![]() ![]() Or, more accurately, we can’t know, statistically speaking, that we don’t live in a simulation-philosophers being particularly prone to the plausible deniability of a double negative. If that weren’t enough, this past January, the Australian technophilosopher David Chalmers published a book called Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, the central argument of which is, yes indeed: We live in a simulation. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. A few months ago, one of the regulars at my local coffee shop, known for overstaying his welcome, excitedly explained to me that each simulation has rules, and the rule for ours is that its beings-meaning us-are primarily motivated by fear. Or you can just poll some randos on the street. You can meet a bunch of them in the documentary A Glitch in the Matrix, which also came out last year. Only difference now is, lots of regular guys (and it’s almost always guys) in “real life” believe the same thing. Elon Musk is their fearless leader, but just below him are eager beavers like Neil deGrasse Tyson, lending something like scientific credibility to Musk’s Bostrom-bolstered claim that “the odds that we are in base reality”-the unsimulated original world-are “one in billions.” In a way, it’s like 1999 all over again: Last year, three more movies about dudes who realize the world they live in isn’t real- Bliss, Free Guy, and Matrix 4-came out. So, nowadays, the result on the ground is that simulation theorists are a digitized dime a dozen. What, that is to say, made it happen in the first place? ![]() It makes no sense for the same reason every creation myth since the dawn of, um, creation makes no sense: There’s no causal explanation. Besides, that’s not even why the theory makes no sense. You simply have to imagine spacetime, and the relativistic limits imposed by it, not quite existing yet! Easy peasy. As the Italian particle physicist Guido Tonelli has pointed out, it actually is possible to go faster than light. Like, at a whoosh far exceeding the speed of light. Something goes pop in precisely the right way, and out of that infinitesimally small pocket of instability, the entire universe bangs bigly into being. It just is, all at once, indeterminate and undisturbed. So even though it’s seething, bubbling, fluctuating, as foam tends to do, it’s not doing so in any kind of this-before-that temporal order. It’s barely there, and can’t even be said to occupy space, because there’s no such thing as space yet. It goes like this: In the beginning-the very, if not quite veriest, beginning-there’s something called quantum foam. The best theory physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense. ![]()
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