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Comment by Aqueous | Hacker News Reader

We'll never know. If the universe is a simulation then it's similar to a virtual machine running on top of a hypervisor. The virtual machine doesn't know that it's not a real machine unless its hypervisor tells it so. From inside the virtual machine, there is no meaningful distinction to be made between being a real machine and being a virtual one.

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We could know. If we ever broke out, that'd be a definitive proof that there is a layer above our reality.

To continue your VM and hypervisor analogy, there is a class of hacks in which virtualized software breaks out of the VM and is able to observe and/or mannipulate host. For example, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/25/vmware_critical_vuln...

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Moreover, even without breaking out, it is -- in some cases, at least -- possible to detect presence of hypervisor by carefully timing computations. Albeit those methods seem to depend on access to a timing source that is reliable (i.e., outside of hypervisor's control). For example, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jfrankli/book_chapters/virtual_machin...

Haha - but I doubt that our post-human overlords have enabled the cosmic equivalent of 'Shared Folders' in our simulation. In any case this is an example of the host giving its VM enough information to determine that it is, in fact, a virtual machine.

Your edit does maybe give us some room, independent timing source or otherwise.

See my other comment about Kant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3932514

The hypervisor analogy is silly IMO, because it assumes 'hardware assisted virtualization', i.e. that the simulated matter/instructions are implemented simply by using real matter/instructions in their normal way, but in a controlled environment.

For the general case of virtualization, breaking out of the simulation would be as impossible for us as it would be for a video game character.

If the computer running the simulation is on a network, and robots/spaceships etc exist, we could break out onto other devices and recreate ourselves as programmed robots.

You've obviously never had to plug a non-mainstream USB device into a virtual machine and get USB passthru to work properly!

If we could find a cosmic equivalent to plug into the universe we might just be able to determine whether we're in a real or virtual one after all.

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