Heās crazy! This is a great hot tub conversation!
Is that a falsifiable hypothesis? (could it be tested)
No, I donāt believe it is any more testable then the existance of god.
Thereās an intriguing interpretation of quantum mechanics that falls into this category. One double slit experiment has become sort of a quantum urban legend. It involves performing the test using a detector, and then throwing away the data from the detector before it has had a chance to be seen by a conscious observer. I spent some time looking for peer reviewed articles on this, thinking that surely somebody has done more than dismiss the idea. I couldnāt find anything.
Iād love to be able to do these types of experiments myself.
No reason you canāt, particle accelerators and detectors are well within the abilities of amateurs. Calling @ChrisPattison
If someone wants to build one, Iām all about having a DMS linear accelerator or cyclotron. 
It was done in 1971 by some amateursā¦
Yep, and the Amateur Scientist book has a design using a Van de Graff generator as the acceleration potential generator. (edit: Doh! Same design!)
Stillā¦ cool to have our own!
Yeh that is the same article I linked to. I find it amusing that the radioactive boyscout used that design to produce the breeder reactor he used to irradiate the neighborhood and turn it into a superfund site.
I think performing a double slit experiment with photons is probably the safest, although thereās technically no way to test for a photon without destroying it. So, maybe the second safest and more precise way would be with electrons. It would be especially cool to perform the test using an electron gun that could shoot one electron at a time, because you could test and watch, in real time, the interference pattern stop and start with single electrons going through one of the slits.
In recent years, theyāve been doing single slit experiments successfully with complex molecules. Iām not even sure where to begin experimenting with something like that! But yet, the old implication remains that nothing really exists in our physical world unless itās observed.
I know that if I were to write a computer simulation, I wouldnāt render a constantly changing, dynamic environment and present it to an observer unless they were looking directly at something. If we were in a simulation, the classic double slit experiment could imply the same thing.
We gotta Fonzie that up, maybe hit it with a blast from our Spice Weasel. Bigger is better!
I much prefer to believe that the Universe is non-deterministic. Copenhagen all the way!
He is just reiterating Descartes point of view.
This is where the idea āI think therefore I amā comes from. If you accept that there is even a small chance that the we live in a simulation or an evil demons pocket dimension. So the only thing you can be absolutely sure about is existence of your own self.
The difference is he provided a set of odds, 1 in a billion that we arenāt charactersvin some computer simulationā¦
Which basically means he is saying you canāt be certain about anything, including your own existence.
If we are a computer simulation of ourselves is that a substantive difference?
We (at least I do) think so regardless of whether I am flesh and blood or bits and bytes I still am.
The actors in my simulations donāt exist, so I would say yes it is a substantive difference. Sorry, my day of mental mastā¦ err philosophical contemplation are long past. The trouble with getting old 
