TheorySimulation hypothesis (UAP-applied) SH

Nick Bostrom’s “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” (Philosophical Quarterly, 2003) gave the simulation argument its analytic form: the argument that at least one of three propositions is true, and that the one most consistent with technological projection is that we are in a simulation. The UAP application is downstream of Bostrom’s argument proper; it asks what kind of empirical residue a simulation might leave that an inside observer could detect.

Vallée has on several occasions remarked that the IDH and the simulation hypothesis are not exclusive — that the “control system” he posited in the 1970s could be implemented as a simulation layer. Rizwan Virk (The Simulation Hypothesis, 2019) and Donald Hoffman (the cognitive scientist, The Case Against Reality, 2019) have advanced consciousness-based versions in which the rendered world is interface rather than substrate, and UAP-class events are interface anomalies.

What the simulation hypothesis predicts: UAP behavior will violate conservation laws, inertia, or thermodynamics in patterns more consistent with rendering shortcuts than with novel physics. The phenomenon will be more visible to observers who attend to it and less visible to instruments that record without an observer (a “rendering on demand” prediction). Discrepancies will tend to resolve in the direction the observer expects rather than in a direction that would require expensive simulation. The phenomenon’s behavior will track, with lag, the imaginative content of the host culture — because the simulation has access to the host culture’s expectation distribution.

Where the simulation hypothesis differs from neighbors: from the ETH in not requiring a physical visiting civilization; from the IDH in providing a substrate (computation) for what the IDH leaves ontologically open; from the psychosocial hypothesis in granting the phenomenon external reality (the simulation is external to the observer) while conceding most of the PSH’s surface predictions; from the AI / non-biological-intelligence hypothesis in not requiring that the operators be biological at all. The hypothesis is widely treated as untestable in its strong form, which its proponents address by proposing weak versions with specific predicted physical signatures (lattice artifacts in the cosmic-ray spectrum, etc.).