Do you believe we're living in a simulation? Serious discussion (no trolling)

I've been reading a lot lately about glitches in the matrix - deja vu, quantum mechanics, the fine-tuning of constants - and I'm genuinely wondering if we're living in some kind of simulated reality. Not in a sci-fi way, but as a legitimate hypothesis.

The Mandela Effect is the main thing that gets me. Hundreds of thousands of people remember things slightly differently than they actually are. Either we're all delusional (unlikely) or reality itself is slightly mutable. That could indicate a simulation running corrections or updates.

I'm not saying this to be wacky. I'm saying it because the alternative - that consciousness exists independent of physical reality and somehow reality shifts to match it - might actually be weirder than simulation theory.

What's your take? Serious replies only please.

The Mandela Effect is just false memory in action. It's well understood psychology. Humans are brilliant at pattern-matching and rubbish at recording exact details. That's not a glitch - that's evolution. Your brain is supposed to remember the gist, not the exact pixels. This doesn't prove simulation, it proves we're not very reliable witnesses.

I take simulation theory seriously because it's actually more statistically likely than us being in base reality. If simulations are possible, and future civilisations create many of them, then odds-on we're in one. But the Mandela Effect is not evidence. That's just psychology being psychology.

the alternative - that consciousness exists independent of physical reality and somehow reality shifts to match it - might actually be weirder than simulation theory

Actually, quantum mechanics suggests something like that. Observation affects outcome. The double-slit experiment shows this. Maybe consciousness isn't weird, maybe consciousness is more fundamental than we think, and physical reality is the derivative thing. That's even more interesting than simulation theory.

The quantum mechanics argument is popular but misunderstood. 'Observation' in physics just means 'interaction with a measuring device.' It's not about consciousness. That's a pop-sci misreading that keeps getting repeated. As for simulation - sure, mathematically possible, but unprovable and unfalsifiable, which means it's not really a scientific hypothesis.

What bothers me is that simulation theory has become unfalsifiable. Any anomaly gets blamed on 'glitches' or 'updates.' But that's the same thing creationists do with evolution - the theory explains everything, so it explains nothing. I'm open to it, but I'd need to see something that literally cannot be explained any other way.

Okay but what if the fact it's unfalsifiable IS the point? If we're in a sufficiently advanced simulation, it would have to be indistinguishable from reality. That's not a flaw of the hypothesis - that's the whole point. We might be looking for evidence when the whole premise is that no evidence would be possible.