The Tar Pit

The subject matter of this article, if we're to call it that, has been on the lips of most "tech enthusiasts" for the last half a decade, if not more. Suddenly, the ideologues du jour, in finding themselves invested with some public exposure, and with that a certain type of power, started fancying themselves philosophers. This, in turn, led their subjects to believe that there must be something there in this so-called hypothesis, that "we are living in a simulation". Now, given all this, the actual subject matter of this article is my deconstructing the whole thing for my own first and foremost, and secondly, the reader's amusement.

So, before even attempting to answer the question posed by said ideologues and their assorted "scientists", the first thing that I think one needs to ask himself is: what even is "a simulation"? The word itself comes from Latin, most likely via French, and it has the same root as the word "similar". Not only that, but the original sense of "simulatio" was copy, imitation, something that resembles [a thing], that is maybe a fake or a "mock" of something, but not the thing in question. More recently, the word "simulation" has become to mean a computer model and/or replica of some particular object. Speaking of which, what is the object in question? If we're going to ask ourselves whether "we", humanity, live in a simulation, or whether, say, the physical (material) universe is a simulation, then we'd better be prepared to answer immediately: a simulation of what¹, more exactly?

Take Grand Theft Auto, the computer game, for example. Upon taking a cursory look at San Andreas, one could say that it is a simulation of certain aspects of the real world, namely 1990s Los Angeles. But really, it's the "certain aspects", which are by themselves limitative, coupled with the computer tech used to make the game, which make up the so-called simulation. The simulation covers the architecture of some buildings, the manner in which some people carry themselves, some of the "lore" of those times, but certainly no magnetic or quantum phenomena occurring in 1990s Los Angeles, if you know what I mean. There's a very particular aspect that's being simulated, but certainly not "the observable universe".

Still, I will admit that there may be something to the so-called simulation hypothesis. For example, the fundamental problem with physical observers can be superimposed on this limitative nature of simulations: any physical measurement instrument, be it one of the senses or an artificial object, is by its very nature limited in both the field and the range that it can measure. The human eye, say, cannot perceive acoustic phenomena as such, and even the electromagnetic phenomena that it can perceive are limited to the visible spectrum of said field, and often these phenomena are distorted in some way or another, e.g. through an optical field of view. In this sense, one could say that everything perceived through the senses is a simulation of the real world, that occurs inside the perceiver's brain. This, coincidentally, is what is called solipsism.

But then, if we tried to argue the opposite, namely, that there must be some entity that were capable of perceiving the universe "as it is", in its entirety, then we would necessarily arrive to God, and particularly nowadays, to post-religion. So it looks like taken from this particular angle, the problem cannot be settled philosophically either way: if you ask me, I'll have no way of knowing whether the observable universe is somehow a computer simulation of a "realer" universe, or multiverse, or whatever the fuck.

But then again, if we went back to the original meaning of "simulation", things would look a hell of a lot more intriguing, because then, taken as such, the whole question would be part of a meta-discourse that is turning towards and against itself. Because the question could then be rephrased as: is everything, indeed, fake and gay? In trying to expand upon this, we immediately find out that we've actually been there before:

Anyway, I don't mind, say, the blackpilling: I agree with them that Trump and Ciolacu are part of the same "Matrix" and that Călin Georgescu is... wait a second, is the Matrix just another signifier for the same thing as The Reality TV show? Well then I agree that everything's fake these days, but fakery isn't really the point of the so-called Matrix. Since we're doing metaphors, the Matrix, or the system if you'd like, is the software that runs a civilization, the sum of its people's thoughts and the interactions arising between them (the thoughts). In particular, in today's democracy one programs this software using a nifty tool called PR: when you become popular, someone else is going to say something about you and (depending on the someone and the say) they'll cause a memory corruption in a variable, thus co-opting your control flow and causing another image of you to spring forth. And when they do, that's "reality" y'know, that is, summing up to the Matrix.

I think that this is a great explanation of why, say, Musk, is pushing the idea that "we" are living in a simulation. What he says in fact is that he owns a platform, Xwittergram or whatever, and each bubble there is a "simulation", i.e. a view of the world, that is, a very carefully distorted representation thereof. And the more carefully crafted the distortion, the more the inhabitants of said "simulation" are unable to distinguish between that and reality. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Anyways, I think that this is pretty much all there is to the so-called hypothesis.

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