The Lexicon
Time, reality, and cosmos
Simulation
Simulation reframes the ancient intuition that the world is a kind of dream in the language of information and computation. If reality is at bottom made of bits, then the cosmos may be understood as a vast process of calculation, and our experienced world as something rendered rather than simply given. The dream of maya returns wearing the robes of digital physics.
Wheeler's 'it from bit' and Zuse's calculating universe opened this door, and Nick Bostrom gave it sharp modern form. For the mind-power traditions the appeal is familiar: if the world is a kind of program, then consciousness may be closer to its source code than to its surface, and the line between observer and rendered reality grows thin. The simulation is the newest mirror in which the seeker glimpses an old truth, that appearance and substance are not the same.
In their words
It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source and explanation; that what we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe.
The entire universe can be seen as a closed system, to the extent the necessary consequences of this assumption are taken into account.
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation, or such simulations will never be created, or we are among the very first.