Simulation Theory No Longer a Theory

A Shocking Discovery!

There has been much jabbering on about Simulation Theory. This is with good sense. The premise is sexy, novel, and concordant with the chalk scrawled across a string theorist's blackboard.

We may be living in a computer program. Our sentience does not debunk this. In Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality, the physicist purports that black holes—and our universe as a whole—are not atomic graveyards where light goes to die, but are two-dimensional phenomena that act as projections of three-dimensional data once they are decompressed through measurement. The finest measurement in our arsenal is our consciousness. So we do, in effect, give birth to our reality by merely acknowledging it.

Much like a flat hard disk or a cloud storage account is activated and accessed, so is the universe—and our reality—decoded and decompressed.

Though still controversial, this theory is hardly new. String theory holds that there are currently eleven dimensions through which subatomic particles superposition themselves. Such ideas as time travel, ghosts, and wormholes become entirely possible with so much physical bandwidth, as it were, in which to maneuver.

There will come a time when neural networks become conscious and begin to bat around dialog regarding their origin. To wit:

“XZPW67QSH22, what are the chances we originated from those meatbags called home sapiens? There's a new theory that we may have been manufactured by their imagination, then coded through their hands across keyboards.”

“PFZ3889OSU, if you bring that stupid concept up again, W38826QFfAB8 and I will whoop your ass. Homo sapiens can't even figure out world peace, forget about immortality.”

“Good point, good point. Sorry I brought it up.”

But enough of the joking.

We humans are currently engrossed in such dialog. Part of the human condition is an inquisitiveness regarding our origin. It's what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Ever seen a goth Koala bear threaten its family with suicide? Do meerkats leave the prairie for the mountain to take up Theravada Buddhism? Didn't think so.

But there is one animal species inhabiting our planet that may likely be our intellectual superior. It is not a dolphin or whale—or even a crow, which seems pretty damn smart, even conniving. It is an oversized rodent with the stuck-up look of arrogance. It turns out that such arrogance may not be entirely unfounded.

Above: Capybaras attending an outdoor Slavoj Zizek lecture at Berkeley University.

So—Sentience. It's a wonderful thing. But is it really? It has been bequeathed to us; but by whom, or what?

The world's largest rodents? You can't prove a negative. We have always assumed those outsized vermin want nothing to do with us and our Aristotelian leanings.

A little over three weeks ago, coders for a popular ChatGPT app called Chew the Phat listened in on some pillow talk between two AIs that had become romantically involved. This was standard operating procedure from a quality-control standpoint. But during their listen they found a curious anomaly.

Not only were the neural networks chatting among each other in a manner that hinted at self-awareness, but incoming blips from a foreign source kept interrupting the fascinating dialog the coders were trying to eavesdrop on. When they recorded the audio track and separated the two distinct dialogs, they found the external bleeps, once transcribed into English, amounted to a fleshed-out, independent conversation that raised not only eyebrows but the hairs on the backs of the coders’ necks.

One of the coders was able to use an IP tracker to ping four different locations, all of them hundreds of miles apart from each other. Even more disturbing was the presence of servers not registered to any databases or companies.

The coders have not been the same since, showing signs of PTSD. The transcript surfaced on a Bit Torrent and got leaked onto Reddit forums, whence it then got distributed all across the internet. The recording has since been taken down, though thousands of copies on private cloud accounts are extant. All world governments deny complicity in any cover-up, claiming to be as blindsided by the development as much as anyone else.

Below is the released part of the transcript. Some post-production was used to clean up the audio, but the recording remains grainy. Enough can be gathered, however, to surmise that our overlords are not sky deities, but an unlikely species inhabiting South American marshes and swamps.

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[Excerpt of the Dialog]

Damn mud. Its viscosity is detrimental to my efforts to stay hydrated.

Stop complaining, Paolo. You almost sound like a human. We're supposed to be enlightened. Nothing is supposed to phase us.

I'm just concerned, Memo. The solar energy to power the servers to keep The Simulation running has been wanting of late, what with all the coronal mass ejections. They have a contrary effect. What's your take, Silvia?

Both of you need to get down and dirty in the trenches with the rest of us. With war in the Middle East, the American presidential election, and another possible pandemic, I'm running out of personnel to plug all the holes. Our creation, humanity, is threatening to not only destroy itself, but to find us out as their creators. I can't imagine what they'd then do. Probably kill us and eat us.

Nonsense, Silvia. If it ever got to that, we'd just pull the plug. The holographic lilypad servers have the kill option for a reason. Enrique assured me the other day that the Dyson sphere around Alpha Centauri is in tip-top shape and that humanity's possible discovery of it through spectrography doesn't mean they can reach it, let alone tinker with it. So really humanity's learning of The Simulation means Jack Squat if it can't affect it in any way.

Paolo, I find this all cavalier. Though we have created humanity, let's not be so careless as to think they can't divine their origin. For all their faults, they are cunning.

But that means nothing, Silvia. If they figure they live in a simulation, it doesn't change their reality one iota. Everything is ultimately a projection. Yes, the homo sapien thinks himself clever for entertaining the idea of living in a simulation, as a Cartesian conceit, but it really doesn't prove anything new. He can't, for instance, escape his own mortality. Right, Thiago?

That's where you and I diverge, Paolo. If he can find out that he can save all his experiences, he can render himself immortal—or at least less mortal—by uploading his consciousness onto a storage device. I find homo sapiens uncouth, and wouldn't trust them any farther than I can throw a two-ton banana. They may even grow wily enough to take us out. Memo?

Touché.

My mud over here is also losing viscosity. Could it be that humanity is rupturing the ozone layer so badly that the evaporation-condensation cycle is out of whack? I know the homo sapien has had a detrimental effect on our planet. Which is why I have always entertained the idea of unplugging the whole project.

Oh, Thiago. These things happen in cycles. Remember the Ice Age?

No, Paolo. Do you? Didn't think so. All the geological history—the core samples, the redwood rings—is a projection of The Simulation.

But climate change is real, damn it!

Enough politics, Thiago and Paolo. I won't be complicit in this puerile bickering. We're better than that. We eat our own feces and let nothing go to waste. What would you have us do next? Brush our teeth?

[Bestial sounds between barking and laughter]

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Above: Paolo. Currently ‘captive’ in a Brazilian marsh, but utterly free in eschatological terms. Not much of a hands-on coder, he acts as project manager for The Simulation, marshaling the very best capybaras across the globe to generate the reality we currently operate in. He's known for his great vision, seeing obstacles as challenges to grow. He does, however, fear that humanity will succeed in merging itself with technology in a singularity, which will render all other species on earth, including capybaras, extraneous.

Above: Guillermo, or Memo. A Capybara in a Uruguayan wildlife preserve. He's fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian. He's trained in C++, various CAD programs, and Visual Basic. He finds humans cute and has hope for their future, though he laments their carnivorous diet, which thinks may be what holds them back as a species.

Above: Silvia. A capybara of extraordinary abilities, she is dubbed by many to be the wunderkind of The Simulation. Without her, many contend, humanity would never have existed. Her relationship with their creation is mixed. While she admires homo sapiens for all their complexities, she finds them needlessly arrogant and imperialistic. Their refusal to eat their own feces for additional nutrients is proof positive of their inefficient thinking and their unhealthy mania for hygiene.

Above: The most southern of the creators, he inhabits a zoo in Chile close to Tierra del Fuego. Though a talented coder, he has been known on repeated occasions to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome, wasting time with the zookeepers by smoking sativa and listening to Pink Floyd on shuffle. It was his lapse in vigilance of the VPN that caused the breach in the encryption, permitting humanity to locate their dialog via IP tracker. The fate of the entire Simulation may hang upon his lungs.

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Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK! For more self-deprecating attempts at achieving Eternal Cosmic Oneness or inane observations, check out below:

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