I have read only the last page of this thread, but have a strong POV that the "physical world" does exists, is NOT a simulation, in part because the simulation requires a simulator, much bigger / more powerful than just having physical laws govern the behavior of all matter in the universe. For example, just consider the dynamics of each grain of sand on the world's beaches - i. e. the simulation would need to model the motion of EACH grain of sand in precise agreement with physical laws as they are moved by waves breaking on the shore, and as it collides with others and is dragged by the moving water, the force of gravity and surface tension acting on it, etc. Simulating only a cubic centimeter of beach sand accurately IN REAL TIME is trillions of times more complex than all the world's computers could do in a month of calculations for each second of simulated time.
I do, however believe that human brains (and other higher animals) do run an adequate, but not precise, simulation of the physical world their bodies have sensors following. - For example the retinal cells sense or can following a portion of the EM spectrum we call visible, but not the portion we call micro waves etc. I. e. my model of perception is quite different from that accepted by main stream cognitive scientists. They think perception "emerges" after many stages of neural transforms of the input sensory signals. That is nothing more than hand waving non-sense with zero explanatory power as says nothing about the neural mechanisms creating the perceptions that emerge. Also it strongly conflicts with well established neurological facts.
For example, the information in the sensory input signals is deconstructed into different characteristics that are further process by other neurons in widely separated parts of the brain and never again reassembled in any part of the brain, yet we perceive a unified world. To give a specific example, consider this very simple visual stimulation field:
A yellow tennis ball rolling towards a red cube of about the same size on a large green table (so large no other light is coming to the retina). After the continuous visual field has been parsed into these three objects* mainly in the visual area called V1, the three colors are set to V4 and their movement (speed and direction) to V5. In V1 and V2 their shapes are determined. So the three characteristics (shape, color & motion) are separated decomposed characteristic that never come together again in the brain; yet we correctly perceive them - as they are in the physical world. Not the seven other ways these three could be perceived. I. e. not as a stationary red table, a rolling (or sliding) yellow cube and a stationary green tennis ball.
My parietal tissue, Real Time Simulation, explains this unified perception AND why the visual field objects were decomposed into their "characteristic" (more than eight are known, thing like surface texture, etc. and all processed separately in different neural tissue, never to come back to any common brain tissue.) It is supported by dozens of known facts that the accepted "perception emerges" can not explain, or even contradicts. One quick example: How does a visual experience / perception "emerge" in dreams with eyes closed in a dark room?
For more but still very partial evidence and some brief discussion read this post:
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...Nonexistence&p=2899438&viewfull=1#post2899438
There you will see a link to about eight pages (if printed) of discussion and much more supporting evidence from many different fields of knowledge, but the focus of that link is to show how the RTS makes it possible than Genuine Free Will , GFW, to NOT be in conflict with the physical laws that control the firing of every nerve in your body, especially those in the brain. (Not a proof that GFW exists, only that it could. I tend to think GFW is the most universal of all illusions.)
* In the published paper the longer link on GFW is derived from, I also explained how the parsing in V1 is done using known properties of how neurons in V1 interact with near by neurons .- I. e. that they reinforce (have mutual stimulation) for like oriented "line detectors" (which Hubel & Wiesel discovered and got a 1962 Nobel Prize for their work)** but a mutually inhibitory influence on the near by line detectors with the orthogonal orientation and several of the Gestalt laws by using know properties of neurons, not hand waving.
** BTW their cells are not "line detectors" but more like Fourier filters (more precisely Gabor function filters). The stimulus they showed to the monkey with in dwelling electrodes in V1 was a large field of parallel uniformly spaced high contrast lines (mainly so it did not matter where the monkey looked). If you do a Fourier analysis on that parallel line grating it is strongly spiked at one special frequency and one orientation. - That is why they found cells sensitive to the rotation of their line grating pattern. Just like the response of a complex electrical circuit is easier to understand after it is resolved into Fourier components, so too the Brain seems to work in a "Fourier like transformed space." One advantage of this is where in the visual field an object is, is not important for identifying it - the 2D Fourier transform is independent of location of the object.