Unless you, dear reader, are a web-scraping software bot quietly pulling this text into a data-hungry LLM, you’re probably a human. And though you’ve likely never seen me in person, you have good ...

In this week's It’s Debatable article, Rick Rosen and Charles Moster debate whether we're all living in a computer simulation like the Matrix. Rosen retired as a professor from the Texas Tech ...

A new essay explores which conditions must be met for consciousness to exist. At least one of them can't be found in a computer. Would it be desirable for artificial intelligence to develop ...

The concept that we are all computer-generated characters occupying a world as real as the ones gamers explore on their PlayStation consoles isn't exactly a new one. As far back as 1999, Morpheus was ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Despite how it may feel some days, we probably aren’t stuck in a ...

The idea that we might be living inside a vast computer simulation, much like in The Matrix, has fascinated philosophers and scientists for years. But a new study from researchers at the University of ...

The notion that we live as characters in someone else’s video game is irresistible to many, even outside of science fiction bookshelves. Googling the term “simulation hypothesis” returns numerous ...

What if gravity were informed by the way matter was arranged in the universe — and a sign that we were living in a reality composed by a giant computer? In a new paper published in the journal AIP ...

Elon Musk and others find it plausible that our experiences result from events in a computer simulation, just like the characters in the Matrix movies. An alternative view, supported by both common ...

I was invited by the American Humanist Association to present the arguments of my paper “Natural Evil and the Simulation Hypothesis” at the national conference this past weekend. It was fun: I met a ...

We have long taken it for granted that gravity is one of the basic forces of nature–one of the invisible threads that keeps the universe stitched together. But suppose that this is not true. Suppose ...