Are we living in a simulation?

The debate in its current form starts with a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom.He argues that one of three things must be true.Either civilisations die out before reaching such technology, or they reach it and decline to run such simulations, or we are inside one.

The argument does not pick among the three.That one of them holds is as far as the paper goes.It does not assert that we are in a simulation.

The main criticism concerns testing.It is hard to derive a checkable prediction from the hypothesis.Without predictions there is no way to find out that it is wrong.

Red-pill material attaches other things here.The archons of gnostic texts, Saturn and the moon as a broadcast station, and the film The Matrix line up together.The story continues into who is running the simulation.

A philosophical hypothesis and the story laid over it are different things.The first can be read as a paper; the second cannot.