Is our world a simulation, as some scientists claim? The idea that the world is not what it seems is very old.
We find it in Hinduism, Buddhism and – around the beginning of our era – among the Gnostics. Plato depicts it vividly in his ‘Allegory of the Cave’. Today, we have created a cave that we carry with us in our mobile phones.
In recent times it has become, if not commonly accepted, then at least a topic of considerable debate, that the world we live in, from the cozy familiarity of our own homes to the furthest galaxy unthinkable light years away, is a kind of fake, or at least a copy, a simulation. What may once have seemed the stuff of science fiction – think, of course, of the film The Matrix – is, for some scientists, now seen as, if not yet fact, then as a 99% probability on its sure way to becoming one. High profile technology giants like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel seem to accept it, and in an odd way, the fact that the simulation theory is yet to be proved or even to be accepted as provable, seems, in their case, to be one very good reason to accept it, as an act of faith; both have described themselves as Christians, although not in an orthodox sense. In some ways, this faith strikes me as an example of the “promissory note” character of much current science, the contention that, while we may not be able to prove X now – whatever X might be – we most likely will be able to prove it soon enough. So, if we can’t yet prove that we live in a simulation, don’t worry. With a few more years and more technological advances, we’ll get there, you’ll see.
Are we being simulated by a future civilisation?
The main idea behind this notion comes from the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. In essence he maintains that just as we, now, run computer simulations of any number of things, from the weather to traffic to military combat – not to mention video games and virtual reality – so too, advanced civilizations – either extraterrestrial or in the future – will run them, but on a much larger and more complex scale. These advanced civilizations would run many such simulations and one of them is life here on planet Earth. Quantum physics allows this, with quanta of ‘reality’ being manipulated in the same way that pixels on our computer screens are. The many ‘coincidences’ that seem to have been involved in life appearing here, and which for other scientists suggest what is known as the “anthropic cosmological principle” – which argues that, rather than a fluke in a hostile and meaningless universe, our universe is one in which intelligent life must emerge – are for the Simulationists, evidence for, well, the simulation. Someone, they say, is running the show.
For some that might be God. For others, it’s the great computer programmer in the sky. For some of the Simulationists, it is ourselves, in the future. We then are simulations that our future selves have created. Yet if we give rise to the future generation that the Simulationists suggest are simulating us, it’s difficult to escape the logical problem of how a ‘fake’ reality can give rise to the ‘real’ reality that creates it.
One remark by one of the scientists advocating the simulation theory stopped me when I read it. Rich Terrile, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, believes the simulation theory is so probable, that “if we are not living in a simulation, it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance.” How he could possibly determine whether it was likely or unlikely escapes me, given that, if we are living in a simulation, any notion of “likelihood” would necessarily be part of the simulation and so unable to pass judgment on it as a whole. And in any case, how “likely” was the Big Bang – if indeed it happened – or, better still, how likely is existence itself? How could we possibly answer that question, given that our notions of likelihood are part of what we are asking about?
The question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” has stopped some hefty minds in the past: Leibniz, William James, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, not to mention countless children, before the wonder is drummed out of them. That what I see when I open my eyes is a simulation is no more likely than that I see anything at all. That the universe “just happened” seems incredibly unlikely, but minds like Stephen Hawkings, who believed he could know the mind of God, more or less said that it did, although his suggestion of a “quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing vacuum” being behind things sounds much more scientific.
Besides being “unfalsifiable” – the philosopher Karl Popper’s definition of a theory lacking “scientific” status – simulation theory has some other things going against it. For one, it assumes that “advanced civilizations” would be doing the same things that we are, like running simulations, but on a bigger scale. That strikes me as suggesting that they would have busses, just as we do, but that they would be a mile long and move at 1,000 miles an hour. If these civilizations are so advanced, why would they bother doing the same things scientists here and now are doing? Perhaps their being ‘advanced’ would be better evidenced by their transcending technology altogether?
The assumption that any definition of being ‘advanced’ must be in terms of technology is itself is a product of another problem with the theory: it presents a metaphor as a fact. When Newton did away with the old Ptolemaic model of the universe and replaced it with one modelled on a machine, he projected a metaphor onto reality. The Einsteinian revolution did the same when it overthrew Newton; now, through relativity, the universe was like an expanding balloon. Today it is no surprise that computers and the ‘virtual realities’ that emerge from them provide the metaphor for the latest model of the universe, the simulation.
The illusory nature of our experiences
Yet even more than this, while being presented as the sharpest point on the cutting edge of scientific theory, the notion that the world we inhabit is somehow false – or at least not all it seems to be – is as old as the hills, simulated or not. Hinduism speaks of Maya, the illusory character of our experience of being separate from the world. Buddhism does as well and speaks of our Nescience, our ignorance of reality. But we needn’t go to strange altars to discover ideas that predate our current fascination with simulations. The west has produced them as well.
One indigenous source of an early simulation theory, we might say, are the Gnostics. The Gnostics were a diverse group of early religious movements, some of them Christian, flourishing mainly in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Many Gnostics distinguished between the transcendent, supreme God and the creator God of the Old Testament, whom they identified as a lesser divine being (the Demiurge). They tended to interpret Christ’s life, death, and resurrection in a symbolic and spiritual manner, emphasizing inner knowledge (gnosis) rather than a literal or historical reading.They are called Gnostics because, rather than accept Christ’s teachings through faith and dogma, as the literal Christians did, they sought gnosis, a Greek word meaning ‘knowledge’. This was not the sort of knowledge one gets through learning or study – what the Greeks called episteme – but a kind of immediate experiential knowledge, a knowledge that was an ‘experience’. This knowledge was of the true character of the world, which they believed was created by a false god – the ‘demi-urge’ – who came to believe he was the true God. We are trapped in the false god’s world, but we retain within our souls ‘sparks’ of light that are from the true God beyond creation. The Gnostics saw Christ as a liberator who came to Earth, not to die for our sins, but to teach the truth and show the way to release the sparks and return to our true source.
Until relatively recently, most of what we knew about the Gnostics came from hostile accounts by the early Church fathers. In 1945, this changed when a collection of Gnostic writings were discovered in Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. Through works like Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospels, a more positive understanding of what the Gnostics were about has emerged. By now, the term ‘gnostic’ has entered our common language and is used to characterise a number of works in popular culture, all sharing in some way the notion of a “false world.” I’ve mentioned The Matrix. Other films, such as The Truman Show, Dark City, and The Cube, present similar scenarios, of humans living in a world that they don’t realise is “unreal.” The novels of the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, many of which have been made into films, are frequently based on the same idea. Netflix series like Dark and others use the same theme of everyday reality being unlike anything we believe it to be. I would even say that the kind of “hermeneutics of suspicion” that the philosopher Paul Ricouer developed in the context of texts – seeking for their ‘hidden’ meaning beneath the surface – has translated into our contemporary epistemological uncertainty, exemplified in the rise of what we’ve come to see as a “post-truth” world made of “alternative facts” within a malleable reality. We seem to live in a time when everything is plausible yet nothing is certain, with a plethora of pervasive conspiracy theories dissolving the distinction between fake and ‘reality’.
Yet, even before the Gnostics, the father of western philosophy, Plato, presented what still stands as a symbol of the difference between knowing reality and being trapped in illusion. In The Republic Plato presents what we know as the Myth of the Cave. He asks us to imagine people chained in place in a cave, where they are forced to look straight ahead at a wall, on which shadows move back and forth. Behind them is a fire, which they cannot see, and before the fire people, whom they also cannot see, carrying objects which cast the shadows they see. As those chained look at the shadows, voices explain what they are. Fixed in place, unable to move, reality for them is what they see on the cave wall.
The philosopher, however, is somehow able to loosen his chains and turn around – can we say he looks inward, away from the unreal images on the ‘outside’? He sees that what he had taken for reality were merely shadows. But even more, he makes his way out of the cave. At first he is blinded by the sunlight – the Truth is a shock – but when his vision adjusts, he returns to the cave to tell his fellows what he has discovered. Alas, those who cannot see the Truth will not believe it and, as Socrates himself came to know, will hate those who try to make it visible to them.
In many ways, Plato’s cave strikes me as a more apt metaphor for today than the simulation theory. Or rather, I see our current obsession with our personal technology and the digital electronic world we enter through it, as a blend of Plato’s cave and simulation theory. But in this case, the simulation is not the world ‘out there’, the world of stars, clouds, sunlight, mountains, animals, trees and other people, but the world we enter when we narrow our consciousness down to what we see on an iPhone or other device. More and more, it strikes me, we are losing interest in the outer world – which the Simulationists tells us is a simulation – and are becoming increasingly addicted to the simulated world we find on our telephones. We seem to be going back into our own personal caves, portable ones, that we carry around with us, and on which we watch the shadows of reality provided by social media. The simulation, then, isn’t the world we see around us, but the one we spend our time in, when we shut out the world and enter the stream of electronic pseudo-reality we carry around in our pockets. Those who choose not to enter the cave, have to entertain the “extraordinarily unlikely circumstance” of an unsimulated world that still confronts us with the mystery of its existence.
This article is also published in the German print issue of LOGON
