In our universe everything consists of molecules and atoms just like in video games everything consists of pixels or polygons. Are we avatars or NPCs? How long till we start making video games with characters that have conscience?

A simulation inside a simulation inside another simulation for sure.

Then what is it simulating?

Something similar to their reality, like we make Sims and such.

This is your PSA to watch Pantheon. It's on Netflix. You're welcome.

Who is they? :p

Can a simulation be undirected. Are we part of a quantum computer running a (near) infinite multiverse of options to find stable intelligence. What could be the threshold and method for detection. Or are we not part of the goal, just a byproduct while searching for a stable configuration of physics parameters. Or are we nothing but the equivalent of a Lava lamp to some art project. Or did the original 'player' die without turning it off and it's still running. Player one is god ;)

Anyway would it be ethical to populate our own simulations with conscious AI agents. If we can ever create them and decide what consciousness actually means and how to detect it. Is using survival of the fittest in a simulation with conscious agents ethical? How many virtual beings have we killed in our lifetimes...

Seasoned gamers easily rack up hundreds of thousands to millions of virtual kills over a lifetime. A common CNN estimate suggests that by age 18, the average person has eliminated over 100,000 digital beings.

Yeah AI is going to be our friend /s

They should shut it down.

It's an essentially untestable hypothesis. It's like a secular version of theism or deism, but instead of "We were created by a god" it's "We were created by computer programmers existing outside our own reality." If we started noticing obvious glitches like in The Matrix, people who postulate the "simulation theory" might be on to something, but our universe runs on a set of observable, testable, quantifiable physical laws that don't just randomly break down. If some sentient being that wasn't an omniscient, omnipotent, infallible super-being created our reality via a simulation, then that being would have to have made some sort of programming errors in the process because anything short of an omniscient, omnipotent, infallible super-being is going to have flaws of their own and eventually screw something up, or the program they made or the machine they built to run it is going to have some sort of malfunction at some point. So, where are those errors?

Even if our universe were an incredibly sophisticated computer program, there would be something out there that would somehow blatantly violate well-established physical laws just given how much stuff happens at all scales all the time. And I'm not talking about something where the "violation" is just a measurement error current theory doesn't account for (there's always gaps in our knowledge), like how Newton's laws didn't fully explain apsidal precession or the deflection of light by massive bodies, something finally accounted for by Einstein's theories. No, I'm talking something blatant, like a person just literally clipping through the floor like in The Backrooms, or a closed system's entropy doing anything other than increase (like your cell phone battery going from 5% to 100% all by itself without being charged in some fashion by opening the system up to external energy that can flow into it), or any sort of macroscopic object just spontaneously teleporting or even ceasing to exist it its entirety, like its atoms just vanished. Stuff like that never happens, kinda like how obvious miracles never seem to happen (like a self-proclaimed "faith healer" spontaneously regenerating the severed limb of an amputee by invoking the power of God). Some things are just simply impossible.

The laws of physics are definitionally inviolable. They ain't like the laws of man. I can't just levitate off the ground and start flying like Superman simply because I don't feel like obeying the laws of gravity and inertia. If I want to fly, I need some kind of device that actually can produce the forces needed to counteract the downward pull of gravity, because my body can't generate those forces on its own. The best I can do is just jump a couple of feet in the air before landing on the ground a second later. And even an aircraft is subject to the laws of physics. Flying is hard. Falling is easy. Like an acquaintance of my roommate once said "Engines may fail. Wings may fall off. But gravity always works." There ain't no cheat codes in real life, like "idclip" in Doom. We are all subject to the laws of nature, we will obey them because we literally cannot break them, and they never alter themselves willy-nilly.

Now, we do see some odd things at the quantum level, but it's only odd to us because we observe things at a macroscopic scale. We see how things interact via the macroscopic forces. Like gravity, or electromagnetism and everything that derives from it, like light and chemistry. At small or large enough scales, though, things just seem "weird" to us because they're outside our day-to-day experience and often seem counterintuitive to us (even some ordinary things at scales we are familiar with are sometimes counterintuitive, sometimes due to outright ignorance, like when people say "If global warming is real, why is it cold outside here in Fargo in the middle of January?" because they don't understand or refuse to understand the concept of a global average). But at the end of the day they're still explainable through science and known forces, and we even can apply those seemingly bizarre phenomena to things that are ordinary day-to-day things, showing how even in scales where reality operates in ways that might not make immediate sense to us, it still all runs on a set of observable, testable, quantifiable physical laws just like the ones that we experience at our human scale.

Thanks, I will check it out.

That just proves how well tested this simulation was, kind of like how well tested the 6th gen games were because after printing them there was no way of patching them. But seriously I am surprised by the poll results, I thought gamers of all should know what's up :P