How real are you? What if everything you are, everything you know, all the people in your life as well as all the events were not physically there but just a very elaborate simulation? Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper Are you living in a computer simulation?, where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings, whose real nature we may never be able to know. Now a new theory comes along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings like that either and everything in "reality" is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?
The physical universe is a "strange loop" says the new paper titled "The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" from the team at the Quantum Gravity Research, a Los Angeles-based theoretical physics institute, founded by the scientist and entrepreneur Klee Irwin. They take Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, which maintains that all of reality is an extremely detailed computer program, and ask - rather than relying on advanced lifeforms to create the amazing technology necessary to compose everything within our world, isn't it more efficient to propose that the universe itself is a "mental self-simulation"? They tie this idea to quantum mechanics, seeing the universe as one of many possible quantum gravity models.