AIN'T NOTHING NEW ABOUT THE IDEA THAT WE LIVE IN A SIMULATION, FOLKS!

From the Vedic notion of the Veil of Illusion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, philosophers and mystics have always doubted that the existence we experience is Truly Real

HEY NEVERMORONS!

Happy 2024, everyone! I hope you’re all well.

I’ve been a little break lately, but I’m planning to get back to work soon.

I’m pleased to report that I have a treat for you metaphysics buffs, though. Regular Nevermore contributor Starr O’Hara has outdone herself with her latest piece, which uses Elon Musk’s dubious claims about metaphysics as a jumping-off point to point out that there is nothing new about the idea that we live in a simulation.

I sometimes refer to the Universe as “the energetic matrix within which we are all embedded”, which is a term that I learned from Terence McKenna. Personally, I believe that the question about whether or not we live in a simulation is a very interesting one, because it leads us to the question “What is really real, anyway?” Asking such questions which will lead us into a search for some kind of theoretical metaphysical unity that we can derive logical truths from. Fortunately, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel - many ancient cultures asked themselves the same questions that we’re asking now, and we can learn a lot from their answers.

I hope that you enjoy this article as much as I did!

Stay tuned for more crazy conspiracy theorizing and unauthorized philosophizing from your favourite purveyors of anarchist metaphysics! We’ve got lots more coming soon!

As always, your comments are appreciated. And if you haven’t already become a paid subscriber, it’s not too late to turn from the error of your ways!

for the wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

Starr O'Hara

Jan 5, 2024

Are we virtual experiencers living in a simulated world?

Simulation Hypothesis posits that there may be a reality realer than real, that we may be virtual beings living out our whole lives—hangnails and all—in a highly complex computer program. The idea captured the popular imagination with the release of The Matrix in 1999, and has since inspired many more fictional explorations, as well as a good deal of debate among philosophers and futurists. Elon Musk has been one of the more vocal proponents of simulation theory, stating at a 2016 conference that “The odds we are in base reality is one in billions.”

In 2003, Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom published the short but thought-provoking (and a bit controversial) paper “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?” , which deals with how a simulated reality would work, speculations on whether humankind will ever achieve the capability of building one for ourselves, and the likelihood of us already being in one.

The idea that we are all in a virtual reality seems pretty far-fetched, and Bostrom’s paper doesn’t say emphatically that we are, but it argues that in order to believe we definitely aren’t, then we would have to accept at least one of two (perhaps even farther-fetched ideas) as fact: (A) we would have to believe that humans are very likely to go extinct before reaching a “post-human” stage of evolution, or (B) we would have to accept that “any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof)”. If we believe either of those two propositions, then we are safe disbelieving proposition (C): that we are very likely living in a simulation. If we believe neither (A) nor (B), then rationally, we must accept (C). The paper is worth a read.

But prior to the if, then scenarios, the whole concept of computer simulations, as articulated by Bostrom, rests on the idea that it’s possible for consciousness to be programmed into silicon. Bostrom takes this as a foregone conclusion, but I think it’s a pretty big assumption. Not because silicon wouldn’t be capable of supporting conscious life. Sure, why not? But because it assumes that consciousness is something that humans could potentially create or harness and put into anything we like.

Even if you see no difficulty there, the problem of the project’s feasibility still remains.

We’re talking about a simulation that could support 8 billion consciousnesses (humans) and all the background environment: butterflies, planets, traffic jams, etc. The tech would need to not only be able to sustain such a program, but to do it so perfectly, so convincingly, in such fine-grained detail, that none of the virtual experiencers would catch on.

The problem is in computing power. If a civilization had advanced its technology far enough to host conscious beings in a simulated reality, the argument goes, that would require a mind-boggling amount of energy. And then what if the simulation advanced far enough to create their own simulation? Theoretically it could be simulations all the way down. But any simulated reality spawning its own simulation would further drain the computing power of base reality, so multiple generations of simulation would be highly unlikely. This computing power problem significantly reduces the overall odds of our being in a simulation. That’s why many experts disagree with Musk, putting the odds of our reality being “base” at around 50/50.

But, hear me out. What if the assumption of limited energy is false? What if by making this assumption, we are simply projecting the limitations of our own experience of reality onto a theoretical base reality?

Well, as it turns out, thinkers have been thinking about these things for a long, long time. Simulation hypothesis is, at its essence, nothing new or novel. It’s a myth as old as human civilization, recently re-costumed in sci-fi garb. As long as humans have been trying to get down to the bottom of what this damnable place is and what the actual fuck we’re doing here, simulation theories have been posited.

The oldest known example is from one of the most ancient societies for which we have written records. The civilization that gave us the roots of our language, if we speak the tongues of India and Europe. Let’s take a look at the simulation theory of the Vedas.

The Supreme Personality of the Godhead said:

It is said that there is an imperishable banyan tree that has its roots upward and its branches down, and whose leaves are the Vedic hymns. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas. The branches of this tree extend downward and upward, nourished by the three modes of material nature. The twigs are the objects of the senses. The tree also has roots going down, and these are bound to the fruitive actions of human society.

— Bhagavad Gita 15.1-2

The mystical banyan tree Lord Krishna describes in the above verse—using imagery uncannily similar to Jesus’s mustard seed metaphor—can be interpreted as representing the entirety of what exists, with its roots in the sky (spiritual realm) and its branches in the earth (material realm). There’s also another possible interpretation. This view sees the banyan as representing only the portion of the entirety that we perceive. This material-reality-banyan is a shimmering reflection of the “real” tree (spiritual reality). It appears upside-down in the same way a tree on a river bank would cast its reflection upside-down in the water.

There are two creations of the universe in Hindu cosmology. The primary creation is metaphysical, composed of spirit, and eternal. The secondary creation is physical, composed of matter, and temporary. In Vedic myth, the material universe is manifested by the demigod Brahma, who, as secondary creator, creates all the forms that exist in the universe but not the substance of which everything is made. This substance is god-stuff, or sometimes thought of as the seeds of everything that exists. It pre-exists Brahma and will go on existing eternally, while Brahma himself—along with all of his creations—will eventually be snuffed out. Therefore, Brahma depends upon a higher god or ultimate reality as the source of his being, his power, and his creative activity. He is responsible for the creation of the world as we experience it, the illusion known as Māyā.

Māyā, literally translated, means “Not This.” It is both the creative power of the ultimate reality and the illusion that keeps the material from perceiving the spiritual. Comparing this ancient cosmology to the simulation hypothesis, Māyā is akin to the energy source within the hypothesis: it is both the creative power underlying the simulators’ experience, and, from the perspective of the consciousnesses in the simulation, it is the illusion itself. Brahma would be the post-human simulation creator, but where does he get the consciousness (spirit) to imbue into the living creatures he creates? Or how does he go about imbuing it? In the Vedic myth, this substance exists eternally. Brahma can’t create it, he can only play with it and shuffle it around, the way Minecraft Steve shuffles blocks of sand. Brahma’s primary function is to mold whatever that stuff is into matter, and in doing so, he creates the sense of separation between Divine and Material.

This same type of analogy has been used by many other cultures, mystics, and philosophers to explain the disconnect between the material and the spiritual and the resulting illusion. Consider Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, or the many creation myths from a wide range of cultures which relate that our world of forms and solid stuff was preceded by a world of more fluid substance and beings who molded it into solidities, separating or drawing it away from ultimate reality.

The Book of Genesis (riffing on an ancient Sumerian creation story) tells us that in the beginning, the world was “without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” God then separates the light from the darkness and the firmament from the waters, and gets to work creating. But in Genesis, too, we have a secondary creation: the one that takes place in the Garden of Eden.

Halfway around the world in pre-colonial Australia, the Aboriginal people told a similar story: that in the beginning, the world was soft, and the creation spirits arose to lift the earth and sky out of the ocean.

Minecraft Steve has a Dream

Let’s pause for a moment to consider how a virtual experiencer, in a simulation made by a post-human society, might view its creators’ world of origin. To simplify, just pretend you’re a conscious Minecraft Steve, dreaming a vague dream of our actual world, the world of your creators. You’re just a blocky little guy. Your world is sharp and square. All things are built out of cubes. Everything fits together neat and flush. But in this murky dream, things are much more squishy and fluid. Rather than only stacking on top of each other, things nestle and flow. You don’t even have the words “squishy”, “fluid”, “nestle”, “flow” in your vocabulary, or analogue concepts for them in your blocky little brain. You make do. In the beginning, the world was soft. Without form, and void.

Jesus Weighs In

Even Jesus of Nazareth may have had some things to say about this. He is often recorded in the gospels as speaking of spiritual blindness: that somehow, through our fallen condition, humans are unable to see reality as it really is. In Chapter 8 of the Gospel of John, the haranguing Pharisees insist to Jesus that his testimony about himself and God is invalid. He is only one person, and therefore his wild claims must be seen as confabulations with no witness to back them up. Jesus answers:

Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go. Ye judge after the flesh; I judge no man. And yet if I judge, my judgment is true: for I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me.

-John 8:14-16

Alas, the translation is all f’d up. Clearly Jesus can’t be saying “I judge no man,” if in the next sentence he says “And yet if I judge, my judgment is true.”

According to Biblical Greek translator Gary Gagliardi at Christswords.com (a wonderful Substack that seeks to explore the gospels in their original Greek and, when necessary [a lot], corrects the traditional English translations of the red text), what Jesus is likely saying here is:

“You yourselves about the flesh judge. I myself don't judge nothing.”

“Flesh” is the way Jesus refers to the material, human reality. Kind of like, recalling the Minecraft analogy, how we refer to everything that makes up Steve’s world as “block.” The double negative is used as a more emphatic negative in Greek, but in this context it could also indicate that Jesus considers this flesh to be “nothing.” When he judges, it is about the spiritual, and he, a native son of that reality, judges truly. He does not deign to judge the “flesh,” the material, because from his perspective it isn’t even a thing. Which is basically the same as what Krishna is saying throughout the Bhagavad Gita: that the spiritual is what is real, and the material is only a temporary apparition, a reflection in the waters.

If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense “real”, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.

- Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?”

We tend to think that a convincing simulation would have to be close enough to our actual reality to not give any clues to the virtual experiencers. But that assumes these experiencers have direct knowledge of what our world is like. If they don’t—if, as simulation hypothesis posits, they are simply silicon consciousnesses spun up on virtual machines, then there's no reason why Minecraft Steve would trust his dream, vague as it was, over the solid blocks that make up his experienced world.

And yet, that is not what we observe in our world. In our world, humans have a perennial, seemingly unstoppable propensity to believe in and attempt to connect with a higher reality. As long as there have been humans, there have been shamans, mystics, and sages. There have always been myths and religions. We have always pondered how to placate the nature spirits and please the gods. We make up sacraments and theories of salvation, and institute complex rules and rituals for the worship of a divinity most of us don’t claim to have ever seen. Since we have lived on this planet, we have always had a hunch that our life here wasn’t quite real. And not only that, but ancient cultures from impossibly distant places conceived of its unreality in remarkably similar ways. And now, as we see with the simulation hypothesis, cultures from temporally distant aeons likewise conceive of the higher level reality in basically the same way, but with less or more technological jargon.

It is almost as if, instead of dreaming of a world we have never actually seen or experienced, we are vaguely recalling something we have direct-but-obscured knowledge of: a deep memory, woven intricately through the strands of the collective psyche. Each era puts the encoded memory through the filter of its own contemporary experience to come up with a workable metaphor. So the Vedic civilization talks of lotuses, trees reflected on a river. Plato speaks of fire, shadows projected on the wall of a cave. And modern philosophers (and techbros) theorize about quantum computers and sufficiently fine-grained ancestor simulations.

This tendency is ubiquitous in human history even down to the point of imagining our own evolution into beings powerful enough to create worlds of our own. Simulation hypothesis is not the first school of thought to hit upon this, it’s just the first one to imagine gaining the capability through material means.

Without probing too deeply, Bostrom touches on this in his paper:

Although all the elements of such a system can be naturalistic, even physical, it is possible to draw some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world. In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are “omniscient” in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens.

-Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?”

So here we are at the threshold of a post-human future where we might finally be able to be the ones who get to play God with a secondary creation of our own.

From here we can venture on to all kinds of speculations about how this works. And in the long history of human civilizations, we have speculated a great deal. Consider that everything the simulation hypothesis needs to “flesh” itself out (lol) is already contained within the cosmologies and theologies of world religions. Is your ancestor simulation attempting to redress the moral/ethical conundrums in your race’s sordid past? Spin up the free will protocol and send more highly evolved avatars forth to teach those consciousnesses how to be good. Want to recycle consciousnesses for better efficiency? Implement the reincarnation protocol: just wipe the entity’s memory and throw them back into the simulation in a new skin!

Yes, beings from a sufficiently advanced civilization with a sufficiently powerful energy source would be functionally indistinguishable from gods from the perspective of the virtual experiencer.

Then what is the functional difference between a naturalistic simulation and a divine projection? I gave a lot of thought to this question. I sensed there was a fundamental difference—apart from the tech jargon in one versus religious language in the other—but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. But then, soaking in the bathtub this morning, it dawned on me, so obvious that I’m a little embarrassed at not having seen it immediately.

The real difference is in whether the power source is placed first or second in the equation.

The Vedic myth puts the power source first. Brahman, the ultimate, unchanging reality, the Observer that exists simultaneously at all points of time and space in the cosmos, is the unlimited energy source used by Brahma, a demigod, to assemble and sustain the projection of Maya. The Judeo-Christian creation story uses the same order of operations to delineate spiritual and material reality. Most religions and creation myths use some variation of what we will call the “power-source-first proposition.”

The simulation hypothesis, in contrast, reverses the order of operations. It uses a civilization-first proposition. A civilization must exist first, then it must create or discover a sufficient energy source in order to run its simulations. The problem with this is that you potentially run into an infinite regress issue: a wall into which the futurists, philosophers, and technologists who write about simulation theory may have already crashed.

Falsifiability Problem Already Solved by Hildegard of Bingen

We are left with just one problem, and it’s a big one. The hypothesis can’t be tested. And how would we even conceive of a test that could be capable of showing the hypothesis to be false? If we thought of a really good one, the simulation could just stop us before the moment of discovery, or wipe our memories afterward. It’s a real head scratcher.

That’s why some scientists are busy formulating methods for detecting a glitch in the matrix. Most of them have to do with creating scenarios that force the VR rendering to crash. This, of course, assumes once more that the energy source behind the simulation would be limited.

But throughout the ages, there have always been people for whom the test lies within.

Mystics of all ages have discovered the glitch in the matrix during states of altered consciousness. In meditation, countless folks have broken free from the illusion and entered into the source reality. They experience a sense of oneness with all things. They come to “know” themselves as beings of pure peace and love. Sometimes, they hear the voice of God.

This is where the rendering crashes, in the deepest part of our inner experience, once we learn to access it. The matrix’s glitch is in the brain or something. To those who’ve become intimately familiar with it, it doesn’t matter what part of the material gives rise to the glitch. They don’t judge nothing.

You don’t have to go back in time to talk to the Buddha or Hildegard of Bingen to learn more. Just chat up your local psychedelia enthusiast. A hero’s dose of mushrooms may not provide the outer evidence necessary to answer the question to the satisfaction of science, but it proves to the general satisfaction of dabblers that our material world—the solid blocks and squishy flesh that we perceive in our day-to-day lives—is merely a tiny fraction of the entirety. It is only the breadcrumbs we can perceive from our normal limited perspectives. Beyond or beneath or above that is where things get weird and wonderful. And even the psychedelic method of investigation provides only a crack of light—a door standing ajar this side of ultimate reality.

To step through, to crack the matrix wide open, you might consider taking up a sustained and serious meditation practice. To eventually find that place, deep within you which is without form, and void; where darkness is upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the waters.

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