Are we living in a simulation? Reality is slipping away

Two decades ago, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom asked whether the universe is a simulation. Should an advanced civilization somewhere have the technology to create a simulation of one universe, he theorized, they would also, in all probability, have created our own. Tech billionaires Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman reckon this is possibly true, and science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson gave it a 50% chance. This year, a physicist claimed to have found proof. We might dismiss this as Silicon Valley’s solipsistic fantasy were the simulated world not becoming a reality.

We have always questioned the realness of this world. Taoists pondered whether the man who dreamed he was a butterfly was not a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. Gnostics believed the material universe was created by a demiurge and that light from a heavenly Jerusalem shines upon this forsaken world through the stars, the perforations in the cosmic veil. In Plato’s allegory a group of prisoners spend their lives chained up in a cave and gaze upon its wall while, unbeknownst to them, guards project images cast by shadows, which the prisoners mistake for the true reality. The philosopher, according to Plato, is the one who ascends from the cave into the light of wisdom and dismisses those who cannot distinguish between “substance and shadow”. Yet increasingly we are unable to do so. As captives in a simulated, digital cave, we are so spellbound by the projections that we neglect the true reality beyond. Even the cave’s architects have become enthralled and, in their puppet show, see flickerings of a god-like intelligence.

The simulated world is making the real one redundant. Once physical things, such as banks and high-street shops, have dissolved into the digital world. Work and social life is increasingly mediated through online apps, whose slickness minimizes contact with other people. Artificial intelligence gives us the power to produce images instantaneously and repetitively, and soon it will be difficult to tell simulation from reality. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey predicts that within a decade we will not be able to distinguish a real image or video from a fake one. Adverts, television and film will be produced without flesh and blood actors. Consumer trends will be galvanized by imaginary influencers. Social movements will be led by fictitious politicians. When artificial intelligence can even do the jobs of remote, digital workers, then the simulated reality will have become self-sufficient, a world completely unto itself.

Meanwhile, the real world comes to resemble what philosopher Jean Baudrillard called “the disquieting strangeness of the desert”. Bereft of the bustle of commerce and conversation, city centers are bought up by ghost-like foreign investors and turned into lifeless mausoleums through which tourists wander. The earth itself becomes a fuel station to power the simulated world. According to MIT, by 2028 artificial intelligence could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of US households. Swamped by contextless information — the news feed and the reel — we cannot root ourselves. Culture withers. The new cannot burst forth. Everything is repeated in what philosopher Byung Chul-Han calls “the inferno of the same”. In a 1935 essay, Walter Benjamin observed that the mechanical reproduction of a work of art causes a “decay of the aura” of the original. Today we might say that the aura, the presence of reality itself, is being lost. So, it is no wonder people increasingly feel lonely, bereft of contact with the aura of reality itself.

This is not, strictly, a new phenomenon. Hegel’s disparaging motto for the Enlightenment was: “Everything is useful.” The experimental study of natural phenomena meant animals, plants and minerals had to be dissected in order that their constituent parts might be understood. To observe the natural world in this way we must imagine ourselves separate from it. A tree, for instance, is no longer experienced as an individual but rather categorized as one of a certain type. When an object becomes isolated and abstracted, it can be more easily manipulated and instrumentalized. What is true of objects is also true of human beings. This is the source of our wealth and scientific knowledge. But it deprives us of a deeper connection with the world.

And the more time we spend in the simulation, the more disconnected we become. A recent paper in the science journal Nature found that increased use of digital media correlates with feelings of what psychologists call “depersonalization” or “derealization” — a sense of being estranged or detached from oneself and reality. The sense that the world is not real. These are symptoms typically associated with schizophrenia. Yet they have become the norm. To have a world, we must be physically present in it. We must be able to relate to and communicate with it. We must be able to touch and taste it. Martin Heidegger called this “being-in-the-world”. To be at home in the world requires a connection with it that artificial intelligence can never have. Yet homelessness, as the philosopher observed, is “becoming the destiny of the world”.

There was not always such a separation between us and reality. For the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales all of nature was “full of gods”. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus believed that the body dwelled in the soul rather than the soul in the body. In Literature and the Gods, Roberto Calasso, writing of the ancient Greeks, observes: “In the Greek language the word theós, ‘god’ has no vocative case”, rather it “designates something that happens”. The divine presence, in other words, was for the ancients dazzlingly immanent.

Art strives toward our lost connection with the world by reacquainting us with its presence or reminding us of our discontinuity from it. The novels of Tolstoy describe everyday objects as if they are being seen for the first time. The still lifes of Cezanne fizz with vitality and aliveness. In his recent book, Cosmic Connections, philosopher Charles Taylor might have been talking about all art when he said that the work of the Romantics “brings us into contact with a deeper reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken”. Like nature, art’s capacity to reveal brings us into contact with a mysterious presence. Latent within the shapes and rhythms of art, it is this presence that could still release us from the darkness of the cave.

But we may need to become truly bereft of this presence before it can. Perhaps we will create new myths to articulate the extent of our disconnection. Or perhaps the old ones will still do. When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge and were banished by Yahweh from paradise, they severed the primal connection between humanity and the world. “Man”, Yahweh says to the angelic host, “has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”. This was the Fall. But perhaps it is unfinished. Perhaps, in our endless desire for useful knowledge, we have much further to go. Yet even in their despair, Adam and Eve were not hopeless. According to a Jewish myth, when, on the night of their banishment, they saw the sinking sun, they believed the world was returning to its primordial chaos because of their fault. Then the new dawn broke.

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