Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?
Here we are then, one month into a new year and things don’t look like they’re going to be slowing down any time soon. Right now 2021 is acting as 2020’s encore, like if Daphne & Celeste had carried on with their infamous set at Reading Festival. We’ve had a failed insurrection in the US. Another national lockdown. Businesses feeling the squeeze after new trade rules came into effect post-Brexit. I haven’t had a takeaway in almost a month. This all seems a bit surreal, doesn’t it? Is it almost as if someone has us rigged up to a computer to study how we cope in stressful situations perhaps?
Before I go any further with this, I would like to stress that I don’t really believe that Simulation Theory is correct. You’re not suddenly going to start seeing me at protests with the likes of Piers Corbyn and David Icke. Nor have I written this under the influence of any psychotic substances, although I do have a morbid curiosity about what it would be like to end up in a Clintons while on LSD (imagine hallucinating while all of those Mrs. Brown’s Boys birthday cards with those crap jokes on them looking at you at once — nightmare fuel). This is just a “What If?” type scenario, something that explores the concept. I don’t think that an Intervention with my loved ones will be required any time soon.
Despite it having roots in most of human history, Simulation Theory was popularised in its current form by Nick Bostrom in 2003 and it proposes that all of reality is an artificial simulation. The premise is that as larger amounts of computing power will be available in the future, later generations might run a large number of detailed simulations of their ancestors on super-computers. You could then suppose that if these simulations are so advanced that they gain consciousness, then it is possible that our own consciousness does not belong to the original race, but instead belong to the people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. For this to be true, some assumptions need to be correct:
- That it is possible to simulate consciousness
- Technology will continue to develop and won’t stop any time soon
- Advanced civilisations don’t end up destroying themselves
- Advanced civilisations want to run simulations
Now that I have offered up my own bastardised explanation of this theory (Neil de Grasse Tyson explains it much better here), you’ve probably realised that you’ve seen it countless numbers of times in pop culture. Think of The Truman Show, a film that I had not seen in full until a few weeks ago (I’m not very good at watching critically acclaimed films — I’m still yet to see Goodfellas, for example). Truman Burbank is unaware that he lives in a world that is stage-managed and filmed for the entertainment of others. Maybe there’s an Ed Harris-type director who has put cameras in a box of Weetabix in my house, just to film my morning routine each day and broadcast it out to millions for their entertainment.
“That Phil Walker — he really loves to put a lot of golden syrup on his cereal. That is fascinating”.
Or what if it’s more like the Tranquility Lane quest found in Vault 112 in the game Fallout 3? For those not aware, this Vault was designed to keep humans safe during a nuclear apocalypse by hooking them up to a computer simulation run by a scientist named Dr. Braun. Unfortunately, Dr. Braun gets bored and instead starts terrorising the inhabitants of the simulation by killing their avatars for his own amusement.
What if our reality is an elaborate experiment like that Vault, being run by the likes of Stanley Milgram, John B Watson, and Philip Zimbardo, three of Psychology’s most notorious scientists? I haven’t heard of any recent unethical experiments like the ones that they ran, so maybe this is their new project? You can just imagine them sitting around a big table, surrounded by wallcharts, smoking their pipes and drinking their brandy as they think about what conditions they could subject me to so that they could study my reactions.
“I’ve got a great idea! Let’s see how he copes with his parents breaking up at 10 years old”
“That is genius — how about testing what sort of reaction we get from him in his late 20s? We could do some major political events around the world and then top it all off with a global pandemic. That would be really cool! Purely in the interests of science though, of course”
“Naturally, this is just for scientific purposes. But wouldn’t it also be really interesting if one weekend in January 2021 we gave him a scenario in his house where the fusebox would just randomly trip, and there be no rhyme or reason as to what is causing it? Wouldn’t it be funny to watch him dart back and forth between random switches and the fusebox while he tries to work it out?”
“Delightfully devilish my friend! Then we could have him support a football team where all of their success with trophies happens before he’s born. They could be mediocre for most of his life, then get really good to let him dream a bit, but ultimately never let him that euphoric moment”
“Hmmm, I’m not sure about that. What would we gain from it?”
“We put one of the most successful managers in the modern game in charge of the team and make them implode”
“Fire up the computer right now. I’ll get the snacks in”
