[Editor’s Note: This fine essay was submitted over two years ago, but we never got it off the ground. We are prompted to publish it now because of something revealed by a recent book review: “The Novel That Riveted France During Lockdown Arrives in the U.S.” (Roger Cohen, New York Times, November 23):
Yet in the end the double anomaly at the heart of the novel – the upending of time in a world that discovers it is simulated – captured a moment when the pandemic stopped the world and existence veered toward the virtual.]Are we living in a simulation? And what if we are? A 23-minute documentary film, What If the Earth Does Not Exist?1, explains what “living in a simulation” means and why the idea is taken seriously as a possibility. The film is imaginatively and descriptively visual. I had seen many of its demonstrations before, but they have been effectively re-imagined here. The film makers spend so much time on the video game series Grand Theft Auto, however, that I suspect coin may have changed hands – maybe I’m just joking with this observation.
Or, rather than watch the film, you might prefer reading Wikipedia’s explanation of the “Simulation Hypothesis,” which has a section on a theorist prominently mentioned in the film – Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom.
The thing I find most strange about all of this is that the idea of a simulated universe is neither strange nor unfamiliar. Mystics, psychonauts, philosophers, and theologians have been saying roughly the same thing for eons. If the testimony of the shaman is to be taken at his word, the idea may actually be older than civilization itself.
The 4th Century BCE pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus posited that all matter is composed of atoms, particles so small and all-pervading that they can be neither destroyed nor divided. Of course, their existence in something other than a primordial, undifferentiated soup requires organization. And this elicits the question, Who or what does the organizing? As our fundamentalist Christian brethren are fond of asking the followers of Darwin, Can you have organized reality without an organizer, or Creation without a Creator? Even atheist physicists are beginning to ask this reverently of the Universe itself: Is you is or is you ain’t my Daddy? (Mommy?)
Throughout the ages, philosophers have conceived the universe through allegory. Plato, who was a contemporary of Democritus, spun a yarn in his Republic about slaves chained in a cave whose only distraction and entertainment lay in the shadows cast on the wall before them.2 They became so used to this situation that they began to believe it was the sum of reality. What Plato was getting at with this strangely prescient anticipation of the modern-day motion-picture theatre was that our everyday world of material reality is only a shadowy simulation of a higher organizing reality that is the only real thing. We are an illusion, a failed reject from the mold of our higher self, which is perfect. Apologies if this is starting to sound more Thomas Aquinas than Plato.
Later the Portuguese/Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza posited that the material world was as though comprising billions of timed clocks, with no causality but only coincidence, even in the most fundamental laws of nature. This seems to anticipate quantum entanglement, which is discussed in the film.
“Thank God Spinoza was a lens and instrument maker,” my buddy Severn Darden used to say. “What kind of a universe would we believe ourselves to be in if he’d been a baker?” That scientific clockwork theory of the nature of the universe has endured for nearly 200 years, excepting one or two rogues. Chaos theory laid it to rest as late as the mid-20th Century.
See “The Secret Life of Chaos” for a definitive demonstration of the impact of Chaos Theory on the old orrery idea of a predictable universe.
Throughout the ages, philosophers have conceived the universe through allegory. Plato, who was a contemporary of Democritus, spun a yarn in his Republic about slaves chained in a cave whose only distraction and entertainment lay in the shadows cast on the wall before them.2 They became so used to this situation that they began to believe it was the sum of reality. What Plato was getting at with this strangely prescient anticipation of the modern-day motion-picture theatre was that our everyday world of material reality is only a shadowy simulation of a higher organizing reality that is the only real thing. We are an illusion, a failed reject from the mold of our higher self, which is perfect. Apologies if this is starting to sound more Thomas Aquinas than Plato.
Later the Portuguese/Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza posited that the material world was as though comprising billions of timed clocks, with no causality but only coincidence, even in the most fundamental laws of nature. This seems to anticipate quantum entanglement, which is discussed in the film.
“Thank God Spinoza was a lens and instrument maker,” my buddy Severn Darden used to say. “What kind of a universe would we believe ourselves to be in if he’d been a baker?” That scientific clockwork theory of the nature of the universe has endured for nearly 200 years, excepting one or two rogues. Chaos theory laid it to rest as late as the mid-20th Century.
Our present computer simulation allegory of the universe is still an allegory, isn’t it? It certainly is the most interesting interpretation of the nature of reality. Like in past allegories, it is subject to all the mental and material limitations of our time. If near term human extinction is not in the cards, could there yet be a higher and more profound one than our computer simulated universe being projected by Elon Musk?
Arthur C. Clarke is quoted as saying that advanced technologies will always be recognized as gods.
Let me cut through the mist here and suggest a far more immediate if controversial explanation. I am talking of the DMT experience [dimethyltryptamine] as commented on by Terrence McKenna and others. In fact the reason this explanation, perhaps the only reason for accepting it is the universal nature of similar perceptions about it. Let me make this a little clearer. If a psychotic patient is hallucinating in a mental ward upstate, his reality is regarded as inauthentic by reason of its uniqueness. Now if two of your patients on different wards are experiencing the same hallucination, you had better start finding a place on your book shelf for your Nobel Prize. If reports have it that many hallucinations of DMT trippers are identical, wouldn’t you at least think this landscape worth investigating?
Let me cut through the mist here and suggest a far more immediate if controversial explanation. I am talking of the DMT experience [dimethyltryptamine] as commented on by Terrence McKenna and others. In fact the reason this explanation, perhaps the only reason for accepting it is the universal nature of similar perceptions about it. Let me make this a little clearer. If a psychotic patient is hallucinating in a mental ward upstate, his reality is regarded as inauthentic by reason of its uniqueness. Now if two of your patients on different wards are experiencing the same hallucination, you had better start finding a place on your book shelf for your Nobel Prize. If reports have it that many hallucinations of DMT trippers are identical, wouldn’t you at least think this landscape worth investigating?
And I am referring to the modern psychonaught only as an example. Throughout the known human history there have always been what anthropologists call the shaman. There are evidences of it even among the ancient and contemporary hunter gatherers. Explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society is ethno-botanist Wade Davis. He, of Serpent and Rainbow fame, has combed the network of global indigenous societies of “The Ethnosphere” as he calls it, to find out the belief systems, ceremonies, and entheogens that live in these vanishing cultures. His stories will amaze you.
Nearly all indigenous cultures practice ways of transcending the time/space illusion. Plant spirits and medicines are an essential part of this experience. This world the person visits and the shaman controls is always referred to as being super real. Aldous Huxley refers to the super reality involved in all visionary experience in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception. I say all this not to wow you with the universality of visionary experience, but to demonstrate that a recognition of the simulation nature of this reality is very ancient. We have been talking to these intergalactic Game Boys since the beginning of modern time. It is only the Younger Brothers with their computers who have finally gotten around to discovering this. Ha ha.
Of course it could all just be a new tune to whistle while passing the graveyard of Western Civilization. (Just have to end on a negative note, don’t you, Bob?)
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2. In a strange way, the character Chauncey Gardiner (Chance, the gardener) in Hall Ashby’s 1979 film Being There, is kind of Platonic. Chauncey (played by Peter Sellers) has spent his whole life as constrained and bound as a chained slave. All he knows of reality is what he is able to see on his television. Like our would-be philosopher king, Chauncey is rudely turned out of his home and, through a series of real-world experiences and coincidences, becomes a kind or latter-day philosopher king. He was last seen actually walking on water.
Of course it could all just be a new tune to whistle while passing the graveyard of Western Civilization. (Just have to end on a negative note, don’t you, Bob?)
_______________
1.
2. In a strange way, the character Chauncey Gardiner (Chance, the gardener) in Hall Ashby’s 1979 film Being There, is kind of Platonic. Chauncey (played by Peter Sellers) has spent his whole life as constrained and bound as a chained slave. All he knows of reality is what he is able to see on his television. Like our would-be philosopher king, Chauncey is rudely turned out of his home and, through a series of real-world experiences and coincidences, becomes a kind or latter-day philosopher king. He was last seen actually walking on water.
| Copyright © 2021 by Bob Boldt |
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