Life is not a Simulation but a Thought Experiment

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Christian Fritz Dec 29, 2025<br>Life is not a Simulation but a Thought Experiment

What is 453,634,563 + 2,688,222? You can calculate it in your head or use a calculator but the result is the same: 456,322,785. Since when is that the case? Did the result of this addition only start to exist after you calculated it? Of course not! Nor did anyone first have to invent 456,322,785 as the sum of 453,634,563 and 2,688,222, and even if no person or other intelligent being ever thought about adding these two numbers, the result already existed before we even asked the question. Addition, like all mathematical operations, is completely time-less.

In this article I will try to convince you that it is the same with life itself. In particular, one does not need to bother with the idea of a simulation that we live in. The mere idea or concept itself of our universe and the life resulting from it is already sufficient for it to exist. Just like the result of 453,634,563 + 2,688,222 existed before you calculated or even thought of it.

Refuting Simulation: Occam’s Razor

Imagine someone building a simulation. This could be John Conway inventing the rules of his famous Game of Life, or something more widely known like Minecraft or, well, Sims. Every simulation is defined, roughly, by an initial state and a “transition function”, which is a function that, for each possible state of the world, determines the next state or the next set of possible states if the simulation is non-deterministic. These two things together define the entire simulation. In practice, it is helpful to break these two concepts down further. For example the state of the world can be broken down into things that can change, such as the age of a character, and those that don’t, e.g., the terrain or landscape. The transition function is usually where all the complication resides and it is often structured in terms of things like rules of survival, resources, and the physics of the simulated world including what is possible and what isn’t.

In what we call the real world, these rules are the rules of physics, and even if not all of them are known to us yet, we live by them.

The conceived world

When does “life” in the conceived world start? Only once it has been implemented in a computer and the computer has started simulating, i.e., computing the sequence of events and states starting from the initial state? Which part of that simulation exists at that point, only the states computed so far? If you are inclined to say “yes”, then tell me: what if the creator had already thought through some of these events and states in their head. If they did, then these states have already been computed, and they exist, no computer simulation required, right? But what about the states that have not yet been computed? Do they not yet exist even though their existence is inevitable as the simulation continues? This brings us back to the question of the result of 453,634,563 + 2,688,222. Did that result only exist once it was computed for the first time by a person? Or was it sufficient for someone to conceive of the rules of math in order for its result to exist? We all know that it’s the latter. So conception is sufficient for the entire life of the simulation to exist in its entirety.

This is the moment where we leave time behind. As the simulator, we have full control over time and know quite well what will happen before it happens (in the simulation). So time is not holding us back.

Conception unnecessary

So if conception of a world with all its rules in one go creates the entire, simulated world, then what about that moment of conception? Does the world really only start existing once it has been conceived and the rules of the world have been “written down”? Or did the world already exist even before it was conceived? We’ve already established that time plays no role here, so perhaps the moment right after the world is conceived and the one right before it, do not actually differ regarding the existence of the simulated world?

Logic and Existence

If we are willing to accept this, then indeed we can make our claim.

Claim 1: Anything that is implied by any logically consistent theory exists.

Wait, you might say, how did “logically consistent” sneak into this claim? You are right, we have not yet talked about this requirement. It is indeed necessary though, because without consistency, the theory of the life being conceived (or even computed) would “break the thinker” and a “broken thinker” cannot think, and hence the theory they think through cannot be computed. In essence, the thinker “wouldn’t know what to think” if the logic is not consistent, i.e., is ambiguous. Not random or stochastic — more on that topic later — but actually ambiguous or contradictory: things could be true and false at the same time!

Math and Logic

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