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Fact is often weirder than fiction. This isn’t just a fancy phrase, though! If you look at science, history, and even at our personal experiences, you’ll realize that the world can be a truly bizarre place at times. So much so that anyone who’s a fan of ‘The Matrix’ might wonder whether what we see is, in fact, reality.
Inspired by user u/DawsonD43, the members of the r/AskReddit group started a lively discussion where they shared some of the top spooky indicators that we might be living inside a computer simulation. We’ve collected some of their most interesting ‘proof’ to share with you. Scroll down to check it out! And if you get an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu, don’t panic—an Agent will soon be with you.
We reached out to the author, u/DawsonD43, who was kind enough to share their thoughts on simulations and how our lives would change if we were actually in one. Be sure not to miss Bored Panda's interview with them!
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Long, but super weird and inexplicable. I know how this sounds, but I swear this really happened:
I was a childhood bookworm. While the other girls at a 5th grade sleepover were playing air hockey and dancing around to "Let's Hear it for the Boy', I'd pulled a creepy looking book off my hostess' shelf and huddled into a beanbag chair in a quiet corner of her family room.
I finished the book that night and the next morning I placed it back on her shelf, left, and promptly forgot the title.
We moved a few months later and I spent the next 7 years trying to find that damn book. There was no internet, just old card catalogues, but I searched every library I visited.
Unfortunately, both book and title remained elusive. It turns out that there is no shortage of books about young ghost girls on farms in spooky houses with ponds. The author wasn't Mary Downing Hahn, Richard Peck, or any of the usual paranormal YA authors. It wasn't "Wait til Helen Comes." The only thing I could remember about the cover was that she was holding an owl. That didn't turn out to be helpful, either.
In my sophomore year I worked as a librarian's aid & spent roughly 2 hours in my school's library every day. To no avail, I'd literally searched through every book that contained the following keywords: ghost, haunted, spooky, scary, & mystery.
But one afternoon as I was shelving books in the Biography section, something quite literally hit me on the head. It was a hardback book that had fallen off the top shelf in a section it didn't belong in. As soon as I picked it up and saw the hollow owl on the cover I KNEW.
It was not a book logged into our system. Nobody knew how it got there. I was alone in the library.
FWIW, I just Googled "ya novel ghost story girl pond owl" and it was the top result: *The Ghost Next Door* by Wylly Folk St John. If I'd just waited 32 years...
Daisy1355 5 months ago
I had a similar experience with a game. When I was a kid, my dad and I played a pool game on NES. But for the life of me, I could never remember the name. I remembered exactly how the balls and interface looked. I remembered the tables would be crazy shapes. I remembered the theme song. But nobody recognized it. I started to think I was crazy. And this was pre internet for me, so my means of searching were limited. I eventually gave up. Then years later, my cousin gets one of those plug n play N64 controllers that's just loaded with games. I pick a random game called "Lunar Pool" and it was that game I could never find. I was absolutely ecstatic
We absolutely love the idea in fiction that the reality surrounding us might be just an illusion. Throw in some psychological thriller elements to elevate these modern retellings of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and we’re even happier. Aside from ‘The Matrix’ trilogy (let’s ignore that the trainwreck of a fourth film even exists…), we can heartily recommend ‘Dark City’ and ‘The Thirteenth Floor.’
There’s something about meticulously peeling back the layers of ‘reality’ to get to the Truth (capital ‘T’) of how the universe actually works that is entrancing. After all, we can’t always trust our senses. Even our memories can be faulty.
The idea that there’s something much deeper going on with the world is easy to believe if you’ve ever read about quantum physics, even superficially. Quantum entanglement, tunneling, and wave-particle duality, anyone?
#2
The Mandela Effect.
Like, there are things that have clearly been changed. Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia when I was a kid. It’s the entire reason I know what a cornucopia is. Yet according to every source it never did.
#3
Clearly that some people have their settings on Easy Mode and others are on Survival Mode. You ever met someone who literally never has or had any issues? Easy childhood, solid upbringing with good parents, smart, good looking, gets the job they want, healthy relationship, financially stable… that’s an NPC on the Easy Mode for sure.
The idea that we’re potentially living in a simulation isn’t something that just sci-fi fans have embraced. Well-respected researchers and philosophers are seriously considering the idea. Earth.com explains that the Simulation Hypothesis is, in fact, a real theory. It’s the idea that our world and the entire universe are an artificial simulation created by an advanced civilization.
According to philosopher Nick Bostrom’s 2003 paper ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation,’ there’s a significant chance that we exist in a simulation if advanced civilizations are capable of creating complex simulations inhabited by simulated conscious beings. Of course, we would have to assume that those advanced civilizations are even interested in running realistic simulations at all.
#4
That it never fails that once you start to get a little bit ahead in life, your car’s check engine light comes on
#5
Going into a room and forgetting what i was gonna do. We're sims and they cancelled the action.
Thomas Maertens 5 months ago
"The doorway effect". A more likely theory is simply that your brain kind of cleans the 'buffer zone' of the short term memory when entering a new space, so it can store the new informations more easily.
Meanwhile, the brain in a vat experiment supposes that a brain connected to a powerful computer that feeds it a simulated virtual reality would have no idea that it is, in fact, a brain in a vat.
For it, the world that it’s seeing, including its perception of its body, would be ‘real.’ Some philosophers claim that there’s no surefire way of knowing that we aren’t brains in vats if the simulation is good enough. That suggests, rather uncomfortably, that we'd never be able to find out what Reality (with a capital 'R') truly is.
#7
Look at the video game industry, and all the progress made in only fifty years. We went from dots and bars on a screen to photorealistic characters and full scale worlds.
Now extrapolate this progress out say....1,000 years? I don't think it's inconceivable to think that we might be able to simulate an entire galaxy by then.
And if we can, someone else might already have.
#9
The big bang, there was nothing and then there was everything. Sounds like a program starting up to me. Also particles acting differently when being viewed.
The author of the viral thread opened up to us about the inspiration behind the unusual topic. They said that the question popped into their head while working one day. “I work from home as a software developer, so sometimes, my mind tends to wander throughout the day. This was right around the time that 'The Gateway Process' was kind of trendy to talk about on TikTok, and I had been seeing a lot about it on my feed," u/DawsonD43 told Bored Panda.
According to them, the topic resonated with so many people because there are so many unexplainable strange things that happen to us. "There’s just so many people who have probably experienced (the same) weird things happen to them, and for people to be able to share on that Reddit thread and see that they’re not the only ones who’ve experienced it—it was probably quite a relief!"
However, from the author’s perspective, everyone who saw or participated in the discussion might not necessarily enjoy the idea that we might live in a simulation so much as the fact that it’s an interesting topic to think about. "It becomes quite philosophical the more you think about it. And the more you think about it, the more you go down the rabbit hole. If I’m inside a simulation, well, what’s outside the simulation?" they mused.
#10
Never forget the dancing plague of 1518.. Probably devs were installing a new Mod or something.
james stevenson 5 months ago (edited)
I'm pretty sure it was suspected to have something to do with some psychedelic d**g type mould that got into the bread
#11
Things would re-appear only when I stop looking for it. If that’s not a dead give away that we’re living in a simulation, I don’t know what is.
And don’t forget about hair pins and hair ties. Where do they even go???
#12
The baader-meinhof phenomenon- lazy coding like GTA, you see a car for the first time and the next day you see it everywhere
james stevenson 5 months ago
Isn't this just like once you've noticed something it becomes so much more obvious? If you've found a hidden image in one of those puzzles you're going to notice it pretty much every time you look at that particular puzzle
Bored Panda asked u/DawsonD43 how people's lives would actually change if it were conclusively proven that we all do, in fact, exist inside of a simulation. "I don’t think we will ever know for sure if we are living in a simulation. I just don’t think the general population would be able to digest the fact that we, and our entire reality, are not real," they shared their take.
"It would cause everything as we know it to change: religion, politics, relationships, etc. I don’t think it would be a good thing for the public to know about, honestly. It would probably cause a lot of chaos. People likely would question whether or not anything they do even matters," u/DawsonD43 said.
#14
Thinking about something then getting an advertisement for it online.
#15
Me asking myself a question about a topic I have no prior knowledge of and the next day a YouTube video appears on my screen answering the exact same question in detail.
Screeching Owl 5 months ago
I'm pretty sure it's because YouTube listens and/or takes your data from other things to give you better recommendations
"In the end, it’s a fun (and kind of scary) thought experiment. But, the truth of it is, we’ll never know! Maybe a very select few of us will know, but it will never become a known fact that we’re living in a simulation. People don’t like to feel controlled, and I guarantee if they found out they were just a program written, things would get ugly."
#16
The stupidity of some people makes me believe we are 100 percent in a simulation
#17
The pens. I used to go to large corporate meetings a few times a year. They gave out pens and notepads to everyone (as if I was going to take notes). I would take pens from empty seats and from coworkers and take them home. A dozen at a time at least. This went on for years. So where are the pens? There should be *hundreds* of them in my home. I should be able to stand anywhere and look in any direction and see a pen, but no.
Widdershins66 5 months ago
Scissors! Scissors! SCISSORS!!! I own hundreds... where are they???
#18
We went from the Wright brothers flying the first plane to space missions in roughly 50 years. That’s wild imo. I don’t think people realize how quickly tech evolves.
What do you think of these theories, dear Pandas? Do you think that we might be living in a simulation? Why (not)? What movies similar to ‘The Matrix’ would you recommend to all the other readers here?
Feel free to tell us all about it in the comments… and if you get an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu, don’t panic—an Agent will soon be with you.
#19
Monarch Butterflies: A soft tube of goo with tissue-thin wings, and brain smaller than a grain of sand, flitters across an entire continent and back to the exact same tree in less than one year.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly_migration?wprov=sfti1)
similarly 5 months ago
Maybe its limited brain can't comprehend anything more than returning to that one tree. Maybe in a manner of speaking, that's all that its brain is capable of processing. What if certain insects are not even aware of 3 dimensional space, but (despite being what we perceive to be a 3 dimensional being) are themselves only able to perceive 2 dimensions ...
#20
Some people getting a head knock and suddenly becoming geniuses. Or people waking from accidents or surgery and speaking with a foreign accent from countries they ve never been to.
Gary Avekukk 5 months ago
Have head trauma and believe Donald Trump would make a good president.....
Jen Drake 5 months ago
I think that was a virus when we tried to download free music from LimeWire. 🤔
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similarly 5 months ago
Or getting knocked in the head and suddenly believing the stories in supermarket tabloids ...
Jill Rhodry 5 months ago
Unfortunately that doesn't even require and knock on the head - just a red hat
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martymcmatrix 5 months ago
It's probably much more disturbing when the hospital staff speaks to you in a foreign language after you wake up from a general anesthesia...❓ 🤔 🤷🏽
Michael None 5 months ago
Trump is that sim you keep trying to get to screw up his life but somehow keeps succeeding.
R.A. Haley 5 months ago
Sums it all up, doesn't it? No matter how hard everyone tries to "get 'im", he still comes through. And he doesn't fall up stairs either.
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Toothless Feline 5 months ago
The thing with accents is that it’s not really the accent it sounds like. An accent is just a variation in pronunciation. Minor brain damage can affect the speech centers in such a way as to tweak how one pronounces certain sounds, resulting in what sounds like an accent.
Rae Rory 5 months ago
Not fair. I've had multiple head injuries and all I got was an inability to do math.
Philly Bob Squires 5 months ago
All I got was 2 tylenol. Oh, and laughed at.
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Anyone-for-tea? 5 months ago
I must be a new save, because I hit my head so hard I had post-concussion syndrome for 10 months, and I didn’t have any new skills at all!
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Nicole Trabucco 5 months ago
My BIL had a brain tumor and could inexplicably speak and understand German
#21
One time some friends and I were playing a game on Steam called TableTop Simulator. Its a game where you can play board games and have to actually move the pieces and such. It had the ability for any player to spawn in any game pieces for any game at any time, theres also an extras category. One of the extras you can spawn in is an iPad.
So we get f****n around and its a functioning iPad. I opened up Andkon Arcade, and tried playing Hex Empire… it worked.
So Im sitting in my game room, on my PC, playing a game on steam, with a VR headset strapped to my face, where Im sitting at a table on an iPad, playing full functioning flash games on that iPad.
I was like “How much deeper does this go than me, is somebody playing me too?”
#22
Anyone else ever experience this? It happens to me all the time, and with words that are not part of every day speech. I'll have the TV on or YouTube while I'm reading an article and as I'm reading, the video will say a word that I'm reading at the exact time I get to that word. I always forget the word, but most recently it was "masticate." I've used that word maybe once in my life and only ever read it in a book before. But, there are so many examples of this, and every time I'm left thinking, "are you serious?" Seems like something that might happen in a simulation.
#23
All the times I've "nearly" died.
I've lost count of the number of moments I've had where all I could do was think: "Well, this is it..." and somehow made it through.
One example:
I was turning onto an offramp and got clipped by a bus. I was driving a tiny car (Geo Metro, I think) and the bus spun my little car 360+ in the middle of traffic. When I stopped spinning I was facing perpendicular to traffic with the drivers side facing incoming traffic.
I could see the truck about to hit me. There was literally nothing I could do. My car 'slid' backwards off the road as the truck whipped past me. The driver hit their brakes and nearly ran off the road.
We had a good laugh about it after. But man... Once in a lifetime is weird enough. But the fifth, sixth, etc. time something so surreal happens it's harder and harder it is to accept it as just dumb luck.
Like at this point I've used up all my luck, and at least six or seven other people's dumb luck (sorry).
#24
I can’t remember what it’s called but the scientific phenomenon of particles and photons behaving differently when observed. They aren’t being coded into the environment if no player is observing that area.
#25
The fact that the fibonacci sequence shows up everywhere in nature.
#27
I used to work in a pharmacy, so I asked about a hundred people for their name and DOB every day. A couple weeks into the job, I mentioned to a coworker how I hadn't had a single customer with the same birthday as me. Got 4 of them over the next two days.
EDIT: Another time I realized we were living in a simulation was when I said something online and 40 people replied to me saying the exact same wrong thing about the Birthday Paradox or the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Lazy devs copy-pasting code.
#28
When observed from the surface of the earth, the moon has the exact same diameter as the sun.
It's because the Sun has a diameter about 400 times greater than the Moon, yet is also 400 times further away.
What are the odds of that happening by pure chance?
Vix Spiderthrust 5 months ago (edited)
This is backwards thinking. We evolved on a planet where conditions are good for life to evolve, including being a certain distance from the star and having a moon that works well as a meteor shield. So the "odds" of such a coincidence are high, because without it we wouldn't be here to notice it. It's like asking "with eight billion people on Earth, what are the odds that my parents happen to know each other?"
#29
I can sometimes think of a movie or a song. And that b***h either shows up in some form on my suggestions or my actual television.
#30
Too many things taste like chicken
What do you think ?
Game Guy 5 months ago
Yeah. All that and no mention of information physics or the apparent pixelized nature of the observable universe?
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CanadianDimes 5 months ago
I think the idea of simulation is just confirmation bias coupled with a brain that’s adapted to seek out patterns. We evolved to live in groups of about 30-50 people and now many of us live in much larger communities so there are a lot more complex interactions and actual coincidences. But our brains interpret coincidences as patterns and pick up on said apparent patterns to the exclusion of things that don’t fit the pattern.
Jihana 5 months ago
That was the point of the whole list. So "30 Creepy Things That Might Prove This Life Is A" was fun, and then you read the last word of the headline and the actual list?
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Trev Fontaine 5 months ago
F**k me this is such a bad list! I mean how come having arms isnt proof we are living in a sim. Everything else in the world is
Lyoness 5 months ago
Similar to the ring story above but I was in the first grade. I'd been given a beautiful gold band with a pattern engraved on it as a Christmas gift and as a special treat was allowed to wear it to school. I was 6, so naturally I lost it. This did not go over well at home. A full year later I was in a bathroom stall at school and I looked down and right in the far corner was my ring. Those bathrooms were cleaned every night by the janitors and somehow the ring ended up where they missed it. I still can't believe the odds of finding it but I'm grateful because today my daughter wears it.
HTakeover 5 months ago
There's also a character face generator; barring things like physical trauma, surgery, genetic defect, etc. there are only about 15 different nose shapes , 6 eye shapes, a dozen chin shapes, and so on. Once you've seen 'em all, you start noticing certain combinations on repeat. Sure, you can say it's because of dominant genes but we all know it's a character generator ;)
Josh David Whitmore 5 months ago
Tom Cruise being a huge star. In a REAL universe, this could not happen.
Floeckchen 5 months ago
...So many supersticions, cognitive dissonances and all kinds of fallacies and in this list...
PFD 5 months ago
The Matrix. Hear me out: ok, tech advances to the point where the idea of a computer simulation becomes a popular idea, right? Then suddenly there's *a movie about it*. That's obviously lampshading, a common authorial device. Hence, it proves the existence of a scriptwriter. QED. (Don't bother trying to point out logical fallacies here, logic is just a set of hard-coded parameters in the simulation so you'll only be providing more proof.)
Jackie Lulu 5 months ago
Never heard of 'lampshading ' before. Is that something like gaslighting?
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Major Harris 5 months ago
had my own. was listening to "the best of john lennon" cd in my car one day. the song, "woman" came on and i sang along to it. next day, listening to the same cd, and "woman" did not play? when i stopped at my destination, looked at the playlist and that song is NOT on this disc!
Robert Millar 5 months ago
The easiest kind of simulation would be just you. Everything else would be simulated and created on the fly just for you. Even your free will would be a part of it.
John Harrison 5 months ago
This is the kind of article that appeals to folks that arent good critical thinkers.
Game Guy 5 months ago
Yeah. All that and no mention of information physics or the apparent pixelized nature of the observable universe?
Load More Replies... CanadianDimes 5 months ago
I think the idea of simulation is just confirmation bias coupled with a brain that’s adapted to seek out patterns. We evolved to live in groups of about 30-50 people and now many of us live in much larger communities so there are a lot more complex interactions and actual coincidences. But our brains interpret coincidences as patterns and pick up on said apparent patterns to the exclusion of things that don’t fit the pattern.
Jihana 5 months ago
That was the point of the whole list. So "30 Creepy Things That Might Prove This Life Is A" was fun, and then you read the last word of the headline and the actual list?
Load More Replies... Trev Fontaine 5 months ago
F**k me this is such a bad list! I mean how come having arms isnt proof we are living in a sim. Everything else in the world is
Lyoness 5 months ago
Similar to the ring story above but I was in the first grade. I'd been given a beautiful gold band with a pattern engraved on it as a Christmas gift and as a special treat was allowed to wear it to school. I was 6, so naturally I lost it. This did not go over well at home. A full year later I was in a bathroom stall at school and I looked down and right in the far corner was my ring. Those bathrooms were cleaned every night by the janitors and somehow the ring ended up where they missed it. I still can't believe the odds of finding it but I'm grateful because today my daughter wears it.
HTakeover 5 months ago
There's also a character face generator; barring things like physical trauma, surgery, genetic defect, etc. there are only about 15 different nose shapes , 6 eye shapes, a dozen chin shapes, and so on. Once you've seen 'em all, you start noticing certain combinations on repeat. Sure, you can say it's because of dominant genes but we all know it's a character generator ;)
Josh David Whitmore 5 months ago
Tom Cruise being a huge star. In a REAL universe, this could not happen.
Floeckchen 5 months ago
...So many supersticions, cognitive dissonances and all kinds of fallacies and in this list...
PFD 5 months ago
The Matrix. Hear me out: ok, tech advances to the point where the idea of a computer simulation becomes a popular idea, right? Then suddenly there's *a movie about it*. That's obviously lampshading, a common authorial device. Hence, it proves the existence of a scriptwriter. QED. (Don't bother trying to point out logical fallacies here, logic is just a set of hard-coded parameters in the simulation so you'll only be providing more proof.)
Jackie Lulu 5 months ago
Never heard of 'lampshading ' before. Is that something like gaslighting?
Load More Replies... Major Harris 5 months ago
had my own. was listening to "the best of john lennon" cd in my car one day. the song, "woman" came on and i sang along to it. next day, listening to the same cd, and "woman" did not play? when i stopped at my destination, looked at the playlist and that song is NOT on this disc!
Robert Millar 5 months ago
The easiest kind of simulation would be just you. Everything else would be simulated and created on the fly just for you. Even your free will would be a part of it.
John Harrison 5 months ago
This is the kind of article that appeals to folks that arent good critical thinkers.
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