We Are Definitely in a Simulation; Also the Simulation Argument is Poorly-Defined With Many Unjustified Assumptions

Periodically I re-write an argument about both the relevance of the simulation argument, as well as its poorly defined nature. This leads to people overextending its meaningfulness and smuggling in other assertions.

First, here's why it's irrelevant - because we're all already in a simulation, with high certainty, just not the one you think. People who lived in the middle ages believed the world was flat and there were dragons and trolls. This is a form of simulation. If you're outraged at this assertion, then tell your definition of a simulation. Full sensory immersion like in the Matrix? Why a sensory-only simulation? While we're using science fiction for our thought experiment - are the robots in Westworld not in simulations? On witnessing any potential epistemological disturbance to their world (e.g. being shown a picture of the late twenty-first century cities) they don't register it, instead saying "it doesn't look like anything to me".

This means that all of us - all of whom have some false beliefs - are in a simulation. An extremist position would be that to have any beliefs at all, even if they are accurately based on prior observation, is to be deluded, because your perception of here-and-now is polluted by past experience. Leaving that aside, pain, pleasure and emotions are entirely contained within nervous systems and do not represent anything in the external world - meta tags at best - and yet they are inextricably part of our experience of the world.

Even assuming we are living in a Matrix-like sensory immersion simulation, and we find some way to detect this and pierce the veil as it were - we would still be in a single, unitary material universe, albeit one with more complicated rules than we realized that led us previously to a distorted understanding. Isn't this what science has already been doing for centuries? The Egyptians thought the sky was a ceiling with holes letting in light from heaven, then we built lenses to pierce the veil of the inadequate model our naked senses had given us.

Second, these arguments often smuggle in simulators with agency. (Here is where we can more clearly see the clear parallels between theology and simulation arguments – always suspicious when familiar outlines re-emerge in high-status, low-data discussions, probably revealing more about the shape of the human mind than the universe that mind inhabits.) Why must there be simulators? Certainly there were no demons actively hiding the Milky Way from us. What we now call a simulation might be a natural feature of the wider universe that has so far tricked our senses.

Third, even assuming simulators - how can you know their nature and intentions? Often an argument is made that if we ever did figure out one way or the other that we're in a simulation, the simulators would adjust things so we forgot. So why are we bothering to talk about this then? (Boy does the discussion start to sound like religion at this point.) It also doesn't follow, at all, that the simulators would not want us to know we are being simulated. Maybe that's the point of the experiment!

And fourth, assuming we can know the nature of the simulators, why assume that they would be palatable to us, or relevant to our choices? There's an obvious track to monotheism's goal to learn and glorify the desires of the one true god, which are assumed to be (curiously) similar to the morals of the worshippers. But we're still arguing whether human morality is generalizeable between humans, much less to hyperintelligent 13th-dimensional squid aliens. They might not care, any more than a human scientist cares about the E. coli in a petri dish. Their sense of morality, if such a concept even applies to them, might be (it seems mostly likely) completely inscrutable to us. It might be grotesque. And again, should the E. coli (or one of your video game NPCs) suddenly figure out your morality, so what? What can they really do for you; what can we do for squid-god? If I had to pick, I would want a simulator that doesn't care, because their desires are likely to be repugnant or incomprehensible to us. Living in a universe created by a simulator that cared, and actually wanted us to do something, would be the same as every being in the universe being kidnapped by sadistic terrorists and turned into brains in a vat, utterly at their mercy.

It should not be missed that these are exactly the same questions an atheist asks a believer. I ask my many fellow atheists who are proponents of poorly-defined versions of the simulation hypothesis why they miss asking these questions; I also ask religious believers who may have accepted these arguments regarding the simulation hypothesis, why they don't turn them on their own beliefs. After all, don't you want to know the truth about whether there's a supreme being, and what they're like, and what we should do as a result? Isn't that the point of many religions?

Expanding on the fourth point, here's a problem not unique to the simulation argument, but to any "super" being. If you're a utilitarian (greatest good for greatest number), there's a familiar problem put forth by Robert Nozick, the utility monster, a being who experiences sublime pleasure (and suffering) that "swamps the signal" of the collective happiness and suffering, so that you spend all your time pleasing and avoiding hurting the utility monster and neglecting everyone else. A simulator who cares could be such a utility monster, and on learning of their existence, you must give up caring about anything or anyone else, and bring glory to their name (or whatever it is they want you to do.) You could waste your time on improving the pale blunt emotions of the primitive beings in your family, or the sublime simulator squid-god. Indeed this is what aesthetics do.

Fortunately, based on the best empirical evidence, our present preferences do not appear to influence the type of universe we're already in. We are definitely in some kind of simulation, owing to the way our nervous systems work; in fact it’s not clear how it could be otherwise. If we find this is true more than we knew beyond even the functioning of our brains, it could well be a revolution in science, but would not overturn the brute fact of monist reality.

Why Only Exotic Gods Coming to Life in Movies?

Here's an idea for a movie: a Lakota boy is adopted and raised by Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. He is thus mostly ignorant of Christianity; and given his genetic ancestry, he is fascinated with Old World culture. He becomes an archaeologist and travels to Israel. While there, he discovers an ancient tomb...a tomb that locals fear, and one old man tries to warn him about. Though their "New Testament" describes the power of the demigod who was killed and put in the cave, this archaeologist knows better than to believe in primitive fairy tales. Until, of course, strange things start happening. The bread and fish he bought for lunch one day keeps replenishing itself, and one of the other professors who had been laid up with leprosy magically heals. Was he about to discover that this "Christ" was real, and had awoken? And even more, that the locals' god had a dark side as well?

Of course I'm deliberately being uncomfortably irreverent, even offensive. If instead of the tomb I'd used Mohammed's angel-cave, people would really be upset with me. And yet when you see a movie with a white archaeologist being chased around by an awakened Native American god, that's somehow okay...and that's exactly the point. There is a strange disconnect here. Movies are "allowed" to concretely depict the powers of pagan gods that we remember mostly as myths; that is, they can do so without being considered offensive. But movies are not allowed to depict the powers of gods that people still actually believe in.



Above: in The Mask Jim Carrey was supposed to be wearing the Mask of Loki, the Norse God of mischief, which gave him powers. Below: a major studio is unlikely to make a movie about Christ rising from the dead like this. But wait - people actually believe that he did! Shouldn't there be more support for doing such a movie then?


For the purposes of supernatural horror, people who identify as Christian are quite willing to suspend disbelief about the reality of an exotic god for the duration of a movie or book. So Christians should love a movie about a literal avenging Christ, or Jews about the modern Angel of Death, right? Imagine it: U.S. fighter planes scramble over the Red Sea, firing missiles pointlessly into the Angel's swirling mass. Lamb's blood for door-painting is at a premium on Amazon. (I can't wait for 2-day shipping, we're already up to the seventh deadly plague! ZING, HEY-O!) But guess what? They don't love it. Even talking about it in this way may seem provocative. (An experiment: would trying to explain Buddha's supposed cobra-calming ability be offensive? Shiva's appearance from a flaming lingham? How about a movie about the search for the Mormon gold tablets or the Scientologists' alien-spirit volcano? If some are okay and some are not, why? I think the answer is fairly obvious.)

Of course there are exceptions to this strange ban on movies depicting the gods or forces people say they believe in. The American film industry made a number of such pictures in the 1950s and 60s, and more recently, Passion of the Christ - although these took pains to identify themselves as narratives created by the in-group, and all carefully kept themselves within the scriptural understandings of their likely audience. The only action movies per se made about these themes were Raiders of the Lost Ark and especially the Holy Grail. But there, it's not about Indy getting a gleam in his eye and going on a quest to use the power of the Holy Grail - no, in both cases with Biblical artifact maguffins, it's really, really bad guys who in their hubris have gone looking for them. It's also likely that setting the adventure a few decades in the past insulates it from moral discomfort. It would make people very itchy if Raiders were re-made to take place in the Middle East today, with ISIS fighters digging for the ark and grail.

The likely reason that we're allowed to put mostly-abandoned gods, but not ones worshipped contemporarily, in works of fiction - even if we don't personally believe in them, and just know that many other people do - is the same reason people get uncomfortable about the direct, concrete discussion of religious stories, even if not from a critical standpoint. Angry Christ fighting off the Navy Seals by walking out on the water where they can't get him would move the whole thing out of ritual-land and into concrete visualization, which is very uncomfortable for modern people who believe in things like laws of nature. And we have a frankly misguided sense that it's offensive to do this with anyone's continuing beliefs. But the second the last Scientologist dies - then I guess it's okay to make the L. Ron Hubbard zombie movie.

In this case, giving power to indigenous gods is not a compliment, or an endorsement of their reality. It's exactly because we clearly understand that they're silly that they can serve as entertainment. But we don't want to get led into thinking or explicitly saying that about contemporary gods.

The Film Martyrs and Horror of the Irrational

"Martyrs" is the first horror movie I've seen that I would put within hailing distance of Hellraiser. Here's a review; I'm not linking to a trailer, but you can find them on Youtube quickly. To put it mildly, "Martyrs" is postdoctoral-level horror, and don't watch it unless you would characterize the Hellraiser films as "intriguing". (Spoiler alert.)

Why does it deserve such high regard? Because "Martyrs" has a concept which intrudes into the real world and scares us that way, rather than just splashing blood on walls. Without a concept, a horror movie is just shock - and most fall into this category - and whether you're laughing or gasping, shock quickly becomes boring.

Hellraiser doesn't just present you with monsters and torture, it presents a whole new cosmology. It argues that there's a world underneath ours and that the rules we think govern reality are not the rules at all. ("Event Horizon" does something along these lines as well.) Turn of the century strange fiction does something similar. There's a horror of the irrational, a terror at the revelation that the comforting predictability of the rules we think govern the universe is an illusion; that either we only know the rules on this one world or in this one spiritual plane and these rules are so provincial that they might as well be an illusion.

The concept in "Martyrs" examines a similar idea, one that many humans in the real world take seriously - an afterlife - and posits a question. If we take this part of religion seriously, and many (most?) of the world's great religions have at their core a recognition that through suffering we attain transcendence, then shouldn't we explore this further? The protagonist in "Martyrs" encounters a cult that captures and tortures people precisely to get them to the point where they can see this next world. When this main character is tortured beyond all imagination to this stage of "transfiguration" where she can see into the next world, the cult leader gathers the rest of the group's higher-ups. The leader asks the dying protagonist what she sees, and of course it's kept secret from the audience - and then very soon after, the leader kills herself. "Keep doubting," she says to her second-in-command just before she puts the bullet in her own brain. The ambivalent ending is fantastic. Did the leader kill herself because she realized she had just been torturing people for no reason? Or, did she finally have a direct report of how wonderful the afterlife is - and acted rationally, given that information?