Because it is my pleasure, not that there is any urgent need (or is there?)... I will now do justice to the argument that we are actually "living in a simulation".
First of all, definition of terms. Broadly, to "simulate" means to imitate the characteristics of that which is to be represented. It can take an object, or be intransitive. I can simulate being an authority figure, but only if I properly imitate the characteristics which would actually be authoritative, and by which someone would be properly thought of as an actual figure of authority.
It implies that there are levels of ontology in any phenomenon such that some may be actively taken on by another phenomenon simply so as to lend to the realm of the subjectivity of the interpretation of appearances the possibility of mistaking the latter phenomenon for being actually a specimen of the former. It is a process by which we say that what is an inauthentic being can be presented as being a specimen of the sort of being which is the authentic being. Inauthentic, that is, with regard to appearances matching the substantive character which should have caused their presentation, as they are expected to do in the authentic being's case.
This entire idea is supported by the metaphysical context which declares that the appearances of phenomena are somewhat disjoint from two poles of being which make those appearances possible in the first place: pole 1 is the cause of the characteristics perceived, that is, the character of the being presenting the appearance; pole 2 is the perceiver of the characteristics, the being which attempts to correlate the characteristics perceived with the specific properties of a being which produces them, and not only that but a specific type of being which produces those characteristics, by those properties the being inherently has, which uniquely says something about that sort of being, and hence about those characteristics in that context.
But just because a characteristic is special in that way in that context does not mean that just any presentation of those characteristics correlates with those properties in any being, let alone assuming it should be the exact same unique sort of being which we would refer to as being the principle type from which our authentic specimens are to be drawn. We call the reference group the authentic group, the "true" type, and we call groups that merely share some features of similarity to be relatives to that type. But any sort of entity which presents a cluster of features which lend themselves to being mistaken for the true type, but which happens not to be even a close relative, we tend to think of as inauthentic varieties of beings, though they may be distantly related. Compare the true scorpion to the pseudo-scorpion.
Now no one would accuse nature, let alone the pseudo-scorpions of the world, of attempting to put on a fraud that they were the real thing, though they look quite a bit like the real thing. Indeed they would be in the same club if only they had a tail that stung! Indeed, pseudo-scorpions are more like spiders that weave cocoons out of their mouth parts rather than their rear-parts, but also possessed of pincers just like a scorpions. Nevertheless, they are more closely related to scorpions than spiders, though all three of these types of insects are in the same group called "arachnids".
But to say that something simulates something else is to suggest a degree of intention. It is more than just mimicry that is going on, but rather there is the witting attempt to make appearances falsely suggest that what is not a certain type of thing literally is that certain type of thing. If it is merely a means to the end of deception, that would be one basic level of simulation that is simply the presentation of an appearance so as to elicit conditions that better enable opportunities which should only be present when both parties are actually what they appear to be.
So for example, a politician or a car salesman who is actually an honest, charming person will attempt to persuade to accept a good deal. But a less scrupulous person in that position will simply use his charisma and cunning to lend the appearance that he is doing what the honest variety of person in those roles would be doing. Customers pretend to be clever by kicking tires. Clever customers learn a lot about what they intend to select, whether a car or an elected official, whether with money or with votes, and can much more easily spot a lemon, as well as a con artist selling them one.
We might say that the fraud simulates being the upstanding variety of person who deserves our trust, enabling him to get into a position to receive from us an unwarranted exposure to something of our own which he desires. Again, this is a simple and basic level of simulation, which in nature occurs rather frequently by mere fact of degrees of similarity trailing of, sometimes gradually and sometimes with punctuation, into a distinction which might be missed and which lends to a false identification of one type of entity with another. Many ecosystems of predator-prey relationships are stabilized around a series of such disparities between what is in substance one thing and yet which in the facts of perception appears to be another. Some worms look like mere twigs to avoid being eaten by birds, and some add to this an advantage over flies who get too near to them, so that accidentally simulating the appearance of a twig protects it from predators while it develops on a diet of leaves, and for some this facilitates its own access to prey such as flies, doing double duty in both deceiving predator and prey.
But there may be constructive uses of mimicry which do not have as their goal the taking advantage of a targeted prey, nor of escaping the notice of a searching predator. When attempting to understand something as it really is we are sometimes attempting to understand aspects of some of its properties, not necessarily all of them. Also we are sometimes attempting to understand some aspects of its relations to other entities and some of their properties, not necessarily all at once. Allowing room for error based upon taking these properties out of their context, we may put these entities in environments which are sufficient to engage some of the properties of the entities, preferably only those we wish to study especially, and this is clearly not the exact same thing, nor even really the same kind of thing as studying those properties in their natural environment. But we have found an isomophism between the normal environment and the one which we've set up, one which is sufficiently similar so as to elicit action concerning those properties we wish to study "just as if" they were in their natural circumstances.
That is part of the method of science which studies natural phenomena, and this much is known by the average 7th grader. Likewise, all the tricks they play on one another, all the mockery, all the fantastically imaginative story-telling and lying they do, shows they know well the underlying mechanics of fraudulent presentations which are at least sufficient to garner them (mostly) harmless amusements at one another's expense.
Given these parameters for understanding ideas such as "similarity" and "simulation" we can already state that humanity, "in the state of nature", as well as in his contrived social circumstances, lives in a simulation, more or less, and not necessarily on all fronts. Much of his mentality, activity, and methodologies of progress, whether constructive and benign or destructive and malign, whether productive or fraudulent, rely on a capacity to simulate and to understand simulation, and to create simulations both as a part of their own being and also as extended constructions outside of their own being and "out there, in the world".
Then we have the world of technological development in which computing technology, combined with artificial forms of stimulating the sense organs of human bodies could, conceivably, be so advanced and so realistic that the brain might be utterly fooled into believing in a simulation of its original sensory environment (original both evolutionarily and bioecologically). And the issue was raised by some intrepid minds concerning whether or not this was probably already the case for at least one of us, if not perhaps even all of us here in what is reported to be, to my senses at least, "planet earth".
Whether one person or a whole warehouse of tightly packed brains were simply plugged into a simulation, perhaps in a warehouse stored on an interplanetary vehicle hurtling through hyperspace, seems an interesting possibility. And to consider that we don't know what size the universe actually is outside of our own rather suspiciously controlled intelligentsia's claims based upon their rather guarded methods of observation and interpretation which are more akin to a presumptuous religion than to an objective assessment, it might seem a bit of a stretch to assume the premise that the universe is already populated with intelligent life which for the most part is sufficiently advanced enough to have produced a simulation capable of wholesale deception of real organic brains. Even further of a stretch is to assume that the habits of such civilizations are to entrap as many brains into such simulations as they can so that the ratio of brains-in-simulations to those outside should be such that most of the time, if you are a brain, you are in a simulation, in this universe.
That would be a very weak inductive argument...
But there are those thinkers who are so intrepidly overambitious that they presume that consciousness itself can be simulated.
They've now gone completely outside the realm of inductive argument and have dived into the murky deeps of arbitrary metaphysical speculation. So much for their clever presumption to have proven that it is probably the case that our world is a simulation, because they have not even demonstrated that consciousness is probably something that can be produced by material concatenations of energy which forms into patterns of data which can be so constituted as to believe that they are not such a thing, and made to believe that they are the sort of patterns of data which are produced by material concatenations of energy formed by brains instead of what were made by brains out of other matter.
And unless we are willing to swallow wholesale all their assumptions about the nature of the relationship between subjective consciousness and objective matter in such a way as to allow them their pet fantasy, it must be called for what it is and left for them to enjoy, but a cogent argument for the probability that we are living in a matrix it is not, and this would be the case even if I myself were already a brain in a vat merely connected to a matrix by some psychotronic gadgetry.
But if you look at the human skull as an organic vat attached to a vat support system called its body, and if you look at the world of fraudulent systems of control which pretend not only identities they do not have, but rights they do not possess and authority which they cannot authenticate, and if then you add to this the fact that psychotronic weapons are deployed as a covert infrastructure of social control throughout "developed" countries, then in fact I already am, in a "free range" sense, exactly a "brain in a vat". My proof against the argument that we are probably in a simulation still stands, and my condemnation of this world as a vat of corruption does also.
And in this sense, I've done Justice against two birds with one stone. What has been discovered is that we really are living in a simulation, one at the very least which results in only a simulation of a discussion of a simulation of a simulation. That is because the nature of simulation is erroneously hinted at by the topic discussed "as" simulation, and therefore also so that a discussion of the real topic was only simulated, for it is as different as a discussion of predator/parasite and prey/"host", as different as a discussion of what is from what is only superficially like it, but diametrically antagonistic to it... As different as a world whose main myth is that it is even a world, versus a mythical world which takes such an utter falsification to be a moral and cognitive impossibility.
Yet this difference exists, and to such a degree, that we see by metaphysical deduction and not merely by any spurious pseudo-induction, that we do indeed live in a simulation of a metphysical kind and of an ontological order. And such which has the character, ironically, of a plot in a horror movie, and in which world people watch such movies, paying to be taught to disbelieve in their plot though they themselves embody and live in that in real life, even in cases when the movie literally has characters in the plot who are doing exactly this.
This is the real "Ourobouros" which CHOOSES and CHEWS those whom it makes falsely believe that they CHOOSE and CHEW. It may bite and perhapse even swallow itself and regurgitate itself many times and for a long time, but it is the Good News that only those who oppose it, whom it attempts to digest but cannot, that only they will survive its end when it shall breathe no more, when all fraudulent similitudes are annihilated. That is RAGNAROK, that is ARMAGEDDON, that is "The End of the World", that is "The End of Time", that is "Judgement Day", that is where all this MUST GO and I have DEDUCED IT FROM THE EVIDENCE WITH METAPHYSICAL CERTAINTY.
So much for the world's mythic simulations to the contrary.
