Are we living in a simulation?

Scientists and mathematicians have found that it is mathematically impossible that we live in a simulation.

Question: Are we living in a simulation?
Position1 of 3›: No, we are not living in a simulation.
Argument‹2 of 2: Scientists and mathematicians have found that it is mathematically impossible that we live in a simulation.

The simulation theory simply does not hold up under intense mathematical and algorithmic scrutiny. The universe could never be computer-generated based on what we know today.

The argument

The argument rests on a claim about computation rather than about metaphysics. A study published in Science Advances by physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry L. Kovrizhin outlines the impossibility of any known computational algorithm with the ability to perfectly replicate the expanse of the universe. Framed that way the question stops being a matter of philosophical taste and becomes a question about resources: whatever else a simulation would require, it would have to be run on something. Proponents note that the finding is not an isolated one. Mathematician Marcus Noak at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, as well as many other prominent names within the scientific community, agree with the study, citing the extreme unlikelihood of any purely hardware-based simulation with the power to control the world. The obstacle they identify is one of scale. The computing software algorithm itself would have to use more data than there are atoms in the observable universe — which means the machine would have to be larger than the thing it was reproducing, since no store of information can be smaller than what it records in full. The scope of the universe and the many complex laws of physics governing it, on this argument, would never be able to exist solely within a simulated reality. And the objection is not merely that no such machine has been built but that nothing approaches the requirement: there has never been any computer even remotely close to that level of capacity, which proponents take as proving that the simulation theory, at least right now, is a complete myth.

Premises

[P1]A Science Advances study by physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhin argues that no known computational algorithm could perfectly replicate the expanse of the universe. [P2] Such a simulation would require more data than there are atoms in the observable universe, and no computer approaches that capacity. [C] Because perfectly simulating the universe is mathematically impossible, we are not living in a simulation.

Counter-arguments

Prominent supporters of the theory, like Elon Musk, argue that because the future human technologies are so advanced, we would never be able to conceive of their vast computing power in the present. Just as humans could never imagine anything like the Internet in the 1970's, they assert that our technology will advance and grow so exponentially that the ability of a computer algorithm to synthesize all of the observable universe would be possible. Also, this scientific study does not account for the metaphysical aspects of the theory that science cannot explain, like those to do with philosophical definitions of selfhood and "being" as well as strictly theological conceptions of higher powers beyond our control. This argument does not take all of the complex factors surrounding the popular theory into account.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] This mathematical calculation only takes into account our current conception of the parameters of technology, not the possibility of technology in the future. [Rejecting P3] The argument that the simulation theory cannot exist is illogical.