---
title: "Thinkers · Plato to Chalmers · Simulation Hypothesis"
url: https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers
description: "Plato’s cave, Zhuangzi’s butterfly, Descartes’ demon, Putnam’s brain in a vat, Bostrom’s trilemma and more, each matched to a dial in the sandbox."
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
credit: "Ross Allan Dahl, Simulation Hypothesis (simulation-hypothesis.com)"
---

# Thinkers · 14 essays, from Plato to Chalmers

Each era restates the same question in the terms of its own period. These are the 14 formulations on which the site draws, each with the sandbox dial that corresponds to it.

[around 375 BC Plato’s cave Prisoners, a fire and shadows on a wall: an early picture of a projection mistaken for the world.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/plato)[around 300 BC Zhuangzi’s butterfly Zhuangzi dreams he’s a butterfly, then wakes up and can’t say which of the two is dreaming.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/zhuangzi)[4th–5th century AD Vasubandhu’s dream A shared, orderly world that affects us can appear without outside objects. Vasubandhu argues it with a dream, hungry ghosts and a nightmare of hell.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/vasubandhu)[8th century AD Shankara’s māyā The world is real enough to live in and not real in the last analysis. Advaita Vedānta keeps both claims at once.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/shankara)[early 12th century al-Ghazali’s doubt Five centuries before Descartes, a Persian scholar asked what would make waking life look like a dream.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/ghazali)[1229 Ibn Arabi’s imagination The whole world is imagination, made new at every instant. For Ibn Arabi that makes it more meaningful, not less.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/ibn-arabi)[1635 Calderón’s life is a dream A prince is told his best day was a dream. He decides to act well anyway, in case he wakes.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/calderon)[1641 Descartes’ demon Suppose a being of great power has put all its effort into deceiving you. What’s left?](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/descartes)[1710–1713 Berkeley’s perceiver To be is to be perceived, and things nobody is looking at still exist because God is.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/berkeley)[1940 Borges’ circular ruins A man dreams a son into being, then learns that someone is dreaming him.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/borges)[1974 Nozick’s experience machine A machine that gives you any life you choose, one you can’t tell from the real thing. Would you plug in?](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/nozick)[1981 Putnam’s brain in a vat The demon becomes hardware. Then Putnam argues that a brain in a vat couldn’t truly say it’s in a vat.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/putnam)[2003 Bostrom’s trilemma Not an argument that we’re simulated, but an argument that one of three propositions must hold.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/bostrom)[2022 Chalmers: virtual worlds are real The strongest recent case that a simulated world wouldn’t be a fake one.](https://simulation-hypothesis.com/thinkers/chalmers)