I‘m going to self-plagiarize three paragraphs from a 2019 blog, then expound further:
Taking movies like The Matrix way too seriously, some prominent scientists have declared it not unreasonable that we ourselves are living in a computer simulation. What’s odd is not that they think this, but that they think it’s a new idea. Traditional religions hold that God created the heavens and the Earth and the plants and creatures within. That is, that we live in a created universe, not a happenstance universe.
If all we are and all we see around us were, instead of God-given, some cosmic super-kid’s high school computational biology experiment, how would we ever know the difference? Would there be a difference?
A question, assuming there is a Creator, is whether the creator is biological, robot, or spirit. And another question: Why should we care? I ask this because it seems that persons seeking transcendence would seek it in the same ways in any of the three instances, whether through study, prayer, meditation, asceticism, vision quests, etc.
And those who don’t care to transcend would live their lives as usual, in any of the three instances.
Yet we are living in a simulation.
Yes, we are. By way of explanation, consider the raccoon. Especially consider the next raccoon you see squashed on a highway. Raccoons are highly intelligent, social creatures, but (unlike, say, dogs) they just don’t "get it" about cars. Cars are real. Yet mentally, raccoons live in a world without cars.
So, you ask, what computer are we living inside of? What is it about reality that we are not “getting”? The computer is our own brains. Brains, plural, because we too are social creatures. As such, we impose social norms on each other, telling each other not just how to behave, but also what we are and are not allowed to see. We co-create language that gives us words only for what we allow each other to see.
This is called “consensus trance.”
You’ve read about cultures that are surprised to be told the sky is blue – either because they don’t have words for it, or they’d never thought about it.
You’ve heard about the Captain Cook paradox, in which Pacific islanders couldn’t acknowledge Cook’s sailing barque lurking off their reef – because for innumerable generations, anything sticking up out of the water could only be a canoe or a whale.
The brains of social mammals evolved to do two things: To ensure the animal lives long enough to bear and raise children, and to communicate and share ways of surviving together. Thus, most humans share the same perceptual filters, though these filters may vary from one human culture to another.
Has this article, so far, helped you “lift the lid” off your culture’s norms, allowing you to see things you’re not supposed to see?
And why would you, like Keanu Reeves, want to lift the lid? Because there are ways our consensus filters don’t serve us well:
· When fundamentally novel threats arise. We’re good at warning each other about marauding tigers. Not so good at dealing with nuclear disarmament or climate change.
· When raising teenagers. They know we’ve been flimflamming them for 15 years. It’s natural for them to rebel, though it’s really annoying. The teen years are when a young adult must decide whether or not to buy into the consensus norms.
· When we adults become ground down by our community culture or work culture, we suffer ennui and psychological distress.
(That last can be turned to good ends, if it spurs the adult to travel, engage in creative pursuits, sit in a Zen temple,…)
Think different?
We did not evolve to see the whole truth of the universe; we evolved to efficiently share and reproduce. Few brain cycles are left over to devote to lifting lids. Yet some people – quoting Steve Jobs here – “think different,” and those people more or less live under the lid. We need them, to fix the bulleted items above, and they need the rest of us, to hold society together.
And we can celebrate those who, for their own satisfaction (i.e., not to build the next Apple) lift the lid and peek under our consensus norms.*
A simulation is a model, a simplified version of the “real” world the simulation creator lives in. (The simulation may include some elements of fantasy, and technology extrapolation.) Humans’ evolved brains and social norms ensure that we live in such a restricted subset of reality. We’ve created the simulation we ourselves live in.**
It’s exciting to know there are things around us that we can’t see and can’t imagine. At least we can know that – unlike our friends the raccoons.
- - - - - - - - - - -
*If you want to be one of them and you’re looking for a place to start, try Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui way of knowledge. Univ of California Press, 1998 edition.
**As for whether aliens created our larger reality, I find scientists’ thinking on this to be disappointingly shallow. See for example, https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/are-we-living-simulated-universe-here-s-what-scientists-say-ncna1026916.
