Last blog of 2022.
Comprehensive retrospective? Nope.
Prognoses for 2023? Nah.
Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.
If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.
A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.
Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)
More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)
So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?
Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.
Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?
What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?
Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.
Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.
Music a favorite by Fauré, after the dream.