Why You Really Think You Live in a Simulation, Pt 1of3: The Bad News
All it takes is a little human intuition, no science required.
“…we must not forget what the simulation hypothesis really is. It is the ultimate conspiracy theory. The mother of all conspiracy theories, the one that says that everything, with the exception of nothing, is fake and a conspiracy designed to fool our senses. All our worst fears about powerful forces at play controlling our lives unbeknownst to us, have now come true. And yet this absolute powerlessness, this perfect deceit offers us no way out in its reveal. All we can do is come to terms with the reality of the simulation and make of it what we can.
Here, on earth. In this life.”
-Fouad Khan, writing for Scientific American
“The Tao that can be named, is not the true Tao.”
-The Tao Te Ching
Part 1: The bad news—You really do live in a simulation.
Part 2: The worse news—Believing you live in a simulation might be a sign of the end times.
Part 3: The good news—You can escape anytime and we will all be okay.
Part 1: the bad news
The Simulation You Live in Is Called Civilization.
The reason we’ve all collectively developed this paranoia that we are living in a mysterious computer program is that we are currently living in the most civilized civilization that has ever existed in historical memory.
This is to say, we have never lived in a time that is more full of societal artifice than the current one.
To make sense of this, understand that I’m not looking for the dictionary definition of civilization here, it’s not about the existence of social strata or money or language or [insert your anthropologist or sociologist’s checklist here]. Not about the absence of death by Sabertooth Tigers, or cannibalism, or human sacrifice, or [insert your intolerable savagery here], either. I’m talking about the civilizing drive.
What causes a group of humans to look at other humans and think themselves comparably more civilized? For the European colonial powers of the latter half of the second millennium, C.E., it was about clothing. This is why missionaries to Africa and Southeast Asia were always railing against the nakedness of the heathens. For the Greeks, it was the ability to speak Greek. People they couldn’t understand sounded like they were saying, “Bar, bar, bar” so they called them barbarians. For the Chinese, it was about rituals and manners.
At its most basic, civilization seems to be about the ability to define things, to derive meaning. It’s about the ability to reveal or cover up reality. Civilized peoples can work in the abstract, by representing or replacing a piece of our direct experience with an image or sound or piece of cloth, and then manipulating that symbol so as to inform our actions back in our direct experience. In other words, it’s our ability to simulate.
To civilize is to simulate.
What was the main stated aim of the imperial powers during the height of colonialism? To civilize the rest of the world.
Setting all that happened in its name aside for a second, consider what it functionally meant even without all the coercion and bloodshed: ensuring the locals adopted customs and practices like pretending that a piece of paper was actually a pound of gold (commerce), agreeing that everywhere you could walk to within your lifetime and everything on it could belong to a single person because they gave you some glass beads and you made a mark on some paper (property rights) or imagining that a body covered in particular arrangements of fabrics and ropes, leathers and feathers, was somehow more acceptable than one that was not (fashion*). Generally, they involved treating imaginary representations of things as if they were the real thing. Adding levels of simulation to their society.
Overstimulated and Over-simulated
Repeat and accelerate this process until 2021 and what we have now is levels of simulation so thick, we forget what we’re simulating or why we started simulating it in the first place.
Sports began as wargame simulations designed to train us for battle. Today, they’re used to distract us from the wars we’re currently fighting around the world.
What’s more, because most of us simulation theorists are comfortable, affluent, technologically above-average people, nearly everything we do is a simulation:
Our jobs are simulations of tribal hunter-gatherer activities with nearly all the stakes, physical dangers, and major discomforts removed.
We play games that simulate wars.
Fight wars on simulated screens.
Eat foods that simulate recognizable flavors.
Give orders to simulated servants
Believe stories that later turn out to be simulated facts
Everything you do is at least one level removed from trying to survive and rut in the wilderness. Add to that a year spent alone in our homes, and no wonder there’s this lingering sensation that nothing is real.
But just because your world is mostly simulations doesn’t mean all of reality is a simulation. The fact that we’re starting to believe the latter, though, is about to make everything a whole lot worse.
Part 2: The worse news—Believing you live in a simulation might be a sign of the end times. Next Week.
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*Why do you think the word “style” describes both the way in which one dresses and the way in which one speaks?
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Thanks for reading this far, I haven’t really thought about simulation theory all that much prior to writing this article. But credit for any somewhat original opinions no doubt goes to the authors of books I’ve read throughout the year and the meditating I’ve been doing now that I don’t have to spend an hour or more commuting to and from work. The extra time has allowed me to read more books and synthesize more insights. Hopefully, you find them useful or at least interesting.
I don’t do ads and I don’t want to charge for subscriptions. So if you find any of these thoughts interesting, maybe read some of the books that inspired them through my affiliates link. I don’t need the money so don’t feel obligated to support me or anything. It’s more curiosity about how all of this works and what your takes on the books are. If you’re shopping for gifts, these might be nice, too.
King Leopold’s Ghost really blew my mind over how two sides of the world can have such vastly different ideas of what’s really happening. Nearly everyone in Europe believed the king of Belgium was a hero bringing progress, democracy, and prosperity to the Congo. Meanwhile, to the people actually in the Congo for whom existence had become a living hell, calling the bearded monarch a demon was an understatement. It’s also a complete shock how few of us even know about the Congo outside of “Heart of Darkness”. Something to do with how the tactics used to bring about the Congo’s enslavement are those used to justify wars everywhere in every time, I suspect. Definitely a ‘quake book' for me.
The Tao Te Ching - This one isn’t an affiliates link, but it is my preferred version of the book. Commentaries are helpful, and the translations are simple, poetic, and easy enough to understand.
I learned about the concept of Building a Second Brain back when it was a $1000+ course being offered by Tiago Forte. I couldn’t justify the cost back then, so I pieced together most of it from his blogs and played around with his system until I ended up with something that works for me. It’s not as meticulous or nearly as organized, but it takes a lot less maintenance and upkeep. I’ll be buying this book and reviewing my system next year, and also giving it to any close friends in need of a way to organize their thinking.