Sorting the Minutiae of Imaginary Worlds

That’s a scary looking formula. We’ll come back to it later. For now, let’s talk about action films, insane gods, and butterflies.

Just before the turn of the millennium, the global zeitgeist was aflame with uncertainty about a great many things. Would the Y2k bug spark global chaos? Would the turn of the clock herald the Second Coming? What would become of Conan’s “In the Year 2000″ sketch?

This uncertainty had a ripple effect that reached the core of our collective anxieties, and was reflected back to us in the cinema of 1999 – a year of questioning the reality of… well… reality.

The Matrix: Are we living in a computer simulation?

The Thirteenth Floor: Are we living in a computer simulation within a computer simulation?

Dark City: Are we trapped in an alien simulation?

eXistenZ: Are we still in the game?

Fight Club: Am I Tyler Durden?

The Sixth Sense: Am I dead?

It certainly wasn’t the first time these questions have been collectively asked, and it wouldn’t be the last, either. As you might have guessed, the inspiration for bringing this all up right now is this summer’s big hit, Inception (Am I still dreaming?). There are serious philosophers (Descartes) who have postulated variations of the The Dream Argument, which states that we can never be fully certain whether or not we’re “awake” because a dreamer doesn’t realize he’s dreaming.

A dozen or so centuries before Descartes, a Chinese philosopher named Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly in a parable aptly named Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly:

Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly , a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

Around the same time, but a little further west, Plato questioned whether or not our perceptions are able to define what ultimately constitutes reality. He illustrated our sensory limitations with his Allegory of the Cave, which you should remember from your high school humanities class:

Well after Plato died of old age, there arose a sort of fusion of Christianity and Neoplatonism called Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that our world was a degraded copy of a higher-level of reality and consciousness, sort of like the loss of resolution when you look at a painting within a painting.

The most intact Gnostic texts we have today were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945. These documents contain treatises which explain this cosmology using the literary and religious tropes of the times in which they were written. They lay out an extremely dense and complex cosmic drama in which one of the gods, a pretty run-of-the-mill god as far as gods go, somehow spirals into a state of blind madness, leading him to believe that he is the One True God. This astral nutcase is referred to as the Demiurge, and he keeps us imprisoned here in this degraded reality with seemingly no way out.

The word ‘gnosis’ is one of the Greek words for ‘knowledge’. It’s fitting, as the Gnostics believe that the only true salvation for mankind is for us to awaken to the true nature of our imprisonment and eventually return to the higher level of being from whence we came.

Think of the prisoner who is freed from Plato’s cave. If he went back to talk to his old buddies, what would they think of him and all of the gobbeldy-gook coming out of his mouth? They’d probably either ignore it, or completely misinterpret it by utilizing their own limited frame of reference, right?

Likewise, if an ancient philosopher somehow spotted the seams of a simulated reality, how would they have interpreted it? Perhaps one possible answer to that question was found in the clay jars of Nag Hammadi in 1945. As one of Arthur C. Clarke’s laws of prediction states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Now that we have computer software and can use it to simulate physics, can we definitively state that we’ll never be able to create digital consciousness? Let’s go back to that scary looking equation at the top of this blog entry. It’s a temporal logic formula illustrating a trilemma created by Oxford philosopher, Nick Bostrom. This is the central formula in his Simulation Argument. The full text of the hypothesis can be found here.

In it’s simplest form, the Simulation Argument goes something like this. One of the following must be true:

1. No civilization will ever reach a technological level capable of producing simulated realities.
2. No civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will ever produce a simulated reality, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.
3. Almost all entities with our general set of experiences are living in a simulation.

If you think that (1) and (2) are both false, you should accept (3). The reason being that, if a civilization becomes both willing and capable of creating simulated consciousness, then the number of simulated entities created over the expanse of time would be likely to so vastly outnumber the number of “real” entities that have ever lived that it’s extremely improbable that you are not in a simulation.

It’s really just a probability experiment, but even accepting the Simulation Hypothesis as fact would not necessarily mean that one’s life is “fake” or that one’s memories are “false”. The reality could simply be that at the core of physics is computation, and that the invisible force which holds subatomic particles together is software.

If you want to loosen your grip on the certainty of your surroundings, spend a marathon weekend watching all of the great reality and/or memory-questioning films back-to-back, then pass out from exhaustion. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of dreams my recommended playlist would inspire:

1. Inception (Go see it in the theater. Twice.)
2. The Matrix
3. eXistenZ
4. Memento
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
6. Jacob’s Ladder
7. Total Recall
8. Twelve Monkeys
9. Lost Highway
10. Blade Runner
11. Mulholland Drive
12. Vanilla Sky

Tagged as: philosophy

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