It was Nick Bostrom, from Sweden, who really exploded the idea that we're all living in a computer simulation. The idea—that the space we live in isn't what we think it is—might be older than writing. We may be a dream, swirling in the mouth of god. We may be characters in a storybook. We may be residing in The Matrix alongside Keanu...
Anyway, I've solved the whole thing. I know where we are. I know what we are. I know precisely what's going on. I'm standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before—the Bostroms, the Musks, the Vonneguts, the Wachowskis, et al.—and, I better win a Nobel Prize for all this grand excellence.
I'm going to make it easy for you. You will understand, at the end, even if you are stupid.
None of this is sourced. Take me at my word, because I'm at least as smart as Wile E. Coyote, super genius. Alternately, you can utilize the WWW to connect the dots in the same way I did.
The Earth is NOT flat—it is a sphere. This planet is an oblate spheroid. Everything in our reality gathers or bursts in circles or spheres. A drop of water, on the table, splays out in a circular form. A heap of matter, in space, attracted by mutual gravity, eventually collects into something that resembles a volleyball. The solar system is like a dish. It's all spheres. There's no Flat Earth. But, don't worry about arguing with me, because it hardly matters. Things are spheres, because that's how the game was coded. It could have been coded with squares and cubes, probably—but, the writers chose spheres, because their universe is spheres and they relate to those.
I rarely play video games, so my vernacular is limited (I may not even recall the specifics correctly—I may even be conflating multiple game titles into just one, but don't worry about it). My kids had an N64 in the 1990s and played an expansive Mario game. I believe it was the first time I ever saw Mario run around in a 3-D environment, rather than merely from left to right. Mario ran and ran and jumped and spun and ran...and, he could keep going and going. It seemed like he could run forever. Eventually, however, the further he ventured away from his core mission, the fewer things existed. He could run in a straight line forever, it seemed, but, eventually, there was nothing to see or interact with, because the programmers hadn't put anything there. It was all empty coding. There was nothing to see, because Mario wasn't really supposed to be there. It was expected that he would turn back and go to where the action was happening.
If you look out past Neptune, at Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, you're looking at a whole bunch of flotsam that drifts around the periphery of our existence. It's just undeveloped trash. That doesn't mean it isn't real. It's certainly real to the characters—us—who inhabit this program. Which is to say, when Mario is being attacked by a mushroom, that mushroom may look like a blob of imaginary pixels to the N64 gamer, but it's very real to Mario himself. Neptune may be made of methane, candies or papier mâché, but it's still there, coded in its place, doing whatever the developers programmed it to do. We simply aren't meant to go there and find out (I don't think so, at least), which may be why the writers stopped there.
People keep getting abducted by aliens, it seems. This shit really started rolling after the Roswell flying saucer incident. Over seven decades, we've created a pop cultural idea of what an alien looks like. He's got a big head, giant black eyes and a slit for a mouth. He comes from Zeta Reticulae (probably) and likes to sneak into bedrooms to perform painless-yet-invasive surgery on weirdos. Some folks call these creatures Little Greys, while some folks call them Little Doctors. Smart people have decided that these aliens don't really exist and that the people who believe they've been abducted may actually be suffering from delusions, sleep paralysis, secret hypnosis or what-the-fuck-ever. The bottom line, according to these smart people, is that the classical alien face bears a striking resemblance to how a newborn infant would see its mother—bad vision, with big, blurry eyes looming in. Don't fret. We'll come back to this.
Yes. We are still real, for all intents and purposes. Whatever this substrate is—atoms, code or fairy dust—it's as real to us, as mushrooms are to Mario. Everything is everything. Just because we might be thoughts in a storybook, doesn't mean the rent isn't due on or before the first of the month.
Within the boundaries of whatever this is, there's an embedded history. Things either happened over billions of years or were written as though they had happened over billions of years—neither one affects our present situation. Dinosaurs either roamed Earth, once upon a time, or the programmers wrote their fossils into the geology of all this nonsense. Mostly, they did a good job—some of the code writers got sloppy (and, we'll get to that, too). We humans believe that we descended from great apes—gibbons, maybe, but who gives a shit, since we don't seem to have the pieces necessary to connect it all? And, as we look backward, wondering about that oddly absent missing link, we also gaze toward the future, wondering what we might become...
Some people have wondered if the pilots in the flying saucers aren't Little Greys from Zeta Reticulae, but are actually humans from our far-flung future. "Maybe they are the evolved version of us, from 100,000 years hence and they can travel backwards in time in order to look at us," some dope fiend once said. This dope fiend is a little bit wrong, but he gets points for setting off in the right direction. Good work, dummy!
When Bostrom (or, whomever) talks about a computer simulation, we aren't talking about "computer" or "simulation" in the way we currently understand those words. Whatever it is, it's so fucking advanced, that we don't even have a term for it. Just like how the ancient Romans (if they actually existed) had no Latin word for the "internet." How could they? That would be silly.
He doesn't factor into this, I don't think. It's all okay. You can still believe in all that, if you like. Do you have a soul? That's tough to answer. It does seem that your consciousness, within the simulation, equates somewhat with the notion of a soul. Can the programmers upload you into a thumb drive and pull you out of the game? Absolutely! Back in the 1960s, certain fringe theorists were already convinced our consciousnesses were uploading into the I-ther (think cloud) on a daily basis. The Matrix movies were based on the whole I-ther thing. That's cool. Too bad those films were 66% feces.
Bostrom thinks we could be the cogs in an Ancestor Simulation. That is to say, a future version of ourselves created this program, in order to see what we may have been like. It's like if we had a clearer idea of that aforementioned Missing Link between gibbons and humans, gave it a name—say, "Gerry"—and, then, created an online Sim game that we could all tune into, in order to watch Gerry try to catch a salmon, plant a peach tree or have a nice wank before bed. It would be like Pokemon Go, maybe, but less worthless (I told you, I don't know video games...is Pokemon a Sim game?). But, there would be millions of Gerrys—all living Gerrys—live and interacting, in an artificial world that seems very real to Gerry.
Evolution, as we understand it, is not a tangible thing. It's not a process guided by a system or Unmoved Mover. This thing called nature cannot decide what a species needs or does not need. Nature is not a mind. Nature does not decide anything. It's a bit like imagining that the wind could choose to go south, instead of north. There are no choices. It's just chaos, chance and mutation. If an animal develops gills and survives long enough to mate, that animal will birth offspring who may also have gills. If this animal is a land-based creature, he will not survive long enough to mate...and, fuck him right out the window! That's all evolution is. There are no planners and engineers involved—not within the parameters of the story we currently believe we're existing within, at least.
Well, I'm conscious. That's about all I know, or think I know, a la Descartes. I don't know about you. I'm going to assume you're conscious, since you're reading this. How many of us are there? Are we individual lines of code, special and unique like snowflakes and frog cocks? Or, are we mass market archetypes, base models, that only become personal and unique as we progress through the simulation? Even in the current, real world, as we understand it, this is called "nature vs nurture." Were you You, from the outset, or did you only become You over time? Fuck if I know.
People who have near-death experiences gush about a blast of glowing light, love and calm. Scientists say this dying process is an evolutionary gift, to help ease us through death. And that would be fine...except that no one in our history has ever mated AFTER dying. That is to say, if the pleasing dopamine-juiced death process is a beneficial mutation—as it works to ease the organism into a comfortable demise—how the fuck was it ever passed on?
I figured this one out at a young age. That doesn't mean I'm smart—it only means I really enjoyed carbonated beverages. I like bubbles. I wish milk had bubbles, so I could drink more of it. But, I counted three seconds, once, for a particular bubble to rise from the bottom of the Sprite bottle to the top. Three seconds is not very long, but everything is relative. If you were tiny enough to live in a galaxy within that particular bubble, three seconds would be an eternity. Smoke a joint and work this out. You don't need math.
The ancestor simulation is about studying humans, so humans are the only sentient beings in it. Every other living thing, from spiders to dolphins, is a lifeless speck of coding. That's why dogs and cats all pretty much behave the same. Yes, of course, YOUR cat is different from other cats. But, no, it isn't. Among humans, everyone's in the game, it seems, except for the ones who aren't. A contingent of us are mere NPCs, designed to keep the game moving in this direction, or that. But, don't go thinking Carlos at the gas station is one of the NPCs, simply because he works at a shitty job. Your core NPCs probably exist at the other end—as your capitalists, politicians, leaders, businessmen and influencers. Really, politicians behave so ridiculously and so predictably, that they could only be NPCs. If you are fretting that you may be an NPC, keep in mind that an NPC couldn't possibly fret about being one, any more than a pencil can contemplate being a pencil—so, you're okay.
So, yes, we are in an ancestor simulation, but the people who built and programmed it are not the future versions of us. Rather, we are a fictionalized and speculative notion of who the Little Greys believe they may have been. That's sort of the same, but it's completely different. It's not quite the same as saying human beings will eventually evolve into Greys, at some ridiculous future point. Instead, Greys got to wondering whence they originated—what missing link they evolved out of—and, so, they created this simulation to try to work it out. They built this whole thing, just to see what we do inside of it. And one of them said, "Make them different colors, too, so that there will be senseless racism, because that will be hilarious, at least to us." Being that the Greys seem to be uniformly grey, they probably don't get to experience melanin-based prejudice in their real lives. Perhaps their species' bigotry is rooted in height, or head-size—I'm just guessing, though.
It's a great Motorhead album, but it's also an important point in The Great War. It's also the year I'm choosing to begin at. It's very arbitrary. I think anyone born before that date is dead now, so why not start there? I'm positing, for the sake of illustration, that our simulation began at that date, from our point of view. It also may have begun just last Saturday. Who knows? I don't. Everything before 1916 was coded into the program as buried, artificial history. The Little Greys did a fantastic job. They laid in Romans, Voyageurs, Huns, Magyars, cannibals, Samurai, King Louis XIV and gave every group of people a complex back story. They dicked around a bit, too. They plopped in Easter eggs, such as impossible pyramids, mysterious architecture, anachronistic tools and precise joints in granite, from 2000 years back, which could only have been cut with modern diamond blades. That's fine. We weren't supposed to think too hard about these things. At any rate, it's all fiction. We are here, NOW, in a tiny soda bubble—burbling up through an artificial universe, all so that Greys can look at how we communicate and interact, so they can have a better idea of what they may have been in the past.
Everything seems like a conspiracy, because everything is a conspiracy, technically. 9/11 wasn't orchestrated by the Bush & Cheney clans—it was written into the story by the programmers just to see how we reacted to it. There was a Little Grey, maybe, who wagered, "If 3,000 people die in NYC, I'm wagering that the President will use it as an excuse to plunder Iraq's oil and that 'Architects For 9/11 Truth' will be a thing that oozes into existence." That guy won two cases of beer, because it turned out he was right. The Little Doctors concoct amazing dramas, in order to gauge how we, their hypothetical ancestors, will come together and react to them. Consider the nasty fucker who said, "Let's have more bullet holes than bullets at this JFK thing and see how they rationalize that. Also, give one of the NPCs an umbrella and another a babushka. That will confuse everything even further."
There was a Stephen King story where a character, trapped in a dark room, thought she saw an apparition and she screamed, "You aren't real—you're only made of moonlight!" (I read that book—it was okay, for the most part). People who see ghosts are merely witnessing broken loops of past (fictional) events, almost like a sketch that you half erase in order to adjust, but you can still see faint traces of the original lines. It's nothing but a broken or discarded video stream, playing where it shouldn't be...like when you are trying to watch The Lion King and D.P. Me 3, simultaneously, on your computer (but, the latter is sort of minimized and tucked away, in case your boss walks in). Don't be afraid of ghosts—they're just garbage. But, when the Little Grey doctors beam you up (or come to abduct you from your bed in order to put instruments in your brain and asshole), that shit is real—at least from our perspective, it is. Why is this happening? What is the meaning of this?
Indeed, all alien, extraterrestrial and U.F.O. encounters are moments when the Little Greys attempt to touch, interact with and adjust this program. You are NOT being harvested for body parts. You are just lines of code (like Mario) and the Greys are having one-on-one time with you. It's like when you change an avatar's costume, give him a fancy wig or swap his red hat for a blue one. If you find yourself being abducted, you are participating in the ultimate payoff of the ancestor simulation. You are, in a very real sense, seeing outside of the game environment that you were coded into. Hooray for you!
That's all. That's the whole thing. This universe is nothing but a story bubble inside of an ancestor simulation and The Programmers check in from time to time—and less so, it seems, as things drag on—the way you gradually lost interest in your Tamagotchi, so many years ago.
Have fun out there. You aren't real. You aren't even made of moonlight.
Visit Sean Simmans' website for more art.
