Are we living in a simulation? The idea that we might be living in a simulated reality has worried us for centuries. Thomas Anderson - otherwise known as Neo - is walking up a flight of stairs when he sees a black cat shake itself and walk past a doorway. Then the moment seems to replay before his eyes. Just a touch of déjà vu, he thinks.

The simulation hypothesis suggests that we live in a computer simulation. That notion has attracted significant scholarly and popular interest. This article explores the simulation hypothesis from a business perspective. Due to the lack of a name for a universe consistent with the simulation hypothesis, we propose the term simuverse. We argue that if we live in a simulation, there must be a business justification. Therefore, we ask: If we live in a simuverse, what is its business model? We identify and explore business model scenarios, such as simuverse as a project, service, or platform. We also explore business model pathways and risk management issues. The article contributes to the simulation hypothesis literature and is the first to provide a business model perspective on the simulation hypothesis. The article discusses theoretical and practical implications and identifies opportunities for future research related to sustainability, digital transformation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Roman Yampolskiy thinks we live in a simulated universe, but that we could bust out. In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato theorised that humans do not perceive the world as it really is. All we can see is shadows on a wall. In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper which formalised an argument to prove Plato was right. The reason for this is that if it is possible, and civilisations can become advanced without self-destructing, then there will be an enormous number of simulations, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any randomly selected civilisation (like us) is a naturally-occurring one.

Elon Musk thinks you don't exist. But it's nothing personal: he thinks he doesn't exist either. Instead we are just immaterial software constructs running on a gigantic alien computer simulation. Musk has stated that the odds are billions to one that we are actually living in "base reality", ie the physical universe. At the end of last year, he responded to a tweet about the anniversary of the crude tennis video game Pong (1972) by writing: "49 years later, games are photo-realistic 3D worlds. What does that trend continuing imply about our reality?"

A professor of philosophy responds to David Iserson's "This, but Again." That we're living in a computer simulation--it sounds like a paranoid fantasy. But it's a possibility that futurists, philosophers, and scientific cosmologists treat increasingly seriously. Oxford philosopher and noted futurist Nick Bostrom estimates there's about a 1 in 3 chance that we're living in a computer simulation. Billionaire Elon Musk says it's a near-certainty.

It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show's host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument--the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time--much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player. "Maybe that's why we can't travel faster than the speed of light, because if we could, we'd be able to get to another galaxy," said Nice, the show's co-host, prompting Tyson to gleefully interrupt.

NOTE: On the 20th anniversary of the release of the Matrix, MIT and Stanford grad Rizwan Virk is releasing his book, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientists Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are In a Video Game, which explores the scientific, philosophic and religious basis of this theory. This is one in a series of articles which explore different aspects of the simulation hypothesis -- visit www.zenentrepreneur.com to learn more. For hundreds of years, many well-known scientists weren't afraid to speak of God (or the importance of consciousness) in their writings, ranging from Newton to Descartes to Einstein. This may partly have sprung initially from not wanting to share the fate of scientists like Galileo whose research was suppressed by a dominant Catholic Church. Over time, though as the Church became less dominant, I suspect it stemmed from a genuine belief that while science was good at making observations, its reductionist tendencies might never be able to explain the unseen worlds of consciousness often explored by religion.

A prominent computer scientist and MIT professor believes there's a very good chance we're all living in a computer simulation. The idea of humans living in a simulated reality controlled by robotic overlords has been much explored by academics, experts and notable figures like tech mogul Elon Musk. But in MIT researcher Rizwan Virk's new book, 'The Simulation Hypothesis,' he probes the idea further, even examining how long it might take before humans could use today's technology to construct their own simulation of reality. MIT researcher Rizwan Virk believes it's more possible than not that we're living in a computer simulation akin to the scenario depicted in the 1990 sci-fi film the Matrix (pictured) There are several aspects of our world that explain why it's likely we are all living in a simulation, Virk said in an interview with Vox. He pointed to'quantum indeterminacy,' or'the idea that a particle is in one of multiple states and you don't know that unless you observe the particle,' Virk said.

Have you ever wondered if life is not exactly what it's cracked up to be? OK, let's take that thought a little further. Have you ever suffered from an identity crisis? One in which you suspected that you're not a real person, but instead an extremely sophisticated computer simulation of a real person produced by an immensely more developed civilisation than that which we take to be our own? It's just possible that I lost you on that last point, but stay with me, because the reality we take for granted is coming under increasing technological and theoretical threat. Earlier this month in an office block in Euston, I put on a virtual reality (VR) headset and began playing a prototype of a game developed by a company called Dream Reality Interactive.

Editor's note: This excerpt of a chapter from Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin K. Bergen (Basic Books, 2012) relates that our brain's capacity to both perceive a pig and then imagine what the animal is like, even one that flies, points to an essential cognitive skill that makes humans different from all other species. Excerpted from Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin K. Bergen. Starting as early as the 1970s, some cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and linguists began to wonder whether meaning wasn't something totally different from a language of thought [Call it Mentalese, whichtranslates words into actual concepts: a polar bear or speed limit, for instance]. They suggested that--instead of abstract symbols--meaning might really be something much more closely intertwined with our real experiences in the world, with the bodies that we have. As a self-conscious movement started to take form, it took on a name, embodiment, which started to stand for the idea that meaning might be something that isn't distilled away from our bodily experiences but is instead tightly bound by them. For you, the word dog might have a deep and rich meaning that involves the ways you physically interact with dogs--how they look and smell and feel.