The Computer Simulation Hypothesis and the Problem of Skepticism

In the new reality of the society of information, one of the topical themes in philosophy is the philosophy of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. The classic problems of ontology and epistemology do not lose their relevance, but transform in the framework of a new digital reality and require answers to their questions: what exists? what can the subject know? The problem of skepticism is one of these classic problems, affecting both the existence of the external objective world and the issues of cognition, knowledge and truth. In the philosophy of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, interest arose with renewed vigor in the simulation hypothesis, which was formulated by Rene Descartes, went through a series of transformations and appeared in a new form in the works of modern philosophers. This research is an attempt to formulate a new hypothesis of computer simulation and to consider in its context the classic problem of skepticism in terms of the three components of the simulated world: metaphysics, ontology and epistemology. The question of whether the subject’s beliefs about the world are true in the simulation in in the focus of attention. The goal of formulating a new hypothesis is to describe the world of computer simulation in the most detail, including the creator of the simulation and the laws by which the simulated world operates. Such a detailed description of the simulated world can be viewed as a model of our world and allows thinking about fundamental laws from the perspective of an external observer, and not an included subject. But, in this research, the problem of skepticism is considered from the point of view of the subject in the simulation, in the framework of the coherence theory of truth. The positions of virtual realism, based on the interpretation of David Chalmers, and informational skepticism of Luciano Floridi are described too.

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