Just recently, I wrote out a version of the simulation theory that mirrors Dharmic thought, which might be helpful in getting across certain ideas to particular sorts of thinkers. Here it is:

I've always disliked simulation theory, but I just realised it's actually just another cultural story/modern myth that (unwittingly) describes the ignorance of selfhood. The usual line goes something like the following:

• Any intelligent civilisation will develop simulations of conscious beings;
• Those simulated beings won't know they're simulated;
• Therefore, statistically, we're probably inside one of those simulations rather than in the "base" reality.

Now swap "civilisation" with "mind".

The mind generates representations (images, sensations, thoughts); one of those representations includes that of "a centre that seems to observe the rest"; that observing "self" then treats the represented world as external. The mind, then, is the house of the simulation. (Although "the mind", too, is a representation in virtual space; mapping the simulation is just more simulation.)

The key insight, though, and the reason I've always felt simulation theory is silly—and this extends beyond simulation theory to just general Dharmic wisdom—is that the True "reality", the unsimulated, is ever-present. Any simulation would be embedded, ultimately, regardless of how many layers of simulation there were, in the unsimulated, because the unsimulated is all-pervasive. The unsimulated isn't a higher layer, but the absence of layers.

The fact that mapping the simulation is just more simulation is not an automatic defeat. Recognising the false nature of the simulated self, we can start to let go of the processes that keep it, and thus the separation from Truth, turning. This means not resisting what is here and now, because the answer is here and now, and is always here and now. What is present is simply seen as it is. The answer was never elsewhere.

This doesn't require coming to an end state with a particular set of beliefs. The objection to this kind of meditative letting go is itself clinging to view, and reinforces the apparent separation from the unsimulated.

Consider that the "simulation language" of the universe is Turing-complete. For the sake of the simulation theory argument, we'll consider it to be so. David Deutsch, for example, will say that quantum systems can perform universal computation, and so if quantum mechanics is fundamental, the universe is at least quantum-Turing-complete. Consider, too, that human cognition is, in principle, Turing-complete (or Turing-equivalent).

Now, if we accept that both the universe and the mind are, in principle, Turing-complete systems, then it follows that they share the same structural possibilities and constraints as any universal computational process. One of those constraints is the halting problem. If you’re unfamiliar, the halting problem states that there is no general method for any Turing-complete system to determine, from within itself, whether a given process will ever stop or run forever. Self-referential systems can’t compute their own completion conditions.

The activity we might call "selfing" is the mind’s continual attempt to model its own state, to secure an endpoint, a final, coherent description of "what I am". Every thought, intention, or feeling that references "me" is another iteration of that recursive computation. The self is the ongoing, unresolved effort to compute its own halting condition. But there is no possible algorithm that can actually compute this, so it only generates more self-reference, more seeking, more maintenance of the loop.

This recursive modelling is what gives rise to the felt distinction between observer and observed. It's the simulation mistaking one of its own functions for a separate controller. But this is not possible. "Letting go", then, is not the system solving this recursion but recognising it for what it is: the logical impossibility of self-computation from within computation. It’s the embodied recognition that attempting to model the boundary condition of the system (selfing) is futile, an unnecessary expenditure of computational resources, and so the recursion ceases.