red pill, blue pill

Expounding on comments made by one the industry’s visionaries at a coding conference, Vox magazine delivers a very good and accessible primer for the probing question whether we exist in a “base” reality or are living in an advanced simulation. Like the classic Brain-in-a-Vat inquiry, our philosophic prowess cannot solve the nature of the Universe, but I never really understood why a very complex scenario might be preferred (more likely) than a simpler one, albeit mundane one.
Even if technological advance were to grind to a halt or hit some unforeseen barrier, it’s easy to image us experiencing a virtual reality of our own making that’s indistin- guishable from the outside looking in, so suppose what an alien intelligence might develop over a thousand years or in ten thousand years. Given that there would be countless trillions of computers running, the odds that we’re in a so-called base, foundational existence is diminishing low, if one accepts the logic of the argument. What do you think? Is being a playable-character in a super-intellect’s video-game different than being in the Mind of God?