No, you do not know. Neither do I. It goes beyond the "can't prove a negative" thing. Goodness, I hope you have a better argument than your knife thing. I guess you think all of those scientists never thought of that. Maybe there's a Nobel Prize for you if you call Oslo or Stockholm and tell them to take a knife to their wrist. It seems to scare you and your safe little world to think you know what Musk, Greene, Amodei, Leahy, Yampolskiy, Nick Bostrum and others who, dare I say, top your IQ by 50-80 points, maybe more, think. You can find hundreds of articles online, some fanciful, some scientific, that raise the possibility. I'll link a simple one at the end, leaving out the complex mathematics. Personally, I'm agnostic. It makes little difference in how I go about living, so it's merely an interesting philosophical exercise. I take those folks' word for it that it's a possibility, just as I take their word for it (particularly Greene and a few other particle physicists and cosmologists) that "something can come from nothing". (A new experiment just reported in the last few days proves quantum fluctuations show "stuff" emerging from nothing, so there goes the religious folks' spurious argument about creationism.) I've never seen an atom (except in images), and certainly I've never seen a proton, much less an up or down quark, but I accept they exist. I also accept Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", aka entanglement, because quantum computing is based on that theory and quantum computing seems to work. While I'm not a believer in "simulation theory", I appreciate that such a possibility seems as weird to people like you as the concept of gravity was to people hundreds of years before Newton. The Earth simply had to be flat, because otherwise we'd all fall off (to where?). I also understand the probability argument presented by guys like Yampolskiy. Neil de Grasse Tyson takes a very "scientist" approach, saying he's 50-50 on it. If you can conclusively prove we are not in a simulation, Elon and many other people whose intellect dwarfs yours are waiting for you to send electronic beams through seemingly empty space to a router and then to have your thoughts turned from electronic pulses back into symbols that Musk et al can then comprehend. That's a magical way of informing them of their so obvious fallacy and delusion. And since simulation theory is too scary for you, you best not read up on what scientists at Google opined when they began using the quantum systems they created, because they think the system works so quickly because it allocated the wide range of calculations to parallel universes in order to speed up computation, and then collated the data back into a prompt or token the Google folks could read. Religious people believe in another sort of simulation theory, but their AI system is some bearded eternal being who created 2 trillion galaxies, most with ~500 billion stars with possibly 10^24 planets, just so that on one of those 10^24 planets some vastly inferior creatures would cure it of its boredom and provide entertainment, like dying in an earthquake or tsunami, yet still saying their deity is "pure love" and just has an inscrutable Master Plan. And if those creatures suck up enough, they get to go to some country club in the sky when they pass or get 72 virgins spewing from some celestial factory. By the way, Newton was right about iron and gold, sort of. His lab just lacked the supernova needed to provide the energy to do it. His critics call him al alchemist, but perhaps he knew more about the creation of basic elements than them, but they lacked the ability to understand. In case you've forgotten or didn't know, supernovas were the fuel that took the hydrogen of the nascent Universe and created all the elements we know and love, eventually getting them to combine into molecules, then molecules combine into amino acids, which combined into proteins, when folded in bizarre ways to eventually develop the ability to self-replicate, which became cells, which became creatures, which evolved over ~4 billion years to become sentient beings, which then found ways to understand how this entire process came into being. All of that seems impossible, but here we are. It's beyond the ability of religious people to even consider it, kind of like someone too scared he could possibly be in a simulation to even begin to entertain the possibility. He just "knows", which is to say he lets ignorance and fear dismiss unpleasant possibilities simply because they threaten his comfortable view of existence. Anyway, Elon and Greene and a host of others are waiting for you to tell them they are wrong, so I'll let you get to it. Or you can pony up for therapists and drugs and send them to the AI labs and labs of universities like MIT and Caltech and Stanford in the hopes you can "cure" those delusional scientists. One Link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a70594935/simulation-theory-new-physics-law-of-infodynamics/
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