece! That's kind of freaky. It's rare, but it happens, and it's an important rule of the game that, most of the time, you don't see. So I'm wondering, how much of a chess game without the instruction manual is the very universe in which we live?"

The question of the universe as a simulation might be more fundamentally about the extent humans can understand their universe from the inside out — that goal is much more essential than getting to the bottom of the simulation question, the researchers agreed.

"We don't know the answer, and we just keep doing science until it fails," Randall said.