My kid is afraid we're in a simulation

My youngest daughter, Brontë, worries about our shared existence before she sleeps.  Sleep feels like leaving. She doesn’t like to leave, and she is afraid of being left behind. Her dad and I have developed routines to help her settle into rest. She and Riley have a talk. He lies next to her and they chat the day. My ability to chat sinks with the sun, so I read her stories. But sometimes we have a talk too.

When she was four, I read Brontë a bedtime story, kissed her cheek and turned off the light. She started to cry in the dark, “Mom? Is heaven as big as Asia? Asia is the biggest continent. If heaven is as big as Asia, I’ll never find you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t spoken to her much about heaven or continents. But she’d learned about them and mapped the mystery of one onto the known magnitude of the other. We talked for hours until she felt assured that no measure of spacetime could keep me from finding her.

Brontë turned seven last month. As she has grown, her capacity for existential worry has grown too. A few nights before her birthday, I read her a book, turned off the light and said goodnight. I'd reached her bedroom door when her voice came through the dark, “Mom, have you heard of glitches?"

Sure, a glitch is a kind of like a hiccup in a system. It’s often not a big enough problem to be noticed all the time, or noticed by everyone. Why?

“Did you know that people say they see glitches in real life and that proves we are in a video game? What if I am not real?” she started to cry, “ What if you are not real?”

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t ever talked to her about the Simulation Argument, the techno-optimist creation myth popularized by Nick Bostrom. Nick Bostrom is “one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers.” Sam Altman is a fan. So is Marc Andreessen. Whether these men really believe in the simulation myth doesn’t really matter. They're using the myth’s doctrine of power to justify real harm.

The Simulation Myth goes like this:

Humans will go extinct unless they develop technology that turns them into a posthuman species. Technological innovation is simply a matter of turning energy into compute power. The entire universe is made of energy, so humans can develop the technology that turns them into a posthuman species. A posthuman species with enough compute power could, and would, create a “significant number” of conscious simulations of their evolutionary past.

The “people” “living” in those simulations would not know they were in a computer program. They would develop until they became posthuman simulations who could run conscious simulations of their own. This would go on and on in a Technologist Nesting Doll situation.

With so many simulated realities and perhaps just one “base” reality, Musk et al argue that we are nearly certainly in a simulated reality programmed by a higher intelligence. (And that higher intelligence is nearly certainly in a simulated reality coded by an even higher intelligence and so on.)

Our universe is made of energy because it is made of compute power. Everything we observe about matter and motion is generated by computer code. A few people on earth are main characters controlled by players from other simulations. But mostly, people are non-player characters driven by AI scripts that use algorithms to process information.The simulation myth teaches that my daughter was programmed to weep about the possibility of her mother’s unrealness.

Bostrom’s simulation creation myth– and the Silicon Valley funded-work that followed - helped lay the foundation for the long-termism, effective altruism and AI hype movements. The fact that these are all essentially defenses of systemic inequality is a feature, not a bug. His myth requires humanity to be categorized by character class.

White men tend to fall in the "superior" character classes. Bostrom has claimed that different races have different IQs – twice. Most recently in 2023.  The powerful men who preach Bostrom's myth are overtly misogynistic, yammering on about the need for more masculine energy and glorifying documented abuser, and alleged human trafficker, Andrew Tate.

Musk, Altman and Andreessen titter about the simulation myth on X, Joe Rogan and Mar-a-Lago. In their telling they are main characters. Almost everyone else is a script.  There’s no limit to what you can justify when humanity exists to support your character arc.

But you don’t have to engage with a techlord to run into the simulation myth. Its ideas are distributed on the platforms owned by the people most likely to benefit from the spread. Language associated with simulation myth litters our online discourse, popping up in TikTok videos about glitches and posts about NPCs.

Brontë doesn’t spend any time online, not even on tech-enabled toys. But she lives in society.  She heard about glitches on the playground.  And then she mapped her worry onto its distortions.

I climbed into bed next to her and held her hand,

Okay, I think you are talking about a thing some people call Simulation Argument. Simulation Argument is a story that someone made up. And the story basically says, ‘It would be weird if we were in a huge version of Animal Crossing.’ And that would be weird! So it’s kind of fun to think about, right? People who say they see glitches are just playing pretend while thinking about that story. But we are not in a big version of Animal Crossing. We are in real life! I am real and you are real.

I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, hard. “But how do you KNOW?  What if I am controlled by someone else? There is no way to know if we are real!"

In engineering club, you and I learned that engineers use science, math and materials to design and build things. Engineers think of problems and say, "How can I use engineering to solve that?" This semester your problem was, “My teacher told me to build a cool mini-golf hole.” You solved that problem with engineering –you used math and science to create a design. And then you built that design with a lot of different materials– like cardboard, hot glue and particle board! Those materials came together to make something bigger - your mini-golf hole!”

People are pretty good at thinking of problems that can be solved with engineering. Video games like Animal Crossing are engineered! But there are lots of things that can’t be engineered.

Like, engineering is used to design and build rollercoasters! And roller coasters can be built in in the real world, like at Disneyland, and in virtual worlds, like Animal Crossing. But engineering can’t design or build a computer program that can go on the roller coaster and feel physical forces.

You know that whooshy feeling you get on roller coasters? That happens because every part of your body is accelerating at the same time, but separately. All those parts are all moving around each other, swish swash! Your cells, your blood, the stuff in your tummy, your organs, everything! A computer program can’t experience those physical forces! But you can! And you love it! So you are not in a computer game!

“Someone could push a button that made me think I felt all that when I didn’t though.”

Well, computer programs can’t think. But I take your point. Let me wonder about how to help you understand this, okay?

She let us lay there quietly while I tried to think about what she was really asking.  She doesn’t know about billionaires, memes, capital or compute power. So, she wasn’t really asking about simulation myth. Instead, her question was something closer to: What if we, and everything around us, are always being created by something else? 

This is a very old question. Ancient philosophers asked if they existed in a dream that was always being dreamed, a book that was always being written, a painting that was always being painted. These questions help us contemplate the mystery of existence.

At first, the simulation myth might seem like these questions. But that’s a category error. The simulation myth is not a question. It is an invalid proof designed to diminish and dismiss reality. I didn’t have to disprove the simulation myth. I just had to help her see through it, so she could encounter the real mystery at the center of her very good question.

Seeing through the simulation myth is very easy, because it is riddled with logical errors. Here is one of my favorites:

In a simulation, closer observation of the system would reveal more simplicity. You’d see the metaphorical 0s and 1s. But in our reality, closer observation reveals what theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek calls the “hidden complexity” of the universe. The more we can see, the more there is to see.

When we discovered the atom, many believed we’d found the hidden structure “underlying all the things we see – steel and stars, frogs and fire – could be described in the terms of fundamental, indistinguishable building blocks.

Then we looked closer. Atoms themselves have a hidden structure. Electrons orbit a nuclear core, which can be further broken down into smaller structures and substructures: protons and neutrons, quarks and gluons.” And yes, you guessed it! These hidden structures also have a complex hidden structure that we know is there but cannot observe. The hidden structure of the universe is in the aether…ahem…so to speak.

Want to spend some more time contemplating complexity? Head over to the archive to see how this piece interacts with other objects in The Observatoreum.

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It makes no sense for a simulation to waste compute power on hidden structures. What kind of compute power-dependent posthuman programmer would do that? Especially if that power is needed to run simulations within simulations within simulations?

Those ordained by the simulation myth understand that quantum physics exposes the hollowness of their power structure. They take different approaches to dismissing the quantum realm. Sam Altman once posited that quantum mechanics might just be a bug in the simulation program. Which is definitely the kind of top-notch thinking I expect from him. So…I don’t know. One point to the “maybe Sam Altman, at least, is an AI script” camp.

Anyways.

My first grader is pretty good at abstract thinking, but a discussion about theoretical physics is still very much beyond her. That was okay, though. Because there is another kind of hidden structure that the simulation myth can’t compute. And it's one she's knows very well.

Okay, let’s think about love.

Engineers create solutions - their designs begin with an end. Your mini-golf hole was built to get the golf ball to a hole, right? So, the hole was the end all your engineering worked toward. What does love solve? What is its end? Like, sure, a mother loves her child and so she protects her child. That could be problem and solution. But we also keep loving people who have died. What is the point of that? Why do I keep loving my dad, even though he can’t tuck me in? We don’t know!

What we do know that we experience love. And we do know that love cannot be engineered, in the real world or the virtual world. People have tried throughout history. But it doesn’t work. And that makes sense! Love can’t be broken down into smaller parts, the way your mini-golf hole could be broken down into cardboard, hot glue and particle board. Love gets more complex the closer you look at it. For now, let's think of complexity as BIGGER! Love gets bigger the deeper you look into it.

Let’s think of Animal Crossing again. An Animal Crossing character can be programmed to display a word bubble that says, “I love you.” But that character can’t feel love and so it can’t express love. That word bubble just represents the idea of love. Just like the trees in Animal Crossing represent the idea of trees. So, we know we are not in a video game because we can feel love and we can express love. And since I love you and –

“But maybe someone is playing the video game and pushing buttons that make you say you love me!”

I squeezed her hand again and then let go. I held my hands in circle, right above both our faces,

Hey, you didn’t let me finish. I love you and you love me. Think about your love for me. Does it feel engineered? Is it made of simpler things that aren’t love? Or does it get bigger, my hands moved away from one another, expanding to hold a bigger and bigger circle, the more you think about it?

I held her hand again and let us lay there while she tried to think about what I was asking. She stared up into the dark, her eyes wide, trying to gather light neither of us could see. Her body relaxed before she spoke,

“It gets bigger. That is weird. Why is love weird?”

Love is weird. I don’t know why. It’s a mystery.