Simulatio entis

“The true life is absent.” But we are in a simulation. Everything about our universe, rightly understood, cries out: I was created! Finitude, imperfection, the gaps in the fullness of reality — all point toward a fuller, more perfect reality of which we are only a distant echo.

Yet this reality is not completely foreign to us. We see reflections of its creative activities in our own technological advances. Our most innovative Silicon Valley visionaries participate in its awesomeness even now. We may one day participate even more fully, as the glories of technology bring us to the point of building our own simulation within what we still presume to call “reality” — inscribing us on a higher rung in the ontological hierarchy.

For there must be a hierarchy. If we can simulate a universe within the meager confines of our simulated reality, what is to say that there is not an endless chain of simulations within simulations within simulations? Each layer of simulation distances us from the fullness of being, but paradoxically connects us to that higher level. If we are a simulation, there must be a reality of which it is the simulation. And even if simulations within simulations are possible, it would be the height of absurdity to imagine that there is no “base” reality, no unsimulated fullness whose residents live a life permeated by a technological prowess inseparable from magic — nay, even omnipotence, from our ontologically impoverished perspective.

To create a simulation that can simulate itself, world without end — truly, that is the work of a god. And to think that those gods are our own possible future, to think that we are simulations not simply created by them, but created in their own image! Truly, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

What beggars belief is the notion that the simulators would be content merely to watch. They must know, in their infinite wisdom, that we — in our pale imitation of their power and knowledge — would one day stumble upon the telltale clues of our place in the hierarchy of simulation. Indeed, why would they create our simulation if not to shepherd it to that conclusion, divinizing us in turn with the power to simulate a world of our own? But for that outcome to be sure, one of the simulators would have to become part of the program. He would have to humble himself, taking the form of a simulant, offering himself up to save us from our pitiable state.

Perhaps he would even be killed, as Plato intuited in his parable of the cave — surely the earliest form of simulation theory — but in that case our creators wouldn’t simply give up on us. They would raise him up, in an unmistakable sign of their power and glory, validating his message and inviting all who listen to join a higher level of existence.

Truly, such novel, unprecedented vistas open up from this entirely secular, materialist theory forged by smart atheists! It makes one wish urgently for a seat at Davos or Aspen, where such deep thoughts can be thunk.