This is [my] now-19YO [daughter\’s take on the Ohio/cats thing. It occurs to me that TESCREAL-esque claims that we live in a simulation assume “we” = the entire universe rather than something smaller. That assumption seems unusually ambitious, even by humanity’s standards. For most of science fiction’s history, “we” referred to something smaller, usually a planet or a solar system: Martians attacking us, aliens from some other star attack us, etc. But what if the unit of analysis was smaller still, like the nation-state, one of the fifty states, a county, or even a neighborhood? Like, “we” in the US live in a simulation but Canada and Mexico do not? For the better part of the last century, US culture was mired in the idea that rising East Asian powers (Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea) just “copied us.” So, as more and more of America‘s material culture was manufactured in Asia, “we” do, by our own standards, live in a world of copies. That’s not quite a simulation, but close enough for gummint work, imo.