Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.
Weekly Update
It’s been a busy week of activities and work. On Wednesday evening, Oana and I were supposed to attend a talk about the Cost of Living Crisis at the University of Sheffield. However, there was heavy traffic, and our Uber was still fifteen minutes away from the venue five minutes after the start time. So, we changed the destination to an Indian restaurant and had a great meal instead.
On Thursday we took part in the Glow Ride, which happens up and down the country on the same night to promote better cycling infrastructure and improved safety, especially for women cyclists. It was a fun night, and by the end of Thursday Oana and I had cycled over 50km.
Friday evening we attended a tribute piano concert to Ludovico Einaudi, and went for a meal. It was another great night, although I found the venue a little uncomfortable.
We were supposed to have a day out in Sheffield for Out of this World on Sunday, but the weather had other plans.
The AFI Podcast
Check out the AFI section of this site for links to the pod on the various platforms.
As a new podcast, getting noticed is difficult, so please help us out by sharing the links and leaving a rating and review.
See below for a link to the latest episode where I break down the pros and cons of buying a house versus renting.
What I’m Doing
Listening: The Gate of the Feral Gods: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 4 by Matt Dinniman.
Watching: The Diplomat (Netflix).
Reading: Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse Book 3) by James S. A. Corey.
I am loving the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It’s rocketed up to a high spot on my favourite list of books. On the face of it, it’s a bit of a daft concept, but there are deeper themes and ideas running through it, and some truly fantastic character work. I’m thoroughly enjoying it and can’t wait for each time I pick up my headphones to listen.
Financial Update
Assets
Premium Bonds: £500.00.
Stocks and Shares ISA: £140,651.61.
Fuck It Fund: £0.00.
Pensions: £126,437.01.
Residential Property Value: £241,838.00.
Total Assets: £509,426.62.
Debts
Residential Mortgage: £173,115.21.
Total Debts: £173,115.21.
Total Wealth
Total Wealth: £336,311.41.
The quarterly update to the lender’s index valuations has taken place and our apartment value has dropped a few thousand. It’s not something that actually matters at this point, as it only has an impact if we need to do something with the mortgage like additional borrowing.
My investments are plodding along nicely without any sharp movement in either direction. Looking at my business pipeline, it looks as though early in the new year I should be able to start seriously investing again. I just need the conveyor belt to build up to full steam.
Should anyone wish to discuss a mortgage application or issue, feel free to drop me an email at david.scothern@elmtreemortgages.co.uk
I also have to warn you that as a last resort, your home may be repossessed if you fail to make your mortgage payments on time and in full.
Top Ten Funniest/Most Crazy Conspiracy Theories
8. The Mandela Effect (Part 357)
7. Titanic Was Swapped With Olympic (Part 358)
6. The Phantom Time Hypothesis: What If Someone Just Made Up 300 Years? (Part 359)
5. The Moon Landing Was Faked (Part 360)
4. Project Blue Beam: When Faking the Moon Landing Just Isn’t Ambitious Enough (Part 361)
3. Climate Change Isn’t Real: The weather has entered the chat… (Part 362)
2. 9/11 Was an Inside Job (Part 363 & 364)
1. Simulation Theory: What If None of This Is Real?
And so we finally reach number one on the list of the most insane conspiracy theories I could think of.
We’ve had a flat Earth, a hollow Earth, phantom centuries, fake Moon landings, holographic gods, swapped ocean liners, and governments secretly blowing up skyscrapers. But for the top spot, I wanted something that makes all of those seem rather pedestrian.
What if none of this physically exists?
What if you aren’t actually sitting there reading this blog? What if I’m not really sitting at a computer writing it? What if Sheffield Wednesday, my mortgage, my bike, my cat and the balance of my investment portfolio are nothing more than information being processed by some unimaginably sophisticated computer?
Welcome to simulation theory.
And what makes this one particularly fascinating is that, unlike Flat Earth, I can’t spend the next 2,000 words explaining why it’s demonstrably bollocks.
Because it might actually be true.
Fuuuuuck…
Are we living in The Matrix?
The basic idea is beautifully simple.
Our perceived universe might be a simulation.
Everything we experience as physical reality, from the chair underneath you to the stars billions of light-years away, could ultimately be information being processed within some larger underlying reality.
You and I might therefore not exist in the way we intuitively think we do.
Our bodies could be simulated. Our planet could be simulated. The entire observable universe could be simulated.
The obvious comparison is The Matrix, although simulation theory doesn’t necessarily require us to be biological humans plugged into machines somewhere. We could exist entirely within the simulation. There might never have been a “real” David outside it.
Which raises the slightly uncomfortable possibility that somewhere, some alien teenager has left me running while they’ve gone downstairs for their dinner.
At least that would explain some of the decisions I’ve made, and it may also explain oddities like Trump and Boris Johnson, but that could just be malware.
The simulation argument
One of the most famous modern versions comes from philosopher Nick Bostrom, who published a paper in 2003 called Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?
Importantly, Bostrom didn’t simply argue:
“We’re definitely living in a simulation.”
His argument is more subtle.
Very roughly, he suggested that at least one of three propositions must be true.
First, almost all civilisations at our level of technological development become extinct before becoming capable of creating vast numbers of highly realistic simulations containing conscious beings.
Second, civilisations that do reach that technological level aren’t particularly interested in running large numbers of simulations of their ancestors.
Or third, we are almost certainly living in a simulation.
The logic behind the third possibility is where things get interesting.
Imagine humanity survives for another 10,000 years and develops computers powerful enough to simulate entire worlds containing billions of conscious people.
Suppose we create thousands, millions or billions of these simulated civilisations.
You would then have vastly more simulated people than original biological people.
If every simulated person experiences their world as completely real, and you were randomly selected from the total population of conscious observers, statistically you would be much more likely to be one of the simulated ones.
Imagine one original Earth containing eight billion people but one million simulated Earths, each containing another eight billion apparently conscious inhabitants.
Suddenly the odds of being on the original Earth aren’t looking fantastic.
It’s the philosophical equivalent of discovering there are a million identical Wetherspoons and being asked to prove you’re sitting in the original.
But could we actually simulate a universe?
Here’s the first enormous objection. We’re assuming such simulations are possible, but we don’t know that for certain. We can run sophisticated games like Civilization, The Sims, and MMORPGs, but this is still a far cry from simulating a whole universe.
Yes, computer games have become astonishingly sophisticated within a few decades, but there’s quite a gap between Pong and creating several billion genuinely conscious human beings who have absolutely no idea they’re software.
Increasing computing power doesn’t automatically mean we’ll eventually be capable of simulating consciousness, planets or entire universes.
There may be fundamental physical limits.
There is also an extraordinary amount of information in our universe. Simulating every particle and interaction at the most fundamental level might require computational resources comparable to, or even greater than, the universe being simulated.
Which would be a bit inconvenient.
But there’s another possibility.
Maybe you don’t need to simulate everything.
Does the universe only render what we’re looking at?
This is one of my favourite ideas because it makes reality sound suspiciously like a computer game desperately trying to maintain its frame rate.
Games don’t necessarily calculate every detail of their worlds continuously. They concentrate computational resources on whatever the player can interact with or observe.
The mountain visible in the distance doesn’t necessarily contain a fully simulated ecosystem with individual worms crawling through its soil.
It’s scenery until you get there. It’s like in some of the older GTA games where you cross a boundary, like a bridge, and the game pauses briefly to update the next neighbourhood.
Could a simulated universe work similarly?
Perhaps reality only needs to be calculated in sufficient detail when something interacts with it. Philosophers have touched on this before; if a tree falls in the woods, but no one is there, does it make a sound?
Quantum mechanics inevitably gets dragged into this conversation because particles at microscopic scales don’t behave anything like objects in our everyday experience. Quantum systems can exist in combinations of possible states, while measurement produces definite observable outcomes.
Some people interpret this as suspiciously similar to reality being “rendered” when observed.
It’s a wonderful idea. Unfortunately, it’s also an enormous leap.
Quantum mechanics is genuinely weird, but weird physics isn’t evidence of computer code. Physicists have mathematical frameworks that successfully predict quantum behaviour without needing an alien graphics card somewhere outside the universe.
Saying “quantum mechanics is strange, therefore we’re inside a computer” is basically the scientific equivalent of hearing something downstairs at night and immediately concluding it’s a Victorian ghost.
Interesting possibility but several steps missing such as actual evidence.
What about the speed of light?
Another popular argument is that the universe appears to have built-in limitations.
Nothing carrying information can simply accelerate beyond the speed of light in vacuum. There are smallest meaningful scales appearing in our physical theories. Energy comes in quantised amounts. Nature operates according to remarkably consistent mathematical laws.
That can make the universe feel suspiciously computational.
Maybe the speed of light is essentially the processing-speed limit. Maybe quantum properties are the universe’s resolution. Maybe physical laws are simply the source code.
It’s a seductive comparison because modern computers have made concepts like processing limits, pixels and information familiar to us, but there’s a problem…
We’re describing the universe using technology we invented inside the universe.
People living during the Industrial Revolution might have imagined the universe as an enormous machine full of gears. Today we imagine it as a computer.
In 500 years, humans might use some technology we can’t currently conceive and wonder why their ancestors were obsessed with comparing reality to primitive silicon processors.
Perhaps the universe doesn’t resemble a computer.
Perhaps computers resemble the universe because we built them using the same physical laws.
The suspiciously mathematical universe
This is where simulation theory becomes genuinely interesting.
Reality is extraordinarily describable through mathematics.
Relatively compact equations can describe gravity, electromagnetism and the behaviour of matter with astonishing accuracy. Mathematics invented or discovered through abstract reasoning sometimes turns out to describe physical phenomena extraordinarily well.
Why should the universe be so mathematically orderly?
One possible answer is simply that mathematics is the language humans developed to describe patterns in nature.
Another is that mathematical structure is somehow fundamental to reality.
And then simulation enthusiasts arrive through the wall shouting:
“BECAUSE IT’S CODE!”
Possibly, but again, we’re moving from interesting observation to specific explanation without enough evidence between the two.
A universe governed by mathematical regularities is exactly what we would expect if it were simulated.
Unfortunately, it’s also exactly what we observe in a universe that might not be simulated.
Hmmm…
What about fine-tuning?
Then we have the apparent fine-tuning of the universe.
Certain physical constants appear to fall within ranges compatible with complex structures and life. Change some of them sufficiently and stars, chemistry or stable matter as we know them may become impossible.
Why?
One explanation is that there are many universes with different physical properties and, unsurprisingly, conscious observers find themselves in one capable of producing conscious observers, i.e. the anthropic principle.
Someone configured the settings.
Perhaps we’re living in Universe_Experiment_8472_FINAL_v3.
Again, though, fine-tuning doesn’t demonstrate simulation. It simply creates a question for which simulation is one possible answer.
And there’s a recurring theme developing here.
Simulation theory is extremely good at saying, “Well, that would make sense if we’re simulated”, but not so much at saying, “Here’s something that could only happen if we’re simulated.”
What about glitches in the Matrix?
This is where a fascinating philosophical argument inevitably crashes into TikTok.
People report déjà vu, coincidences, objects apparently disappearing and reappearing, strange memories and events that seem impossible.
These are sometimes described as “glitches in the Matrix”.
I’ve already covered the Mandela Effect in this series, where large groups of people confidently remember things that apparently never happened.
Could these be evidence that someone altered the simulation?
Technically, I suppose, but there’s a slightly more mundane candidate explanation.
Human memory is absolutely terrible.
Our brains forget things, reconstruct memories, overlook objects sitting directly in front of us and find patterns in coincidences.
If my keys aren’t where I remember leaving them, there are two possibilities.
One: I misplaced my keys.
Two: the computer system generating physical reality temporarily failed to correctly load the key asset into my local environment.
I’m going with option one until further evidence emerges.
What if some people are NPCs?
Now we arrive at the point where simulation theory manages to become even more disturbing.
If we’re living inside a simulation, does everyone actually need to be conscious?
Video games are filled with non-player characters, or NPCs. They look like inhabitants of the game world and behave according to whatever rules have been programmed for them, but there’s nobody actually in there. The hotdog vendor in GTA isn’t experiencing an existential crisis while you’re off fighting the police. At least I hope not.
So if our reality were simulated, it’s tempting to ask whether the same principle could apply here. Perhaps only some inhabitants need genuine consciousness, while everyone else merely behaves convincingly enough to maintain the simulation.
This idea occasionally gets mixed up with the philosophical concept of a philosophical zombie: a hypothetical being physically and behaviourally indistinguishable from a conscious human but with no subjective experience whatsoever. It could laugh, cry, complain about the weather and spend twenty minutes telling you about the parking situation at Meadowhall, yet there would supposedly be no inner experience behind any of it.
Which immediately creates an absolutely enormous problem.
How the hell would you know?
I know that I’m conscious because I’m directly experiencing my own thoughts. I assume you’re conscious because you’re another human being with a brain broadly like mine who behaves as though you have thoughts and feelings too. That’s an extremely reasonable assumption, but I can’t climb inside your consciousness and verify it directly.
This is essentially the old philosophical problem of other minds, except simulation theory gives it a deeply irritating software update.
If this were a simulation designed to conserve computational resources, perhaps it wouldn’t need eight billion fully conscious minds. Maybe some people could essentially be incredibly sophisticated background characters, becoming more detailed only when another conscious observer interacts with them.
It’s an entertaining thought experiment, but there’s absolutely no good evidence that this is actually happening. And calling real people “NPCs” because they behave predictably, hold opinions we disagree with or seem to follow the crowd proves precisely nothing about whether they’re conscious. Human beings are social animals. We imitate each other, develop routines, follow fashions and occasionally stand in a queue without apparently knowing what the fucking queue is for. None of that requires computer programming.
There is also something slightly dangerous about taking the idea too seriously. If you convince yourself that certain people aren’t really conscious, it becomes much easier to treat them as though their experiences don’t matter. Whatever the ultimate nature of reality, the sensible assumption is that other people possess inner lives every bit as real and complicated as our own.
Still, as a philosophical question, it’s wonderfully creepy.
Perhaps everyone is conscious.
Perhaps only some of us are.
Perhaps I’m the NPC and you’re the player.
Or perhaps you’re currently reading a blog post written by an artificial intelligence about whether human beings are artificial intelligence inside an artificial universe.
At which point reality has disappeared so comprehensively up its own arse that I think we should probably move on.
The biggest problem: how would we ever know?
This is what earns simulation theory the number-one spot for me.
Imagine the simulation is perfect. Every scientific experiment we perform occurs inside it. Every telescope we build is simulated. Every particle accelerator is simulated.
Every measurement we take uses simulated equipment measuring simulated particles according to simulated physical laws.
How could we detect the outside world? It might be impossible.
Imagine a character in The Sims attempting to prove that your computer exists.
Everything available to them is contained within their world. They can’t dismantle their universe and discover your CPU because the CPU isn’t physically located anywhere inside their universe. Well, the same could apply to us.
We could search for irregularities, computational limits or apparent shortcuts in physical laws, but even finding something unusual wouldn’t necessarily demonstrate simulation.
That makes simulation theory extraordinarily difficult to falsify, and that’s a serious problem scientifically.
If no possible observation can establish that a claim is false, how do we meaningfully test it?
Then who simulated the simulators?
Here comes another headache.
Suppose tomorrow we somehow prove beyond reasonable doubt that our universe is simulated.
Fantastic, but who created it?
Perhaps an advanced civilisation in the “real” universe – Fine.
Where did their universe come from? Maybe they’re simulated too.
And their creators? Also simulated.
Congratulations. We’ve solved the mystery of reality by replacing it with an infinite tower of increasingly confused IT departments.
Eventually you either reach some underlying reality that isn’t simulated, or you have an infinite regress of simulations inside simulations.
And if a base reality exists, we’re immediately back to the original question.
Why does that reality exist?
Simulation theory therefore doesn’t necessarily solve the fundamental mystery of existence.
It’s just turtles all the way down.
Consciousness might ruin the whole thing
There’s another enormous assumption buried inside Bostrom’s argument.
Can consciousness actually be simulated?
We don’t even fully understand what consciousness is.
We know brains and conscious experience are intimately connected, but we don’t know whether sufficiently accurate computational reproduction of a brain would genuinely create subjective experience.
Would simulated David actually experience happiness, fear, pain and the soul-destroying experience of watching Sheffield Wednesday concede in stoppage time?
Or would simulated David merely behave as though he did?
From outside, those might look identical.
From my perspective, there’s a fairly fucking significant difference.
If consciousness cannot arise purely from computation, then the idea of vast populations of simulated conscious observers becomes much harder to sustain.
Until we understand consciousness better, this remains a gigantic unknown sitting underneath the whole argument.
So are we simulated?
I haven’t got a clue, and neither does anyone else.
That’s precisely why I find this one so much more interesting than most conspiracy theories.
Flat Earth can be tested and falsified. The Moon landings produced physical evidence.
Historical conspiracy claims can be checked against documents, archaeology and eyewitness testimony.
Simulation theory attacks the reliability of the entire framework we use to establish what is real.
Any evidence we discover could itself be simulated.
Even proving that our universe behaves computationally wouldn’t necessarily settle the matter because information and mathematics might simply be fundamental properties of ordinary reality.
Equally, failing to find evidence of simulation proves very little if the simulation is sufficiently sophisticated.
It’s almost perfectly constructed to mess with your head.
Does it actually matter?
Here’s perhaps the most important question.
Suppose we’re simulated.
So what?
If my experiences feel real to me, does it matter whether the underlying substrate is biological matter, quantum fields or the 94-billionth save file on some extraterrestrial laptop?
Pain still hurts. Love still matters. People still die.
Actions still have consequences within the reality we experience.
My mortgage lender certainly isn’t going to accept:
“I have stopped making payments because I’ve concluded that property ownership is merely an emergent phenomenon within a computational substrate.”
They’ll still repossess my simulated flat, but there might be a note added to the system about my obvious cognitive impairment.
Financial independence would still matter too. Even if money consists of imaginary numbers stored inside an artificial universe, that’s barely different from the current arrangement.
Perhaps the strangest conclusion is that discovering we’re simulated wouldn’t necessarily make our lives meaningless.
We would still exist in some sense. We think, experience and interact.
The nature of the machinery underneath that experience might simply be different from what we assumed.
Why it’s my number one
Most of the theories in this list require us to ignore mountains of evidence.
Simulation theory is different. It doesn’t have compelling evidence for it, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to produce decisive evidence against it.
That’s why it deserves the top spot. Not because I think we’re living in a simulation. I have no particular reason to believe we are, but because the possibility is completely fucking insane while remaining annoyingly difficult to dismiss entirely.
We might live in an ordinary physical universe. We might exist inside an ancestral simulation created by our descendants.
We might be an experiment run by an intelligence so advanced that we’d struggle even to comprehend what it is.
Our entire observable universe might occupy the equivalent of a folder on somebody else’s desktop.
Perhaps the Big Bang was simply somebody clicking “New Game”.
Perhaps the dinosaurs were an earlier build or maybe humanity is the experiment.
Perhaps the simulation has been running for billions of years, or maybe we’ve been running for just a few minutes on an alien supercomputer.
Or perhaps reality is exactly what it appears to be and we’re doing what humans have always done: staring into the enormous mystery of existence and inventing increasingly elaborate explanations because “we don’t know” is an answer our brains absolutely fucking hate.
And so, that’s where I’m leaving this entire list.
After Flat Earth, Hollow Earth, fake Moon landings, phantom centuries, Mandela Effects, Project Blue Beam and 9/11 conspiracies, we’ve finally reached a theory where I can’t confidently tell you it’s bollocks.
I can only tell you that there’s currently no convincing evidence that it’s true.
The thing is, if I’m being completely honest, there’s a part of me that finds myself buying into this theory. Not enough so that I’d claim it’s definitely true, but enough so that if I died, and then woke up in a lab somewhere having experienced the VR game “Earth and The Humans” my reaction would not be, “what the shit?” but rather, “I knew it. I fucking knew it.”
So, in light of, or in spite of, all this, tomorrow morning I’ll get up, make breakfast, work, worry about money, ride my bike and continue behaving as though physical reality exists.
DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.
If you want personalised financial advice, seek an appropriate professional. If you are in financial difficulty, seek advice via the resources below:
Biolink
You can now find all my social media pages by checking out my Biolink:
bio.link/davidscothern.