Here’s some nice reading material for you …
It’s one of those ideas we want to be true, like a low-calorie non-alcoholic beer that actually tastes good. If it were real, it would somehow make sense of the chaos around us. But can you actually run an empirical experiment to prove it?
If reality is a construct, then your experiment is part of the construct. This is why the whole Schrodinger’s cat thing is bollocks, because the cat certainly observes the event and knows its current state. It’s like trying to figure out who’s pranking you by asking the prankster if they’re pranking you. It’s like that famous philosopher who said art doesn’t exist because “The function of art is to hold a mirror up to nature, and there simply isn’t a mirror big enough.”
(Also: imagine the existential crisis if someone did invent that mirror and the reflection looked like a Magic Eye poster of a schooner.)
I’ve read books on the Simulation Hypothesis. Most point out “inexplicable” parallels between philosophy, religion, and video games: a series of rules, quests, and side quests, karmic points, cosmic power-ups. The universe is made of tiny particles, like pixels on a screen. And since humans invented video games and computers, we must be in a video game running on some giant computer. (Rizwan Virk, 2019. I’m paraphrasing—poorly.)
But here’s the thing: much like how we send radio waves into space hoping for a reply, maybe using video games as a metaphor for existence is just a tech fad. Before video games, we didn’t say “Life is like Pong.” Before radios, nobody said, “Life is like AM talk radio, only louder.” We did have smoke signals, though. Imagine trying to explain the universe as “one big smoke signal.”
Oh, and hey—our eyes work kind of like cameras. Therefore, we must be robots! QED.
For all we know, Buddha’s Samsara, Aristotle’s determinism, Descartes’ rationalism, and Nietzsche’s perspectives were all correct simultaneously, and we’ve been wasting centuries overthinking it. Those thinkers weren’t selling $499 “Philosophy Masterclass” subscriptions. They weren’t chasing clicks. They were just risking their lives to say, “Here’s what I think is real.”
Sure, their societies didn’t have electricity, running water, or USB-powered keyboards that let you crank out endless philosophical hot takes from your phone, but they did put in their 10,000 hours. I doubt Bostrom would down a hemlock latte to defend the rights to his next book.
If I ever write a book on this, my thesis will be simple: if you’re powerful enough to create a VR simulation that fools billions of people, you’re also smart enough to hide the twist ending. You wouldn’t just change the constants of the universe mid-game like a bad DM trying to railroad his D&D players into attacking what is obviously a gas spore. “No, really, one of the eyes just winked at you. Roll initiative.” That’s cheating. And if it is true, we should be rioting in the streets like angry gamers screaming that the developers rigged the game to keep us grinding side quests instead of beating it.
The more we study the universe, the weirder and more complex it becomes. Which, to be fair, tracks with concepts like infinity, the multiverse, and entropy. And then there’s Borel’s infinite monkey theorem (if you give enough monkeys enough typewriters, they’ll eventually produce the works of Shakespeare). That’s actually more provable than most of these simulation arguments.
So maybe you’re not in a simulation at all. Maybe you’re just a cat in a box, having just inhaled a lethal dose of cyanide, killing time reading this while you wait to find out if you’re alive or dead.
If that’s the case …uh… thanks for stopping by, I guess?
