Simulation Theory and the Technocratic Coping Mechanism
Are you sure what side of the glass you're on?
The New Demiurge
Do you think any of this is real?
It’s a complicated question and the only answer that’s materially accurate–for all those materialists reading this and trying to resist the allure of the metaphysical that they know really drives them–is “I’m not sure.” Some of the oldest Vedic texts refer to “Maya,” a concept that carries through into other religious movements that states that the material is a trick. This could be as literal in some sects as “nothing you see is real” or as straightforward as an allegory for telling someone “being materially successful isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” It’s easier to convince someone of the latter than the former, but everyone has had the thought. The one where your gut drops and you realize that everything you’ve ever heard is something that another person thought of. That’s a pretty alarming concept, because it is remarkably easy to think of examples from recent history where people were catastrophically wrong about really important stuff.
Our cultures and concepts are iterative, more a constant accumulation of new information that reshapes the way we think of and process the world than a sudden revelation. In theory, that should make things better. But it is objectively getting stupider. Why is that happening?
I had a conversation with a friend–a Catholic, though I don’t hold it against him–who walked me through the reasons why simulation theory is an increasingly popular way for people to understand why we are getting collectively stupider. For the uninitiated, simulation theory is exactly what it sounds like: people who have wrapped themselves up in Theoretical Math Brain have convinced themselves that quantum computing and increasingly powerful technology is inevitable such that it is not only possible but mathematically irrefutable that we live in a computer simulation. I don’t believe this, personally, but I don’t care much to explore the ins and outs of it. It’s not as fringe as you’d think though, and the world’s richest man once publicly said that he found it plausible. While the math checks out, the math is also reliant on “theory math” being anything other than scripture by another name; the assumption that AI and software’s curve is inevitable can be refuted by that age old manifestation of Maya that’s whispering in your ear.
While I don’t personally buy into the computer thing because of what the Buddha taught me, I think simulation theory is a fun way to understand the ways the technocratic elite create new frameworks to understand their own lack of agency in a world that they are told, repeatedly, they are supposed to be able to shape in their image. Why the hell doesn’t anything work? Our ideas look so good on paper!
Specifically, to bring it back to the conversation with my friend, the comforting idea in simulation theory is that it helps explain the increasingly exponential degradation of culture: in technology, every simulation within a technological staging by nature gets worse as it gets farther away from its primary source. It’s like the old “carbon copy” cliche. Keep carbon copying long enough and suddenly you’re looking at–well, are you sure what you’re looking at anymore? It’s a fun hypothesis to play around with as long as you don’t take it too seriously, with everything from dumb ideas that remind you of something you heard once, to increasingly worse musical acts in a given genre; how the Black Keys are exactly 10% shittier than the White Stripes, for example. If everything is iterating from what came before, simulation theory would help explain why it’s getting worse instead of better: we’re not acquiring knowledge, we’re degrading from it.
[Aside from the above reasoning with regard to divine math–i.e. the flawed idea that not just progress but improvement is inevitable–it’s also noteworthy that this creates a somewhat paradoxical situation within simulation theory: how do you explain iterations that are objectively improvements upon what came before it? There’s probably some kind of kooky way to do it with an equation but at some point it feels silly to ignore that you’ve passed the point of materially provable anything and probably sound just as theocratic as any Archbishop did.]
Trying to ascertain what is or isn’t correct about simulation theory will create paradoxical logical loopholes that can leave you pretty confused, depending on what level of personal stakes you’ve set for yourself in the utopian technofuture. At the heart of this is still that 20,000+ year old concept of Maya and why it has persisted despite seeming a little silly at first glance: you can’t really prove anything, can you? You woke up here, and ever since you’ve been at the mercy of every single entity you’ve come into contact with, from your parents to the mailman, with the only things tying you to a past–that you uniquely have experienced–are little trinkets, physical or otherwise. Photos of you as a baby, or a Proustian flash of the exact way your father’s spaghetti tasted when you were a child. Is any of that real? You can’t touch it, nor can you explain to anyone in terms they will understand because their experience of the natural world and the things in it, like your father’s spaghetti, are completely different than yours. Despite the fact that none of us can touch these things, it’s paradoxical to imagine these formative experiences that only exist inside of your memory as immaterial. These memories dictate how we respond to active material stimulus, in a term that is often though of as science fiction since the Spielberg movie Minority Report came out: precognition.
Precognition among human beings instinctually sounds far-fetched because we associate it with prophets throughout history spouting apocalyptic ends that never come, or fiction stories about the ability to see into the future or time travel. But precognition is actually a very simple concept: when you reach into the fridge without looking because you know where the milk is, you are subconsciously acting on an incalculable number of prior memory forming experiences that are now stored in your body, working in unison as you grab the jug where you last left it. Precognition is not a futuristic concept but the entire premise of theory math and how we operate our society today. Our supply chains are based on precognition of consumer needs. Our budgetary process at the business and corporate level is based on precognition of what material factors will influence the greatest amount of profitability. Precognition is just a predictive engine that keeps refining with time, which means it should be a closed loop system with continuous improvement. But the primary issue with precognition as a defining ethos for how you govern a society is that it relies on static frameworks. Precognition only works when stuff stays still. If someone moved the milk without telling you and you reach into the fridge going through your usual motions, you might accidentally come back with ketchup.
Our ideas and understanding of the world continue to evolve and alter our inputs for precognition in ways that are impossible to sense, but we’ve convinced ourselves that we can stay grounded in the same institutions for that have existed for centuries. The milk moved years ago, and the recipe no longer calls for it, and whatever milk we had in the fridge is almost certainly spoiled at this point, but we keep tossing our hand in the same spot. At its core, this is the meaning of one of Jesus Christ’s most commonly misunderstood proverbs, which also has a bonus subtextual dash of Maya:
(55) Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate his father and his mother cannot become a disciple to me. And whoever does not hate his brothers and sisters and take up his cross in my way will not be worthy of me."
That’s the Gospel of Thomas version above, an early gospel from the Nag Hammadi library that has only been discovered in the past 100 years, possibly dated to as early as the first century. For those who stayed awake in Sunday School, it’s apparent that something is missing from this remarkably famous passage in the book of Luke–as translated and now most commonly known from the poorly translated and politically assembled Anglican King James Bible. It’s missing the part where Jesus Christ, the God of all love, tells his followers they are supposed to hate themselves in the Anglican version. It’s nearly impossible to say whether Gospel of Thomas, which lacks this feature of self-hatred, was written before the Synoptics (i.e. Matthew, Mark, Luke, things of that nature). However, given how faiths and beliefs were syncretized regionally at the time, it also feels somewhat irrelevant to date it but instead focus on one important aspect of it: Gospel of Thomas was not fond of the ruling classes, and in it Jesus is often informing his disciples that they must protect themselves from liars who will come to rob of them of their life with fantasies of what could be.
Jesus never told his disciples to hate themselves, only to hate the people who have given them a false understanding of the world, because Jesus Christ (as a workaday carpenter) understood that all existing parables and cultural mores come from the people who raise you and are enforced by the people with money and weapons.
Theories of the Universe From Outside the Gates
Christ taught his disciples to hate their father not because there was something inherently evil about the family structure or innately sinful about man, but because humanity must find its own way. The things that your father taught you are incorrect. You know this, inherently, because you have conversations with your father and see the ways he is right and the ways his ideological understanding of what we’re meant to pursue in our time on Earth has become outdated. The Jesus Christ that was revered outside the gates of the empire was the one who taught people to worship in private, lest they be found as resistant to the state. He was the one who told them that what the workers in the fields and the craftsmen in the streets had was more valuable than they knew, and that the merchants trading with them were deceptive. He gave them parables so they understood that the state, who they thought of as a provider, wasn’t the father they should kneel before.
Which brings us to another remarkably famous prophet from Mesopotamia at the time, an admirer of Jesus Christ, and the first person to create a cohesive philosophy for the increasingly non-homogenous rural peasantry that kept getting tricked into slavery or indentured servitude. The prophet’s name was Mani, though it’s also feasible that it wasn’t his real name and instead an amalgamation of concepts united under one figurehead. Mani was a very advanced thinker, and as early as the third century was already assembling and syncretizing extremely convoluted Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Hindi, Jewish Gnostic, and Chinese Cosmologies into one unified theory of existence. The story of Mani is that he was an educated peasant, raised by a deeply religious father who had given up their possessions to pursue a Monastic life. Mani, then, grew up among the common folk, introducing him to a cross-pollination of worldviews that would be impossible to find in the more homogenous areas of an empire. He bounced around countries as his movement, called Manichaeism, became increasingly popular among the types of people that the ruling class wasn’t fond of. As a result, Mani was exiled, and bounced around India and China and various parts of the Near East before finally returning to Mesopotamia to live out his final days. Manichaeism grew into an extremely major religion among rural peasantry through the Near East and spreading into China. There have been discoveries in the past 100 years of depictions of the Buddha Christ from Manichaen works that call into question the entire timeline of Christianity’s “spread” into the East, even casting doubt as to whether “Christianity” is a Western concept at all.
Understanding the formation of Manichaeism and its spread is imperative to understanding why, all these centuries later, it has been reduced to a “good / evil” cliche. When someone says “Manichean” now in the common tongue, it is shorthand for dualist thinking; people who consider everything to fit into a framework of light versus darkness or good and evil. When you consider that Manichaens were the barbarians at the gates that the state would often try to convince to go along with policies, taxes, or ideas, it makes a lot more sense. They were either accepting the conditions given them by the imperial empire they were at the mercy of, or they rebelled against it and started war. It’s the only explanation that follows any form of logic, as Manichaeism is such a remarkably convoluted religion that it defies comprehension that any honest reading of it could be reduced to such simplistic framing. History (and the value of various philosophies, as we continue to learn through archaeological findings) is written by the conquerors. To the Romans, Manichean meant people that either thought the Christian way was good when they were at peace, or evil when they were at war; to the people who run empires, we’re never much more than minor irritants, much as our ego wishes otherwise.
A closer examination of the text, particularly in context with the material surroundings of the religious movement, reveals something resembling our modern understanding of creation on Earth. To Mani, life on Earth was not all there was, and the creator of the life on Earth that we see was a lesser God meant to trick you (there, once again, is that concept of Maya that just won’t go away) so that you wouldn’t realize that your true nature was to serve a greater God of Light who brought everything into being. It’s the exact same framework as the Big Bang Theory, nearly more than a millennia earlier: we’re not alone, and your previous notion of what made us is wrong. There’s more out there, and the explanations being given by the elites don’t make any sense. It’s a stretch to say that Mani nailed the Big Bang–”demiurge” as a concept for the Sun as just one of many life giving entities is a far cry from complicated physics and theoretical math–but it also means that it’s fallacy to say that we’ve only just recently started to understand our place in the Cosmos. If that’s not enough to send your mind into knots, there are other fun concepts in Manichaeism that resemble modern emerging theories of the universe: it was Mani who said that the universe split in two at its creation, with one moving in the direction of Light and other in the direction of Darkness. In March of this year, Live Science published an article about a paper with possible explanations for dark matter: a twin universe that runs backwards in time. Personally, I’ve stopped living in denial of the fact that our ancestors understood the world so much better than we’ve ever allowed ourselves to imagine. I’m not foolish enough to convince myself they figured it out, but the longer I’m alive the clearer it becomes that we’ve learned more about “how” than we have “why.”
Mani started the age of science in Mesopotamia many years before the first European “Enlightenment” took hold, and he did it out of necessity for the same reason that the scientists later would: the ruling class was lying and trying to exert its will over the people to create a cultural homogeneity that human beings instinctually resist. Mani’s religion was far more advanced than Christianity because it took into account the type of material philosophy Mani carried from Buddhism that allows one to maintain perseverance in the face of a lack of agency, or the usefulness of Chinese Cosmology that allowed rural peasantry to anticipate and assist each other with crop yields and agricultural planning. Manichaeism was the religion of the rugged, a manual for existence from the cultures throughout history that refused to die off no matter how much the state wanted them to.
Perhaps most ironic is why Manichaeism sounds so familiar to Westerners, even those who have never heard of it: the man who is credited with creating what we think of as distinctly Western Christian / Latin Church theology, Augustine of Hippo, was a Manichaean before Rome decreed that all Manichaeans were to be executed. It was Augustine who wrote the Filioque, the individualist seed of our modern hell, and given his background as a Manichaean one wonders if he accidentally destroyed the very religion he was trying to save from itself. By inserting the individual agency of Manichaeism into the Holy Trinity, Augustine gave man permission to determine right and wrong for themselves like the peasantry, but without grounding it in the material philosophies of the indentured classes it can gradually turn into the religion of narcissistic world building that it’s been since the 11th century.
Much like the Big Bang today, Mani’s philosophy was essential for helping human beings who didn’t ask for consciousness of their existence eventually process the fact that they were not the center of the cosmos, and that their desires were largely irrelevant to the things that happened on Earth. Those are the types of philosophies one must acquire to survive in the working class. And today in The West, thanks to student debt, over leveraged assets on credit or predatory loan, and technological advancements, the working class is mostly made up of technocrats—the unemployment rate among those with bachelor’s degrees doubled during the pandemic and underemployment among the highly educated has been an issue since the last economic crisis hit.
Which allows us to close the loop on simulation theory, and why it’s little more than yet another technocratic framework for processing why, despite your individual agency and tendency to play by the rules, you don’t make any progress. Something is keeping you back. And now, because we drained the world of God when we nuked the Japanese, you know that it’s not Him. Each impotent generation creates their own new narrative explanation that matches the creator / creation dynamic present in mythology from as far back as anyone can find, or a way of processing the unshakeable feeling that nothing around us is real; for why everything feels so bad even when we get what we want and why we’re still empty at the end of every day. Our world is on the computer and in the television, so we imagine ourselves as such.
Given that it’s unlikely to be true, perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of simulation theory is in how transparent its falsehood is with each iteration of our technofuture. When Meta rolls out their new Metaverse products, promising the limitless future you’ve always dreamed of, the characters on the screen don’t look like the utopia you’ve always imagined. They look like Nintendo and every other stupid little digital avatar that uncreative people have been copying, pasting, and repackaging to us for the better part of two decades. The company knows this, which is why its advertising campaign for the Metaverse features a physically fit person shaming you for thinking it doesn’t sound cool, all while trying to distract you from the fact that they are selling you a set of goggles you can wear while you do calisthenics. If divinity is created in the image of its creator, I think we can confidently rule out anything with a human origin point.
There was a principle in Gnostic movements that is reminiscent of Maya. Similar to the framing of the demiurge in Manichaeism, the idea is that one must stay grounded in the ultimate knowledge that the human mind can never comprehend the true nature of God, otherwise one might lose their way and fall in with tricksters. Some of the old faiths, as a way of keeping people from falling in with the oppressors, would warn of human beings who are capable of making you believe that the divine is possible on Earth, but that our worst tendencies would never allow that to happen. Hard to believe anyone would have to be reminded of that.
Casey Taylor is a writer manufactured in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.