Are We Living in a Simulation?

Most of us joke about living in a simulation when something weird happens, déjà vu, bad coding in the Matrix, or Tesco self-checkouts mysteriously refusing to scan my Imodium until the assistant tries it. But the unsettling truth is this: physics might actually be hinting that reality only works if someone’s watching.

The Double-Slit Headache

Let’s start with the old favourite: the double-slit experiment. Fire particles through two slits, and you get an interference pattern, as though the particle travelled through both at once. But observe it, and suddenly the particle “chooses” a single slit, like it didn’t want to be caught misbehaving.

That’s odd enough. But then in 1962, physicist Eugene Wigner took things further, and he made it terrifying.

Wigner proposed a thought experiment: imagine a friend making a quantum measurement in a lab. From their perspective, the particle collapses into one reality. But for Wigner, outside the lab, his friend and the particle exist in a superposition of realities. Both are true at the same time.

Meaning? Reality depends on who’s looking, and two observers can experience different realities simultaneously. Consciousness isn’t a passenger in the universe. It’s the driver.

From Wigner’s paradox to John Wheeler’s “participatory universe” and modern QBism, physicists are admitting what philosophers (and stoned undergrads) have been saying for decades:

Your thoughts, beliefs, and choices don’t just describe reality. They create it.

Or, as Wigner himself put it: “It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics without reference to consciousness.”

Living in a Cosmic Game Engine

If that’s true, then congratulations: you are not just an NPC. You are, in some sense, the level designer. Reality is running on your brain’s GPU.

Of course, this comes with benefits:

• Don’t like Mondays? Let’s all collapse a new timeline where they don’t exist.

• Gym memberships? Optional. Imagine the six-pack, then miracle it into existence.

• Climate change? Still a nightmare, but maybe enough positive observers can alt-tab us onto a greener patch.

Dry humour aside, the serious implication is that the line between “simulation” and “reality” blurs. If observation is what generates existence, then we’re already in something like a simulation, only it’s not running on a server in Silicon Valley, it’s running on consciousness itself.

So the next time you mutter, “This isn’t real,” maybe you’re right. Maybe it isn’t, until you decide it is. The old adage that you can manifest your own destiny might terrifyingly, and excitingly, be true.

Which raises the biggest question of all: if reality is waiting for you to render it, who, or what, is rendering you?