An Unsimulated Simulation

In a post on LessWrong, contributor sil walks through a thought experiment that pushes the simulation hypothesis to its logical extreme. The argument starts with an alien running a universe simulation, then strips away the hardware, the programmer, and even the act of running the program, until every possible simulated observer-moment simply exists in a void. It ends by invoking Platonism and the anthropic principle to suggest that your own experience is enough to localize you among infinite possible realities. It's a dense philosophical exercise about computation, existence, and what it means to be real.

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