You're listening to a podcast from Meaning of Life TV.

Hi, Preston.

Hi, Bob.

How are you?

I'm doing fine.

How are you?

Pretty good.

What time is it where you are early in the morning?

Yeah, it's 7 a.m. here.

Where is it 7 p.m. here, ironically. You must be on the other side of the planet. Indeed, I am. Or at least what we think is the planet. We're going to be discussing the question of whether we in fact live in a simulation. But before I get to that, let me introduce us. I'm Robert Wright. This is the right show available on both streaming video and via audio podcast. You're Preston Green. You teach philosophy at Nanyang,

which you've told me is a satisfactory pronunciation. Nan Yang Technological

University in Singapore, which is on the other side of the planet. Yep, that's right.

And as I said, we're going to be discussing the question of whether the thing we think of

as, you know, physical reality is in fact a simulation, a question that's gotten a lot

of attention over the last five years for reasons we may want to explore a little or

speculate about. And we're going to look into the question of whether there's a way we might

find out if we're living in a simulation. I personally am curious. However, you are here to warn us

that we should not try to satisfy our curiosity. You wrote a recent piece in the New York Times,

based on an academic paper you've written,

warning that it could be a fatal mistake

to try to find out if we're in a simulation.

Is that fair?

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