I really don't think a logical, academic review of what I think the reality is of much use when in fact the very subject of what we are discussing is so strange and hard to fathom in our heads but I'll play.

to me, if we were to believe that our our idea of ourselves is actually not unique, that we are just a very large variation of the basic properties of consciousness (something we can't really quite put a finger on), then it can be said that we are in a simulation, for the same reason, you dream, you daydream.

Our brain frequently runs simulations during these period of rest and animals do as well. Why is it that we can be so convinced of our dreams as if it were real? Why is it that they by themselves have no real beginning or an end, sort of like our own existence? What if your life is just an episode of a dream? Who's running the simulations? Why is it not just one continuous flowing state? Why does it need to be disparate and seemingly discontinuous?

My view is that this is actually the most efficient state a simulation can reach. If it was one giant cesspool of initial variables in one bubble it would be pretty obvious for the inhabitants of the simulation to figure out the walls quickly and before long question what's outside of it. The same reason that we can realize we are dreaming and experience lucid dreaming. But, we can't for the love of god find this wall in our own reality because our brain through years of evolution by previous consciousness, have been designed to find safety in numbers, fight or flight reflexes, gather or horde scarce goods. Only when our innate animal like instincts are squelched can we experience reality in it's rawest and purest form, something buddhist tibetian monks often frequent, a higher form of understanding where they are able to feel the whole range of human experiences without actually doing them because they realize that it's actually our own consciousness that trap us into realities that we create for ourselves.

Knowing that we can and create simulations of our own through dreaming, out of will, help of substances or even meditation, it shows that at the outer level our reality can be fluid and can take many different shapes or forms.

In the end, our own intelligence, our ability to find patterns out of chaos, traps us into thinking that something that doesn't follow a rigid set of rules or lack of data automatically mean that they don't exist, when in fact, such narrow mindedness can only come from the choice to view reality and oneself with the same set of practices used in laboratory or whatever environment where such mentality has been useful.

I will say that even the latter situation is actually a simulation of it's own, but much much worse kind, it's created and rigorously maintained by other consciousnesses aimed at supressing all other views.

Quantumn theory suggests that we live in our own simulation create by us, religious texts also suggests the same thing, you shape your own reality but at the end of the day, it's lacking the same solid walls as the one you create, it must be that the most efficient simulation is also one where every possible permutation is achievable, that our collective human race is literally a race towards achieving some enlightened status as a whole, that through experiencing life in the myriad of lives, that our collective consciousness will improve and become efficient, that it outlives all things biological, it continues beyond even our own planet, maybe we are truly one with the universe and everything it represents, we are simply the creation, not of an external super intelligent aliens, not future versions of us running Matrix 2.0 for shits and giggles but because it simply is the way it is designed, the same way we discover math in our own reality, and how it reveals answers, it must be that we are the simulation, not the simulatees or simulators.