Comes up in Iain M. Banks sci fi novels as a religon. With the interesting twist that the simulation will end, just as soon as a certian percentage of sentient beings are aware-of/believe-in 'the truth'.
Interesting, as it means that both enlightenment, and irradication, of non-believers. Are equally effective ways of increasing said percentage, and completing the simulation.
Ken Macleod's 'The Restoration Game' is a fun take on it too.
My biggest gut reaction against the simulation argument is how hard we find it to simulate our universe. Most simulations use heaps of approximations or special cases to make progress. I think it takes a supercomputer to do justice to the full quantum mechanics of just a few hundred atoms. Maybe things get more tractable once we can build quantum computers? Or maybe all the weirdness of quantum mechanics is a symptom of the approximations of the underlying simulation?
Ken Macleod's 'The Restoration Game' is a fun take on it too.
My biggest gut reaction against the simulation argument is how hard we find it to simulate our universe. Most simulations use heaps of approximations or special cases to make progress. I think it takes a supercomputer to do justice to the full quantum mechanics of just a few hundred atoms. Maybe things get more tractable once we can build quantum computers? Or maybe all the weirdness of quantum mechanics is a symptom of the approximations of the underlying simulation?