In probably the most talked-about movie from the general 12 months of the 20 th century, “The Matrix,” a pc hacker named Neo unearths that the sector he lives and works in isn’t actual. It’s a digital fact, created by means of synthetic intelligence.
On the time, the theory appeared like science fiction. Within the years since, alternatively, that idea has grow to be an increasingly more credible idea: “the simulation hypothesis.” This idea posits that, like Neo, residing issues are characters within a computer-generated simulation – or, as I describe in my 2025 guide, a hugely multiplayer online game. On this speculation, the bodily global round us is in reality a part of a digital fact.
Simulation idea raises the type of questions as soon as reserved for mystics and non secular students: Why are we right here? Is there extra to fact than we will be able to see? Is there a writer? Are we greater than our bodily our bodies?
The science and generation could also be trendy, however in many ways, this speculation echoes concepts that religion traditions have explored for hundreds of years.
Dwelling in a sport?
Simulation idea changed into well-liked from the paintings of thinker Nick Bostrom, specifically a paper he printed in 2003. The elemental argument is going like this: If generation continues to fortify, people will be capable of construct digital worlds indistinguishable from bodily fact, and AI characters indistinguishable from organic beings. This implies it’s conceivable {that a} extra complex civilization has already reached that time – and that we’re within considered one of their simulations.
Thinker Nick Bostrom, pictured in 2015, first proposed the simulation speculation in 2003.
Tom Pilston for The Washington Put up by way of Getty Photographs
Physicists, mathematicians, technologists and pc scientists have jumped into the sport. Evaluations span a variety of possibilities. Columbia College astronomer David Kipping attempted to guage the percentages we are living in a simulation and got here up with about 50/50. Some thinkers doubt that the query is even answerable, whilst others suppose the speculation is unattainable – like a 2025 paper arguing that no purely algorithmic device can provide an explanation for the universe.
The simulation speculation does now not must imply that folks within the simulation are best soulless, computed AI within anyone else’s advent. In “The Matrix,” as an example, even if Neo and different people are characters throughout the simulation, in addition they existed out of doors of the digital global.
Upper intelligence
Simulation idea implies there’s a better intelligence than our personal that exists past the bodily global and can have created our universe – echoing foundational ideals in lots of non secular traditions. Transhumanist thinker David Pearce, in truth, known as Bostrom’s argument “the first interesting argument for the existence of a Creator in 2000 years.”
The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as an example, all worship a unmarried writer. The biblical E-book of Genesis describes God growing the sector in six days, and there’s a identical narrative within the Quran. In keeping with those scriptures, God merely spoke, and it took place.
In a similar fashion, the simulation speculation argues that the sector used to be created via instructions – this is, via code. Lately, customers of AI factor verbal activates to routinely create life like footage and movies which are just about indistinguishable from actual other folks and landscapes.
Actually, customers may also advised AI techniques to create characters that insist they aren’t digital, as some have executed in fresh months – a phenomenon known as “prompt theory.”
In August 2025, Google launched Genie 3, which we could customers create realistic-looking worlds that they are able to navigate via, like in a online game. Previously, those digital worlds had to be created by means of hand by means of groups of designers, restricting how giant or complicated they may well be. Lately, as AI advances, the concept huge digital worlds may well be created to look as huge as our personal is not regarded as this type of myth.
Frame and soul
A moment method trendy simulation idea echoes conventional religions is within the thought of the connection between the soul and the frame.
One model of the speculation – what I name the RPG, or “role-playing game,” model – suggests the simulation is sort of a multiplayer online game. Every persona throughout the sport represents the exterior participant who controls them, that means that, in some sense, the characters show off unfastened will.
The time period for this type of persona, an “avatar,” is rooted in Sanskrit, the language of many Hindu, Buddhist and Jain texts. In Hinduism, an “avatar” refers back to the incarnation of a divine being within the type of a human frame.
The ten primary avatars of the Hindu deity Vishnu.
Nomu420/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
The theory of incarnation, or a soul getting into a frame, is among the maximum mysterious sides of many non secular traditions. Describing the advance of an unborn kid, the Hadith – the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad – describe a second when “the soul is breathed into him.” The Bible, too, makes use of the metaphor of breath to explain incarnation: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”
Every other not unusual metaphor is that the soul dons the frame, simply because the frame places on clothes. Rumi, whose poetry regularly explores mystic Sufi topics, when put next the frame to a garment which may be taken off or modified.
A identical metaphor used to be used within the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture: “Just as you throw out used clothes and put on other clothes, new ones, the Self discards its used bodies and puts on others that are new.”
If we consider the soul because the participant of a digital fact sport, and the frame as simply their persona within who has forgotten in regards to the out of doors global, then the parallels between faith and simulation idea are transparent. The sport would possibly finish, or the nature would possibly die, however the participant continues to exist out of doors the sport. Some religions train that every soul may also be reincarnated, having many lives – as despite the fact that the participant is going in and performs the sport time and again, taking part in many various characters.
Immersed in a dream
A primary- or second-century C.E. depiction of the Buddha from Gandhara, in present-day Afghanistan.
Tokyo Nationwide Museum/International Imaging by way of Wikimedia Commons
There could also be an much more elementary method simulation idea echoes some non secular teachings: the concept the bodily global isn’t actual, or isn’t all there may be to fact.
That is transparent within the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, which describe the sector being a results of “maya,” or an phantasm. Frequently, that is expressed in the course of the metaphor of the sector being like a dream that one can awaken from. Certainly, a well-liked definition of the time period “Buddha” is anyone who has “awakened.”
The “Samadhiraja Sutra,” or “King of Samadhi Sutra,” as an example, teaches:
Know all issues to be like this:A mirage, a cloud fortress,A dream, an apparition,With out essence, however with qualities that may be observed.
Paramahansa Yogananda, a Hindu monk who died in 1952, wrote “Autobiography of a Yogi,” which presented meditation and yoga to many within the West. Attempting to give an explanation for the theory of “maya,” which is regularly translated as “illusion,” he when put next other folks’s sense of bodily fact to actors taking part in in a movement image – rather new generation within the Twenties, when he got here from India to make his house in the US.
As I wrote in my 2023 guide about Yogananda, have been the well-known swami alive these days, possibly he would replace the metaphor to make use of these days’s generation: video video games.
In a essential scene in “The Matrix,” Neo’s mentor, Morpheus – named after the Greek god of desires – tells him that he has been residing in a dream global. The simulation speculation, too, proposes that folks could also be residing in a dream global, albeit one this is digital, created and maintained by means of AI.
Possibly the one response is to echo Neo and say: Whoa.
