The Oscars may be proof we are living in the Matrix

As you are probably aware, there was a massive screw-up at the Oscars on Sunday, with La La Land mistakenly being announced as Best Picture. Moonlight won.

Picture: EPA

It was a screw-up of the highest order (when it comes to Hollywood anyway) - the sort of thing you can imagine happening in a bad comedy, but not real life.

Which means some people now think that it’s proof that we are all living in a computer simulation.

Yes. Seriously.

According to N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers, the only explanation for all the crazy stuff that’s been happening at the moment is that the real world is a simulation, and someone is messing around with it.

How else could a reality TV star who once headlined Wrestlemania be the actual President of The United States of America?

Picture: Getty Images / Aude Guerrucci / Pool

Or this year’s insane Super Bowl finale?

Picture: Getty

The New Yorkerdescribes it as being like a simulation videogame, much like The Sims or Football Manager, where you get bored and start messing around just to see what you can do.

And if you believe that, the wrong winner being read out at the Oscars if obviously just another example of someone messing about with the programme again.

This isn’t just a crackpot theory found at the neither regions of the internet – it was actually debated by important physicists and philosophers at the American Museum of Natural History last year.

The New Yorkerexplains the reasoning behind the idea:

Since the advance of intelligence seems like the one constant among living things—and since living things are far likelier than not to be spread around the universe — then one of the things that smart living things will do is make simulations of other universes in which to run experiments.

And if that’s true, then it’s much more likely that we're in a fictional world, rather than a real one.

Since there will be only one “real” universe, and countless simulated ones, the odds that we are living in one of the simulations instead of the one actual reality are overwhelming.

Yeah, don’t think about it too much, it’ll fry your brain.

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