Speaker 1: So I want you to do something for me, just like,
Speaker 1: look at a calendar, right, go ahead, glance at your
Speaker 1: phone or you know, check your watch, look at the
Speaker 1: bottom corner of your screen, and just look at the year.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Now I want you to ask yourself a deeply uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: like a genuinely mind bending question. How do you actually
Speaker 1: definitively know what year it is?
Speaker 2: Oh? That is a heavy way to start.
Speaker 1: I mean, really think about it. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: like who told you or what the general societal consensus is.
Speaker 1: I mean, how do you know the age of the.
Speaker 2: Earth right, or the stars exactly.
Speaker 1: The history of the stars, the centuries of human civilization
Speaker 1: that supposedly led up to this exact, hyper specific moment.
Speaker 1: How do you know they actually happened.
Speaker 2: Well, it's the ultimate cognitive trapdoor, Honestly, it really is,
Speaker 2: because when you really interrogate that question, you start to
Speaker 2: realize that every single piece of evidence you would use
Speaker 2: to prove the passage of time, like fossils, yeah, a
Speaker 2: carbonated fossil in a museum, or a geological rock layer
Speaker 2: in the Grand Canyon, even the cosmic microwave background radiation
Speaker 2: leftover from the Big Bang or even just your own
Speaker 2: vivid memories of what you ate for breakfast yesterday. All
Speaker 2: of it is just information, just data exactly. It is
Speaker 2: data that your brain is processing right now in this
Speaker 2: immediate present moment. You don't actually experience the past. You
Speaker 2: only ever experience the present reading of a record that.
Speaker 1: Is just wow. Okay, well, welcome to Thrilling Threads.
Speaker 2: Everyone glad to be here.
Speaker 1: This is the space where we take a stack of
Speaker 1: the most fascinating sources, research papers, and theories, and we
Speaker 1: just extract the most profound insights. We are your personal
Speaker 1: guides through like the most mind bending concepts out there.
Speaker 2: We really are pulling on some major threads today.
Speaker 1: We are today we were taking a thrilling thread and
Speaker 1: pulling on it until the very fabric of reality itself
Speaker 1: might just completely unravel. Literally, we are diving headfirst into
Speaker 1: simulation theory. But like we are setting aside the tired
Speaker 1: pop culture troopes.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, no leather trench coats today, right, We.
Speaker 1: Aren't talking about wearing sunglasses and dodging slow motion bullets.
Speaker 1: We are looking at this through the rigorous logic of
Speaker 1: modern philosophy.
Speaker 2: And rapidly advancing computational physics.
Speaker 1: Yes, and the fundamental, often bizarre laws of quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1: We are synthesizing some really heavy hitting material today.
Speaker 2: We've got a lot of ground to cover.
Speaker 1: We primarily leaned on Nick Bostrom's seminal paper from Simulation
Speaker 1: argument dot Com, David chalmers brilliant book Reality plus E,
Speaker 1: and some incredibly compelling theories about our cosmic origins.
Speaker 2: It is a staggering topic. I mean, it really requires
Speaker 2: us to abandon our baseline assumptions about what actually constitutes
Speaker 2: a physical object completely because simulation theory has completely migrated
Speaker 2: out of the the late night dorm room hypothetical.
Speaker 1: Fa Oh, for sure, it's mainstream now.
Speaker 2: When you have major figures in aerospace engineering publicly stating
Speaker 2: that the odds of us being in base reality are.
Speaker 1: One in billions, like Elon Musk right right.
Speaker 2: Or mainstream astrophysicists like Neil Degrass Tyson putting the odds
Speaker 2: at a clean coin toss. We have to look at
Speaker 2: the underlying.
Speaker 1: Mass, we really do.
Speaker 2: We have to look at the logical frameworks and the
Speaker 2: quantum physics that lead incredibly smart, grounded people to say
Speaker 2: that this universe looks suspiciously like a rendering engine.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this. I want to ground this in
Speaker 1: a feeling first, a deeply visceral experience that I think
Speaker 1: almost everyone listening has probably had.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm with you.
Speaker 1: You know that surreal sensation of waking up from a
Speaker 1: hyperrealistic dream. Oh man, Yes, where for a few terrifying,
Speaker 1: completely disorienting seconds, you're lying there in the dark and
Speaker 1: your brain is desperately trying to reconcile two completely conflicting
Speaker 1: realities because.
Speaker 2: The dream felt completely.
Speaker 1: Real exactly in the dream, you had a whole life,
Speaker 1: You had an urgent mission, you felt the emotional stakes,
Speaker 1: you had a full history with the people in the dream.
Speaker 2: Your brain was just generating at.
Speaker 1: All, generating the whole world on the fly, rendering the physics,
Speaker 1: the lighting, the emotional weight, all while your physical body
Speaker 1: was just paralyzed in a bed.
Speaker 2: It is wild when you think about what the brain
Speaker 2: can do.
Speaker 1: Right, So let's bridge that neurological phenomenon to the ultimate
Speaker 1: thought experiment. What if all of human history, the thirteen
Speaker 1: point eight billion year age of the cosmos, your childhood traumas,
Speaker 1: your joys, Yeah, all of it what if it was
Speaker 1: simply preloaded data in a program running right now? What
Speaker 1: if you are inside the dream and something else is
Speaker 1: running the code.
Speaker 2: Well, to even begin answering that, we really have to
Speaker 2: look at the architecture of the argument itself.
Speaker 1: Right, Nick Bostrom.
Speaker 2: Yes, the philosopher who structured the modern version of this
Speaker 2: debate is Nick Bostrom. Back in two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: he published a paper that completely shifted the paradigm of
Speaker 2: existential philosophy.
Speaker 1: It really made waves.
Speaker 2: David Pierce, who is a prominent philosopher of mind, actually
Speaker 2: called Bostrom's paper the first interesting argument for the existence
Speaker 2: of a creator in two thousand years.
Speaker 1: That is a massive statement.
Speaker 2: It is because Bostrom didn't just pose a fun what
Speaker 2: is He presented a trilemma.
Speaker 1: A trilemma meaning three options.
Speaker 2: Exactly, a mathematical and logical proof stating that one of
Speaker 2: three highly specific scenarios absolutely must be true about the
Speaker 2: trajectory of life in the universe, and there is no
Speaker 2: fourth option. Right, correct, there is no fourth option.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's walk through those three options, because I know
Speaker 1: they form the absolute bedrock of everything we are going
Speaker 1: to explore today. Let's make sure everyone listening is on
Speaker 1: the exact same page.
Speaker 2: Sounds good. So Option one proposes that civilizations like ours,
Speaker 2: you know, technological expanding species almost always destroy themselves.
Speaker 1: Before they reach a point where they can build the simulation.
Speaker 2: Exactly, before they reach a stage of technological maturity capable
Speaker 2: of running realistic simulations of their ancestors.
Speaker 1: This sounds very much like the great filter concept.
Speaker 2: It is deeply tied to the Fermi paradox and the
Speaker 2: concept of the Great filter. The idea is that the
Speaker 2: universe is.
Speaker 1: Just full of traps, like what kind of traps?
Speaker 2: Well, we invent nuclear weapons and annihilate ourselves. Classic or
Speaker 2: we create artificial superintelligence that decides we are a threat.
Speaker 1: And wipes this out a little more modern, Yeah, we.
Speaker 2: Trigger irreversible climbing collapse, right, Or maybe we engineer a
Speaker 2: localized black hole and a particle accelerator by accident.
Speaker 1: Yikes. Okay, so basically we blow up the lab before
Speaker 1: we can build the matrix exactly.
Speaker 2: Whatever the specific mominism is, the result is the same.
Speaker 2: The species goes extinct before they acquire the computational power
Speaker 2: required to simulate reality.
Speaker 1: Okay. Option one is the existential doom scenario.
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 1: What is option two?
Speaker 2: So option two suggests that a civilization does manage to
Speaker 2: navigate the great filter, they survive, they expand, and they
Speaker 2: reach that incredibly advanced post human technological level.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they lived. That's good.
Speaker 2: It is good, But for whatever reason, they have absolutely
Speaker 2: zero interest in running simulations of their evolutionary past.
Speaker 1: Wait, really zero interest.
Speaker 2: That's the argument. They possess that godlike computing power to
Speaker 2: do it, but they actively choose not to.
Speaker 1: Why wouldn't they want to?
Speaker 2: Well, perhaps it is considered deeply unethical to create simulated
Speaker 2: beings that can suffer. You know, they see our pain
Speaker 2: and say we shouldn't recreate that. Or perhaps they've evolved
Speaker 2: so far beyond their biological origins that our primitive struggles
Speaker 2: are just profoundly boring to them.
Speaker 1: Boring. Okay, I have some thoughts on that, but let's
Speaker 1: hear the final option first. If neither of those first
Speaker 1: two options.
Speaker 2: Are true, then we arrive at option three, the big one.
Speaker 2: Option three states that if civilizations survive, and if they
Speaker 2: retain an interest in simulating their past, then we are
Speaker 2: almost certainly living in a simulation right now.
Speaker 1: Okay, I want to stop right there and put option
Speaker 1: three under a microscope, because a listener might hear that
Speaker 1: and think, Okay, sure, maybe simulations exist in the future,
Speaker 1: but why does that mean we are in one? Why
Speaker 1: couldn't we just be the lucky biological civilization currently living
Speaker 1: in the real base reality, grinding our way toward that superfuture.
Speaker 2: That is the most natural objection, but it crumbles when
Speaker 2: you apply the sheer mathematics of computing power and scale.
Speaker 1: Break that down.
Speaker 2: For me to understand Bostrom's logic, we have to imagine
Speaker 2: the computational capacity of a technologically mature, post human civilization.
Speaker 2: We aren't talking about, you know, quantum computers sitting in
Speaker 2: the server farm in.
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley, right, It's bigger than that.
Speaker 2: We are talking about megastructures. Consider the concept of a
Speaker 2: Matrioshka brain.
Speaker 1: I've heard of Dyson spheres. Is it like that?
Speaker 2: Very similar? It's a hypothetical computational megastructure that relies on
Speaker 2: a Dyson sphere architecture. You completely enclose a star or
Speaker 2: maybe even multiple stars with layers of computational substrate.
Speaker 1: So you're literally caging a sun.
Speaker 2: Yes, you are harvesting the entire energy output of a star,
Speaker 2: capturing every single photon to power a planetary sized computer.
Speaker 1: That is insane to even visualize.
Speaker 2: The inner layers run a blisteringly high ten temperatures, and
Speaker 2: the waste heat powers the next layer out and.
Speaker 1: The next layer until it's all used up.
Speaker 2: Exactly until the outermost layer is radiating heat at the
Speaker 2: background temperature of space.
Speaker 1: So you essentially turn an entire solar system into a
Speaker 1: single CPU.
Speaker 2: Precisely the scale we are talking about now. If a
Speaker 2: civilization with a matriosh Cabrain decides to run ancestor simulations.
Speaker 1: Which means simulations of us.
Speaker 2: Yes, simulations of the turbulent biological era of their own history,
Speaker 2: which is exactly what our current existence represents. If they
Speaker 2: do that, they wouldn't just spin up one single.
Speaker 1: Instance because they have all that power.
Speaker 2: The computational cost would be a rounding error to them.
Speaker 2: They could run millions, billions, or even trillions of highly
Speaker 2: detailed simulations simultaneously. Wow, they would run variations. What if
Speaker 2: the metior missed the Yucatan Peninsula and dinosaurs never died out?
Speaker 1: Oh, I played that game right?
Speaker 2: Or what if the Roman Empire industrialized? What if a
Speaker 2: specific political leader was.
Speaker 1: Never born, So it's basically a numbers game.
Speaker 2: It is entirely a numbers game. If an advance ofization
Speaker 2: creates billions of simulated universes for every single base reality
Speaker 2: universe that naturally exists, then the number of simulated conscious
Speaker 2: minds would vastly outnumber original biological minds.
Speaker 1: By an astronomical margin.
Speaker 2: That almost incomprehensible margin. Statistically, if you put all the
Speaker 2: conscious minds that have ever existed, across all realities, biological
Speaker 2: and simulated, into a giant cosmic lottery machine and you
Speaker 2: pull one.
Speaker 1: Out at random, the odds that you pull out the
Speaker 1: singular original biological mind from base reality is basically.
Speaker 2: Zero, effectively zero. You're almost certainly pulling a simulated one.
Speaker 1: It's like standing on a beach that stretches across the
Speaker 1: entire globe, picking up a single grain of sand and
Speaker 1: betting your life that it's the one grain of sand
Speaker 1: that isn't made of silica.
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. Exactly so Bostrom's logic forces
Speaker 2: our hand. If civilizations don't always die, and if they
Speaker 2: like simulating things, you are a simulated mind.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I have to push back hard on option too,
Speaker 1: the apathy option. Yes, this idea that a super advanced
Speaker 1: civilization might survive but just lose interest in their past,
Speaker 1: that they would find it unethical or boring. Does that
Speaker 1: actually track with anything we know about the nature of intelligence.
Speaker 2: It's a heavily debated point.
Speaker 1: Because look at human behavior right now. We are absolutely
Speaker 1: obsessed with recreating our history.
Speaker 2: We really are.
Speaker 1: We build massive, sprawling, open world video games with budgets
Speaker 1: larger than Hollywood movies just so we can walk around
Speaker 1: a rendering of Renaissance Italy or ancient Greece or the
Speaker 1: Wild West. We pour billions of dollars into historical dramas,
Speaker 1: immersive virtual reality experiences, even physical historical reenactments. Our entire
Speaker 1: entertainment infrastructure is largely predicated on simulating realities we didn't
Speaker 1: get to live in.
Speaker 2: That is a very fair point.
Speaker 1: If humanity eventually possessed the power to spin up a
Speaker 1: fully conscious universe just to watch history unfold or to
Speaker 1: experience it firsthand, I cannot fathom a scenario where we
Speaker 1: collectively decide not to do it.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't just do it, we'd probably commercialize it exactly.
Speaker 1: We would have teenagers running pocket universes on the futuristic
Speaker 1: equivalent of a smartphone.
Speaker 2: The psychology of option two is tricky for exactly that reason.
Speaker 2: To assume a post human civilization would completely shed all
Speaker 2: curiosity about their origins, it requires us to imagine a
Speaker 2: psychological shift so massive that they cease to be recognizable
Speaker 2: as descendants.
Speaker 1: Of humanity, right because curiosity built us.
Speaker 2: Curiosity and the drive to model the world are the
Speaker 2: evolutionary traits that built our civilization in the first place. Now,
Speaker 2: some philosophers do argue that creating conscious beings that can
Speaker 2: suffer just for an experiment is highly immoral, which is true,
Speaker 2: and therefore an advanced species wouldn't do it. But that
Speaker 2: assumes ethical progress perfectly tracks with technological progress.
Speaker 1: And human history completely refutes that.
Speaker 2: Demonstrably, we build the technology first, and we argue about
Speaker 2: the ethics decades later.
Speaker 1: Seriously, look at social media, look at AI right now.
Speaker 1: Exactly So, if option one complete cosmic doom is avoidable,
Speaker 1: and if Option two total apathy toward our origins contradicts
Speaker 1: the very nature of conscious curiosity.
Speaker 2: Then we are left staring straight down the barrel of
Speaker 2: option three.
Speaker 1: We are inside the machine.
Speaker 2: Which means we are forced to ask the next logical question,
Speaker 2: if we are inside a simulation, how good is the simulation?
Speaker 1: And more importantly, can we look for the seams in
Speaker 1: the code?
Speaker 2: Yes, if you want to know if you're in a
Speaker 2: rendered environment, you don't look at the trees, you look
Speaker 2: at the pixel.
Speaker 1: You look at for the boundaries exactly.
Speaker 2: And perhaps the most intuitive way to approach this is
Speaker 2: to look at the trajectory of our own technology. How
Speaker 2: close are we to building a simulation that can fool
Speaker 2: a conscious mind?
Speaker 1: And the answer is terrifyingly close.
Speaker 2: The gap between base reality and our simulated realities is
Speaker 2: closing at an exponential rate. Let's just look at the timeline. Okay,
Speaker 2: Forty years ago, the absolute pinnacle of simulated reality was
Speaker 2: two glowing white rectangles bouncing a square dot across a
Speaker 2: black screen.
Speaker 1: Pong, good old pong.
Speaker 2: Right. It required immense imagination on the part of the
Speaker 2: player to map that onto physical reality. But today we
Speaker 2: have unreal engine five.
Speaker 1: Oh man, it is why.
Speaker 2: We have environments that are entirely photorealistic. We have real
Speaker 2: time path tracing.
Speaker 1: Which means what exactly For the non gamers, it.
Speaker 2: Means the physics engine isn't just faking the lighting. It
Speaker 2: is calculating the exact trajectory of simulated photons as they
Speaker 2: bounce off a textured puddle of water and refract through
Speaker 2: a dirty glass window in real time. In real time,
Speaker 2: at sixty frames per second.
Speaker 1: I can actually speak to this on a deeply visceral level. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I recently had a chance to try one of those
Speaker 1: really high end enterprise level VR.
Speaker 2: Headsets, the really expensive ones.
Speaker 1: Right, The resolution was so high the screen door effect
Speaker 1: was just entirely gone. They loaded me into a program
Speaker 1: where the environment was a skyscraper.
Speaker 2: I think, I know where this is going.
Speaker 1: The elevator doors open and there was this wooden plank
Speaker 1: sticking out over a thousand foot drop to the city
Speaker 1: streets below.
Speaker 2: The plank experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, my prefrombal cortex, my logical brain was fully
Speaker 1: aware that I was standing barefoot on a carpeted floor
Speaker 1: in a windowless room. I knew it as a factual.
Speaker 2: Certainty, but your body disagreed.
Speaker 1: The moment I stepped toward the edge of that virtual plank,
Speaker 1: my biological hardware completely overrode my logic. The visual input
Speaker 1: of the height, the special audio of the wind, rushing
Speaker 1: past my ears the slight sway of the rendered environment.
Speaker 1: It literally hijacked my nervous system.
Speaker 2: You get vertigo.
Speaker 1: I experienced profound vertigo. My heart rates skyrocketed, my palms
Speaker 1: were sweating profusely, and my legs actually locked up. I
Speaker 1: physically could not force myself to step off the virtual plank.
Speaker 1: My brain had just accepted the simulated input as a
Speaker 1: primary survival reality.
Speaker 2: That biological override is the crucial detail here. Your brain,
Speaker 2: which evolved over millions of years to process physical reality,
Speaker 2: was completely fooled by visual and auditory data generated by
Speaker 2: a consumer grade processor in.
Speaker 1: The year twenty twenty six exactly.
Speaker 2: Now, apply More's law to that, or even just a
Speaker 2: conservative fraction of it, extrapolate our current technological growth out
Speaker 2: a thousand years.
Speaker 1: For one hundred thousand years, a.
Speaker 2: Civilization a million years ahead of us would possess commutational paradigms.
Speaker 2: We literally do not have the physics to conceptualize, right.
Speaker 1: Because imagine trying to explain the Internet to a medieval
Speaker 1: farmer in.
Speaker 2: The year fourteen hundred. Explaining cloud computing and large language
Speaker 2: models would be impossible. We just register as magic to them.
Speaker 1: So to us a Matrioshka Brian. Running a universe seems
Speaker 1: like magic.
Speaker 2: But logically it is just an engineering problem. On a
Speaker 2: long enough timeline, we are already building the rudimentary scaffolding
Speaker 2: of the matrix.
Speaker 1: So if we accept that we are already building these
Speaker 1: rudimentary simulations, then we actually have an incredible advantage here.
Speaker 2: We know how they work exactly.
Speaker 1: We know the architecture. We know the tricks, the shortcuts,
Speaker 1: and the mechanics that developers use to manage complex systems
Speaker 1: and keep players engaged.
Speaker 2: We just have to look for them.
Speaker 1: Right. If our universe is a simulation, it's fundamental architecture,
Speaker 1: like the broad sweep of human history, the behavior of
Speaker 1: society at a macro level, it shouldn't look random. It
Speaker 1: should look suspeciously like the games we currently play. It
Speaker 1: should look managed, and we.
Speaker 2: Can actually shift this from abstract philosophy into observable patterns.
Speaker 1: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: In the architecture of massive multiplayer online games. You know,
Speaker 2: persistent worlds that host millions of players. Developers face a
Speaker 2: systemic problem.
Speaker 1: What happens when they just let it run.
Speaker 2: If you just let the game run endlessly without intervention,
Speaker 2: the system stagnates, wealth concentrates at the very top. New
Speaker 2: players literally can't compete, the environment is stripped of resources,
Speaker 2: and the narrative just stalls.
Speaker 1: They have to intervene.
Speaker 2: To fix this, developers utilize a mechanic called seasons or server.
Speaker 1: Resets, like in Fortnite or Diablo.
Speaker 2: Exactly at the end of a predefined period, the developers
Speaker 2: introduce m massive unavoidable in game.
Speaker 1: Cataclysm, a giant event.
Speaker 2: The map is physically altered, the economic rules change, players
Speaker 2: lose their hoarded advantages, and a new version of the
Speaker 2: game launches with tweaked parameters to keep the system dynamic.
Speaker 1: A hard wipe you level the playing field, introduce new
Speaker 1: mechanics and force the players to adapt. So how does
Speaker 1: that map onto our actual human history.
Speaker 2: Well, when you view the geological and archaeological records through
Speaker 2: the lens of simulation theory, human history is punctuated by massive, sudden,
Speaker 2: and largely inexplicable cataclysms.
Speaker 1: That function exactly like server resets.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the younger Driest impact hypothesis. Roughly twelve
Speaker 2: nine hundred years ago, we have evidence of a massive,
Speaker 2: sudden climatic shift temperatures plummeted globally in a matter of decades. Megafauna,
Speaker 2: the massive mammals that dominated the landscape, were wiped.
Speaker 1: Out, so the available resources completely changed.
Speaker 2: Quman populations were dractically reduced, and the trajectory of early
Speaker 2: civilization was fundamentally direct.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate the map has changed. Good luck scenario.
Speaker 1: But it gets even more specific when you look at
Speaker 1: the Bronze Age collapse, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: Oh, The Late Bronze Age collapse is perhaps the most
Speaker 2: perfect historical analog for a corrupted save file or a
Speaker 2: cascading server failure. What happened around twelve hundred BCE. The
Speaker 2: Mediterranean was actually highly globalized. You had the Egyptians, the Hittites,
Speaker 2: the Mycenians. They had incredibly complex, interdependent trade routes spanning thousands.
Speaker 1: Of miles, exchanging ten copper agricultural goods.
Speaker 2: And advanced writing systems and complex bureaucracies. And then within
Speaker 2: a window of perhaps fifty years, which was a blink
Speaker 2: of an eye historically, it all violently crumbled, just collapse.
Speaker 2: Entire empires, felt major cities were burned to the ground
Speaker 2: and abandoned. The trade routes vanished, the Mycenis literally forgot
Speaker 2: how to read and write.
Speaker 1: Wait, they forgot their own language.
Speaker 2: Their script linear b was lost, plunging the region into
Speaker 2: a dark age. Historians debate the exact cause. You know, drought, earthquakes,
Speaker 2: the mysterious invasion of the sea people's.
Speaker 1: Right, I've heard of them.
Speaker 2: But the systemic nature of the collapse, where everything failed simultaneously,
Speaker 2: it looks remarkably like a complex simulation crashing due to
Speaker 2: interdependent variable overload.
Speaker 1: I want to bring up the Toba supereruption too, because
Speaker 1: that feels like a literal patch to the actual code
Speaker 1: of humanity.
Speaker 2: Yes, seventy four thousand years ago, right in.
Speaker 1: Present day Indonesia. It was one of the largest volcanic
Speaker 1: eruptions in the last two million years. It ejected so
Speaker 1: much ash and sulfur into the atmosphere that it caused
Speaker 1: a volcanic winter.
Speaker 2: Blocked out the sun. Global temperatures plummeted.
Speaker 1: But the fascinating part to me isn't just the geology.
Speaker 1: It's the genetics. Geneticists look at the mutation rates in
Speaker 1: human DNA and they see a severe bottleneck. Right around
Speaker 1: that exact.
Speaker 2: Time, population crashed.
Speaker 1: The global human population was reduced to a staggering degree.
Speaker 1: Estimates suggests we were down to perhaps just ten thousand
Speaker 1: breeding individuals on the entire planet.
Speaker 2: Wait, on the whole planet, Yes.
Speaker 1: Breeding individuals. That's like the size of a small town.
Speaker 2: In the context of a simulation. A genetic bottleneck of
Speaker 2: that magnitude is profound. It's not just a natural disaster,
Speaker 2: it is a systemic culling. Exact, those ten thousand survivors
Speaker 2: were the foundational seed for a new iteration of the
Speaker 2: human software. The board was cleared, the available resources were
Speaker 2: drastically altered by the new climate, and a heavily refined,
Speaker 2: smaller player base was allowed to repopulate the new map.
Speaker 1: Season two began Season.
Speaker 2: Two and the developers could watch how this specific genetic
Speaker 2: subset adapted to a newly hostile environment.
Speaker 1: But you know, resets don't always have to be extinction
Speaker 1: level events. If we're looking at game mechanics, developers also
Speaker 1: use global events to pull players together, to force.
Speaker 2: Interaction to keep the network active.
Speaker 1: Right, If you have players scattered all over the map
Speaker 1: doing their own thing, the system loses cohesion. So you
Speaker 1: drop an event that affects everyone simultaneously.
Speaker 2: Exactly wars, global economic depressions, pandemics. These are the macro
Speaker 2: variables injected into the simulation. Consider how a modern pandemic
Speaker 2: functions systemically. It doesn't matter if you are a corporate
Speaker 2: executive in a high rise in Tokyo or a farmer
Speaker 2: in a rural village in France.
Speaker 1: You are dealing with the exact same thing.
Speaker 2: Suddenly a new variable is introduced into the environment that
Speaker 2: overrides all local programming. You are locked into the exact
Speaker 2: same global narrative. You have no choice but to engage
Speaker 2: with the new mechanics.
Speaker 1: Lockdowns, supply chain failures, inflation.
Speaker 2: Travel restrictions. Yeah, the developers forced the entire player base
Speaker 2: to react to the same stimulus simultaneously to observe the
Speaker 2: societal adaptations.
Speaker 1: And it's fascinating to look at how ancient cultures try
Speaker 1: to articulate these sudden global shifts because they didn't have
Speaker 1: the vocabulary of computer science, so they used the vocabulary
Speaker 1: of theology.
Speaker 2: Almost uniformly across agent traditions. The gods operate exactly like
Speaker 2: system administrators.
Speaker 1: Or game developers.
Speaker 2: They reside outside the physical environment on Mount Olympus in
Speaker 2: the heavens, in a higher realm. They have a massive
Speaker 2: dashboard of controls. They observe the simulation, and occasionally they intervene.
Speaker 1: They cause a great flood, they start a war between nations.
Speaker 2: Or they grant a technological boon like fire. But crucially,
Speaker 2: the gods are not subject to the physical laws they.
Speaker 1: Create, right, they don't get hurt by the fire.
Speaker 2: They don't have a biological avatar that can permanently die
Speaker 2: in the physics engine. They possess admin trivileges.
Speaker 1: That makes total sense for the big stuff, the wars
Speaker 1: and the floods. But what about the weird stuff. The
Speaker 1: weird stuff, Yeah, what about the cultural phenomena that just
Speaker 1: defy all logic, Because in modern gaming it's not all
Speaker 1: doing gloom. Developers constantly drop micro content, seasonal items, or
Speaker 1: weird mini games just to keep players logging in.
Speaker 2: You're talking about engagement metrics. If you are in intelligence
Speaker 2: running a complex simulation of a society, you need real
Speaker 2: time data on how the network process is in in
Speaker 2: you need to know how the nodes, which is us, communicate.
Speaker 1: What captures our collective attention right, and.
Speaker 2: The exact velocity at which an idea can propagate across
Speaker 2: the globe.
Speaker 1: So you drop something totally absurd into the environment and
Speaker 1: track it. I am thinking about viral trends here. Look
Speaker 1: at the summer of twenty sixteen with Pokemon go Oh.
Speaker 2: That was surreal.
Speaker 1: For two months, the entire planets suffered a collective hallucination.
Speaker 1: You had millions of people walking blindly into traffic, congregating
Speaker 1: in random public parks at midnight, staring through their screens
Speaker 1: to interact with digital creatures that didn't exist.
Speaker 2: It was a global shift in behavior.
Speaker 1: Or the fidget spinner craze or the ice bucket challenge,
Speaker 1: or when NFTs suddenly convinced the world that a jpeg
Speaker 1: of a bared ape was worth half a million.
Speaker 2: Dollars, That one is still hard to explain.
Speaker 1: Or that specific flows dance from Fortnite. Suddenly every single
Speaker 1: child across completely different countries, languages, and cultures was doing
Speaker 1: the exact same physical movement simultaneously.
Speaker 2: When you analyze those tracks, they do not behave like
Speaker 2: organic cultural evolution, No they don't. They achieve total instantaneous
Speaker 2: saturation in a hyper specific window of time, and then
Speaker 2: they vanish just as violently, almost as if the code
Speaker 2: for that trend was deprecated by the developers. Yes, they
Speaker 2: function as stress tests for the societal network. Someone or
Speaker 2: some system is reading the analytics. They are measuring the
Speaker 2: viral coefficient of a fidget spinner to understand human mimicry.
Speaker 1: They are tracking the spread of a digital dance to
Speaker 1: map our social connectivity.
Speaker 2: It is a low stakes variable introduced specifically to generate
Speaker 2: engagement data.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting because I fell for
Speaker 1: all of it. I dump ice water on my head,
Speaker 1: I bought a fidget spinner. I was literally tracking a
Speaker 1: charizard through my neighbor's yard.
Speaker 2: You were highly engaged user.
Speaker 1: I was generating data for the developers. But this leads
Speaker 1: to a really dark, uncomfortable corner of the theory. If
Speaker 1: we are talking about player engagement, we have to talk
Speaker 1: about the nature of the players themselves.
Speaker 2: This is where it gets heavy.
Speaker 1: In any game, the world is populated by two distinct
Speaker 1: types of entities. You have the player characters, the avatars
Speaker 1: that are being driven by a conscious mind with genuine
Speaker 1: agency outside the game right and then filling out the
Speaker 1: world to make it feel alive. You have the NPCs,
Speaker 1: the non player characters.
Speaker 2: The philosophical equivalent of the NPC is the philosophical.
Speaker 1: Zombie a zombie like brain did no.
Speaker 2: Not quite. It's the concept deeply explored by David Chalmers.
Speaker 2: A philosophical zombie is a being that is biologically and
Speaker 2: physically identical to a normal human. Okay, they talk, they laugh,
Speaker 2: they flinch when they touch a hot stove, they cry.
Speaker 2: It sad movies, But there is no internal experience. Wait, really,
Speaker 2: there is no conscious awareness behind the eyes. They are
Speaker 2: running entirely on pre written scripts and biological algorithms.
Speaker 1: Like advanced AI in a game.
Speaker 2: Exactly in a simulation, rendering eight billion fully conscious, independent
Speaker 2: minds might be computationally inefficient.
Speaker 1: It would take much ram.
Speaker 2: It is much easier to fully render a smaller subset
Speaker 2: of true player characters and populate the rest of the
Speaker 2: world with advanced NPCs that react perfectly to their environment
Speaker 2: but don't actually experience it.
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate existential dread right there, solipsism on steroids.
Speaker 1: You walk down a crowded street in Manhattan and you
Speaker 1: have to wonder how many of the people rushing past
Speaker 1: you are actually experiencing life and how many are just
Speaker 1: background processing meant to make your simulation feel crowded.
Speaker 2: It forces a mirror onto the listener. It forces you
Speaker 2: to critically examine your own daily life.
Speaker 1: Am I an NPC?
Speaker 2: We'll think about it when you wake up, drink your coffee,
Speaker 2: sit in traffic on your commute, perform your repetitive tasks
Speaker 2: at work, drive home, scroll through endless algorithm feeds on
Speaker 2: your phone, and go to sleep, only to do it
Speaker 2: again the next day.
Speaker 1: Are you actually exercising free will exactly?
Speaker 2: Are you making unscripted choices with genuine agency or are
Speaker 2: you simply executing a behavioral loop based on environmental stimuli,
Speaker 2: societal programming, and biological imperative.
Speaker 1: If you are living on autopilot, how do you prove
Speaker 1: even to yourself that you aren't an NPC? Okay, I
Speaker 1: need to step away from the existential terror of being
Speaker 1: an NPC before I have a panic attack. Fair enough,
Speaker 1: Let's pivot from the software mechanics of culture and history
Speaker 1: and let's look at the actual hardware. Let's look under
Speaker 1: the hood of reality. Because if the universe is a simulation,
Speaker 1: the physics of our universe shouldn't just be a set
Speaker 1: of natural laws, right.
Speaker 2: It should look like code.
Speaker 1: Physics should look like the limitations of a rendering engine.
Speaker 1: It should look like computational architecture.
Speaker 2: And this is where the simulation hypothesis finds its strongest
Speaker 2: empirical evidence. Physics looks profoundly like computation. Okay, break that
Speaker 2: down to understand why, we have to look at how
Speaker 2: computers handle space and memory. Let's start with the resolution limit.
Speaker 1: Like pixels on a screen.
Speaker 2: Exactly, if you open a high resolution digital image on
Speaker 2: your computer, it looks perfectly smooth. The curves are continuous,
Speaker 2: the gradients are flawless. But if he keeps booming in,
Speaker 2: eventually that illusion breaks down.
Speaker 1: You hit the squares.
Speaker 2: You hit a hard physical limit. The pixel the fundamental
Speaker 2: unit of the image. You cannot zoom in to see
Speaker 2: what is inside a pixel because below that level of
Speaker 2: magnification the image literally does not exist. It is mathematically
Speaker 2: undefined by the software.
Speaker 1: Right, the screen can only draw squares so small there
Speaker 1: is a fundamental grid.
Speaker 2: Physical reality has the exact same grid. It is called
Speaker 2: the plank length. The plank length, yes, it is roughly
Speaker 2: one point six times ten to the power of negative
Speaker 2: thirty five.
Speaker 1: Meters, which is how small.
Speaker 2: To put that in perspective, if a single atom were
Speaker 2: the size of the entire visible universe. The plank length
Speaker 2: would be the size of an average tree.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that is unimaginably small.
Speaker 2: It is, but it is not just a small measurement.
Speaker 2: It is a fundamental property of space time. In physics,
Speaker 2: space is not a continuous, infinitely divisible sheet. It is quantized,
Speaker 2: meaning it comes in chunks. Yes, when physicists try to
Speaker 2: use the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics to
Speaker 2: describe a distance smaller than the plank length, the math
Speaker 2: completely shatters.
Speaker 1: It just stops working.
Speaker 2: You get infinities, you get paradoxes. The universe returns the
Speaker 2: equivalent of a divide by zero error, the laws of
Speaker 2: physics cease to function. The plank length is the absolute
Speaker 2: hard limit on the rendering engine of reality is the
Speaker 2: literal pixel of the universe.
Speaker 1: So we are moving through a three dimensional grid of pixels.
Speaker 1: That is staggering. But if we're talking about rendering engines
Speaker 1: and memory conservation, we have to talk about the double
Speaker 1: slit experiment.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, the classic.
Speaker 1: To me, this is the smoking gun. This is the
Speaker 1: moment quantum physics stops sounding like science and starts sounding
Speaker 1: like a software developer trying to save ram.
Speaker 2: The double slit experiment is the bedrock of quantum strangeness,
Speaker 2: and it directly implies that the universe only renders what
Speaker 2: is being observed.
Speaker 1: Explain how it works for the listeners who might be
Speaker 1: rusty on their quantum mechanics.
Speaker 2: Sure, In the basic version of the experiment, you fire
Speaker 2: subatomic particles like photon of light or individual electrons through
Speaker 2: a physical barrier that has two tiny parallel slits in.
Speaker 1: It, like shooting a paintball through a fence.
Speaker 2: Right, But when you don't measure which slit the particle
Speaker 2: goes through, something impossible happens. A single particle passes through
Speaker 2: both slits simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Wait, one particle goes through two holes at once.
Speaker 2: Yes, it interferes with itself and creates a wavelike interference
Speaker 2: pattern multiple overlapping bands on the detector wall behind the barrier.
Speaker 2: It behaves as a wave of pure probability, existing in
Speaker 2: multiple states at once.
Speaker 1: But the moment you decide to watch it, the moment
Speaker 1: you place a measuring device at the slits to record
Speaker 1: exactly which hole the particle travels through, the.
Speaker 2: Universe changes its behavior. The wave function instantly.
Speaker 1: Collapses just because you looked at it exactly.
Speaker 2: The particle stops acting like a diffuse wave of probabilities
Speaker 2: and suddenly acts like a solid localized bullet, passing through
Speaker 2: only one slit and creating two distinct solid bands on
Speaker 2: the back wall. The simple act of observation, the extraction
Speaker 2: of information from the system, retroactively changes the physical nature
Speaker 2: of the particle.
Speaker 1: I always compare this to a specific technique in video
Speaker 1: game design called frustum culling.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 1: If you are playing a massive open world game like
Speaker 1: Grand Theft, Auto or Skyrim, the computer's processor is working
Speaker 1: incredibly hard to render the enemies, the lighting, the trees,
Speaker 1: and the textures right in front of your camera.
Speaker 2: View right whatever you're looking at.
Speaker 1: But what is happening behind your character. The computer is
Speaker 1: not wasting precious processing power rendering a beautifully detailed mountain
Speaker 1: range or a bustling city street behind your back. If
Speaker 1: you aren't looking at it, it would fry the processor exactly.
Speaker 1: That mountain range behind you doesn't exist as solid geometry.
Speaker 1: It exists only as a wireframe, a set of probabilities
Speaker 1: and coordinates in the computer's memory. But the absolute millisecond
Speaker 1: you turn your character around with the joystick to look.
Speaker 2: The computer is forced to instantly render that wireframe into
Speaker 2: solid textures.
Speaker 1: Frustum culling is the perfect conceptual analog for wave function
Speaker 1: collapse processing power. Even for a megastructure like a Matrioshka brain.
Speaker 1: Running a universe is finite. It is computationally expensive, perhaps
Speaker 1: infinitely so, to fully render the definite quantum state of
Speaker 1: every single subatomic particle in the universe at all times.
Speaker 2: So this system takes a shortcut.
Speaker 1: It leaves unobserved particles in a state of probability a
Speaker 1: wave function. In this state, they take up very little
Speaker 1: computational memory.
Speaker 2: But the moment a player, whether that is a conscious
Speaker 2: observer or a localized measuring device, interacts with the particle,
Speaker 2: the system is forced to resolve the code.
Speaker 1: The universe only fully renders its physics when it is
Speaker 1: actively being looked at.
Speaker 2: And physicists have pushed this even further, haven't they, with
Speaker 2: the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that experiment just breaks my brain.
Speaker 2: It's where the simulation argument becomes almost undeniable. The delayed
Speaker 2: choice quantum eraser essentially allows the particle to pass through
Speaker 2: the slits, but the decision to measure it or not
Speaker 2: measure it is made after the particle has already hit
Speaker 2: the back.
Speaker 1: Wall using quantum entanglement.
Speaker 2: Yes, and shockingly, if you measure the entangled twin later,
Speaker 2: the original particle hitting the wall will have acted as
Speaker 2: a solid particle. If you destroy the measurement data, it
Speaker 2: will have acted as a wave.
Speaker 1: So it goes back in time.
Speaker 2: The universe literally rewrites its own past history based on
Speaker 2: whether information is extracted in the present. That is not
Speaker 2: how physical matter behaves. That is exactly how a dynamic
Speaker 2: rendering engine manages data pathways.
Speaker 1: Which naturally leads us to the ultimate hard coded rule
Speaker 1: of the universe. The speed limit.
Speaker 2: The speed of light.
Speaker 1: Yes, the speed of light one hundred and eighty six
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty two miles per second. It is
Speaker 1: an absolute constant in a vacuum. It doesn't matter how
Speaker 1: much energy you pump into a spacecraft. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: what propulsion system you invent. Mass cannot exceed the speed
Speaker 1: of light.
Speaker 2: Nothing can.
Speaker 1: Physics doesn't really have a deeply satisfying why for this.
Speaker 2: It just is.
Speaker 1: It is an arbitrary cap placed on the cosmos, but
Speaker 1: in the context of a computer.
Speaker 2: In the context of computational architecture, the speed of light
Speaker 2: makes perfect intuitive sense. Any processor, no matter how advanced,
Speaker 2: no matter if it is made of silicon or quantum
Speaker 2: tangled photons, has.
Speaker 1: A clock speed, a cycle time.
Speaker 2: Right, there is an absolute maximum speed at which information
Speaker 2: can move from one note of the system to another.
Speaker 2: If our universe is rendered on a cosmic server, the
Speaker 2: speed of light is not a physical property of space.
Speaker 1: It is simply the processing cap of the server running
Speaker 1: the simulation.
Speaker 2: It is the maximum bandwidth.
Speaker 1: And this perfectly explains time dilation. Einstein proved that the
Speaker 1: closer you get to the speed of light, the slower
Speaker 1: time moves for you relative to a stationary observer.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: Think of it as CPU throttling, like when a video
Speaker 1: game lags.
Speaker 2: Yes, if a processor is maxed out trying to calculate
Speaker 2: the incredible kinetic energy and movement of an object traveling
Speaker 2: near the absolute speed light limit of the system, it
Speaker 2: literally has fewer processing cycles available to calculate the internal
Speaker 2: state the passage of time for that specific.
Speaker 1: Object because it's spending all its energy just rendering the speed.
Speaker 2: The frame rate of time drops because the processor is
Speaker 2: struggling to render the velocity. The physics of relativity are
Speaker 2: perfectly mirrored by the physics of computation.
Speaker 1: Okay, So if the fundamental laws of physics are just
Speaker 1: the processing limits, the resolution pixels, and the memory saving
Speaker 1: rendering tricks of a massive computer, who is writing the code?
Speaker 2: That is the big question.
Speaker 1: Who is pushing the updates? Because when we look back
Speaker 1: at the history of our species, it doesn't look like
Speaker 1: a slow, steady, even progression.
Speaker 2: No, it looks highly punctuated, it looks managed. Let's look
Speaker 2: at human evolution, specifically the Leban cognitive function. Okay, the
Speaker 2: traditional Darwinian model suggests slow, gradual incremental changes over millions
Speaker 2: of years through random mutation and natural selection.
Speaker 1: Right, monkey slowly turns into.
Speaker 2: And while that explains a vast amount of biology, there
Speaker 2: are specific moments in human development that defy that slow pace.
Speaker 1: You're talking about the hardware patch to the human brain exactly.
Speaker 2: The sudden expansion of the neocortex, the lead to abstract thought,
Speaker 2: the capacity for complex language, the sudden appearance of art
Speaker 2: and symbolic representation.
Speaker 1: It just happens so fast.
Speaker 2: We see periods where human DNA, specifically gene clusters like
Speaker 2: FOXP two, which are associated with language and cognitive development,
Speaker 2: underwent sudden, rapid, massive changes that seem entirely disproportionate to
Speaker 2: the evolutionary timeline. They didn't involve in a linear fashion.
Speaker 2: They exploded into existence.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a gradual climb out of the primal mud.
Speaker 1: It was a hot fix, a patch to the operating system.
Speaker 2: From the perspective of a simulation developer, this is exactly
Speaker 2: how you would manage a project. If you are running
Speaker 2: an ancestor simulation and you watch your simulated hominids hitting
Speaker 2: rocks together for a million years, that's boring. Eventually the
Speaker 2: data plateaus. You aren't learning anything new about the system.
Speaker 2: The simulation is stalled. So you intervene. You push an update,
Speaker 2: You push an upgrade to the cognitive parameters of the species.
Speaker 2: You catch the neocortex. Suddenly they possess abstract thought. The
Speaker 2: invent agriculture, then industry, then computers. You artificially accelerate the
Speaker 2: timeline to observe how this specific intelligence manages rapid technological acquisition.
Speaker 1: But following this chain of logic, you know who created
Speaker 1: the universe, who patched our DNA, who built the computer?
Speaker 1: It always leads us straight into a brick wall. In
Speaker 1: both philosophy and physics, the first cause.
Speaker 2: Problem right, what started it all?
Speaker 1: If the Big Bang started the universe? What caused the
Speaker 1: Big Bang? If an intelligent creator built the universe? Who
Speaker 1: created the creator? Our human language, our logic, and our
Speaker 1: physics completely fail when we try to define the ultimate origin.
Speaker 1: We just loop infinitely. Does simulation theory offer a way
Speaker 1: out of the first cause paradox?
Speaker 2: It doesn't just offer a way out, It elegantly bypasses
Speaker 2: it entirely for our specific reality. In simulation theory, the
Speaker 2: first cause of our universe is incredibly simple to find
Speaker 2: and mundane, which is it is the moment the simulation
Speaker 2: was initialized. It was the moment the developer outside the
Speaker 2: screen pressed entered to execute the code.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: We cannot use our physics to understand what came before
Speaker 2: the Big Bang because our physical laws did not exist
Speaker 2: until the program was booted up. Our physics are strictly
Speaker 2: local to this specific software instance.
Speaker 1: So asking what happened before.
Speaker 2: The Big Bang is like a character inside a video
Speaker 2: game asking what happened in the game world before the
Speaker 2: console was turned on. The question itself is fundamentally flawed
Speaker 2: because time, as the character experiences it, did not exist.
Speaker 1: So we are a heavily monitored species running on a
Speaker 1: server with hard coded skied limits, experiencing memory saving rendering tricks,
Speaker 1: and benefiting from sudden cognitive software patches.
Speaker 2: That sums it.
Speaker 1: Up, which brings us to the ultimate plot twist. Who
Speaker 1: built the sandbox? The easy sci fi answer is aliens, right,
Speaker 1: some super advanced higher dimensional civilization experimenting in their lab.
Speaker 1: But there is a much more compelling and frankly, much
Speaker 1: more emotional and humanistic theory hidden in Bosstrom's trilemma.
Speaker 2: Yes, there is.
Speaker 1: What if the simulators aren't alien intelligences? What if they
Speaker 1: are us? What if the developers are humans from the
Speaker 1: distant future.
Speaker 2: This is where the theory shifts from cold computation to
Speaker 2: profound existential psychology. Let's really try to inhabit the mindset
Speaker 2: of an ultra advanced future human civilization.
Speaker 1: Okay, paint the picture for me.
Speaker 2: Imagine humanity one hundred thousand or million years from now,
Speaker 2: living in base reality. Through technological mastery, we have cured
Speaker 2: all biological diseases. We have mapped every neuron of the
Speaker 2: brain and achieved digital uploading. We have completely solved biological depths,
Speaker 2: so we live forever. We have achieved true immortality. We
Speaker 2: live in a state of perfect post scarcity bliss, where
Speaker 2: any desire can be instantly gratified by matter remplicators.
Speaker 1: Honestly, that sounds like paradise.
Speaker 2: Initially, yes, But living continuously forever without friction, without consequence
Speaker 2: would eventually become utterly paralyzing.
Speaker 1: Why.
Speaker 2: Because the human mind as it evolved is built entirely
Speaker 2: on contrast. We understand light because of the dark. We
Speaker 2: appreciate joy because we have experienced sorrow.
Speaker 1: That makes sense.
Speaker 2: Our sense of triumph is entirely dependent on the reality
Speaker 2: of struggle and the possibility of failure. If you completely
Speaker 2: remove struggle, danger, and loss from the human experience, existence
Speaker 2: risks flattening out into a state of infinite, unbearable apathy.
Speaker 1: So to feel something real again, Yeah, you log in
Speaker 1: play a game.
Speaker 2: You build a highly accurate, flawlessly rendered historical simulation of
Speaker 2: the most turbulent, dangerous, emotional, and vital periods of your
Speaker 2: own history, like.
Speaker 1: The twenty first century.
Speaker 2: You simulate the twenty first century, the error right before
Speaker 2: humanity merged with AI or destroyed its environment or left
Speaker 2: the planet. And you don't just watch it on a screen.
Speaker 2: You fully immersed yourself in it. You temporarily suppress or
Speaker 2: wipe your memories of your mortal, post human life, and
Speaker 2: you choose to spawn into a biological avatar. You choose limitation.
Speaker 1: This completely redefines the human experience. If this is true,
Speaker 1: then death isn't an end. Death is just logging out.
Speaker 1: The biological headset comes off, and you wake up back
Speaker 1: in base reality exactly, and birth is just you at
Speaker 1: the character selection screen, choosing a new avatar, a new
Speaker 1: difficulty setting, a specific era. You specifically chose to inhabit
Speaker 1: Earth right now today, with all of its geopolitical chaos,
Speaker 1: its personal struggles, and its physical limitations.
Speaker 2: You chose to come here.
Speaker 1: You chose to be here to feel what it is
Speaker 1: like to struggle, to feel the devastating heartbreak of loss,
Speaker 1: the intense, fleeting joy of love, the profound, chaotic moments
Speaker 1: of vulnerability that a perfect i mortal existence completely strips away.
Speaker 1: We are not victims of the universe. We are tourists
Speaker 1: here on a historical trip to remember what it feels
Speaker 1: like to be alive.
Speaker 2: And there is a fascinating body of subjective anecdotal evidence
Speaker 2: that perfectly mirrors this transition state. Look at near death
Speaker 2: experiences or NDEs.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've read about these people seeing the light right right.
Speaker 2: Researchers who study NDEs find that across completely different cultures, religions,
Speaker 2: and geographic locations, people who technically die on an operating
Speaker 2: table and are subsequently revived report incredibly consistent experiences.
Speaker 1: What's the most common one, The.
Speaker 2: Most common and profound element of an NDE is the
Speaker 2: life review. Patients report seeing their entire life flash before
Speaker 2: their eyes. But they don't just watch it like a
Speaker 2: movie on a screen.
Speaker 1: Oh, just see it.
Speaker 2: They report experiencing their actions from a three hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty degree perspective of everyone they ever interacted with. They
Speaker 2: viscerally feel the emotional pain they cause others and the
Speaker 2: joy they brought others simultaneously.
Speaker 1: A postgame highlight reel. That is exactly what that phenomenon resemble.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: Think about it. When you finish a match in a
Speaker 1: complex multiplayer video game, you don't just immediately go back
Speaker 1: to the menu. You get a debriefing screen. You get
Speaker 1: a breakdown of your stats. Here is where you succeeded.
Speaker 1: Here's where you failed. Here is the damage you dealt,
Speaker 1: Here's how you impacted the other players in the lobby.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: If we are future humans logging into a specific point
Speaker 1: in history, the life review isn't a mystical judgment. It
Speaker 1: is just the server debriefing the player. It is the
Speaker 1: system processing the characters accumulated data and reintegrating those raw
Speaker 1: emotional experiences back into the prime post human consciousness as
Speaker 1: they begin the logout sequence.
Speaker 2: It completely reframes the purpose of suffering. It reframes the
Speaker 2: struggles of our existence not as random cruel accidents inflicted
Speaker 2: by an unfeeling universe, but as the very obstacles we
Speaker 2: explicitly chose to experience in order to enrich our higher selves.
Speaker 2: We came here for the friction, which.
Speaker 1: Brings us right back to the terrifying mind bending hook
Speaker 1: from the very beginning of our conversation, the calendar question. Yes,
Speaker 1: if we are future humans logging into a simulation and
Speaker 1: the physical universe is just a rendering engine, what year
Speaker 1: is it? Really?
Speaker 2: This is the count of last Thursdayism and epistemological problem
Speaker 2: in philosophy.
Speaker 1: Last Thursdayism.
Speaker 2: Yes, if this is a simulation. Then every single piece
Speaker 2: of physical and historical evidence we have for the current year,
Speaker 2: the thirteen point eight billion year age of the universe,
Speaker 2: the fossil records of the dinosaurs in the ground, the
Speaker 2: geological strata of the Earth, the carbon dating of ancient artifacts,
Speaker 2: all of.
Speaker 1: It exists entirely inside the system.
Speaker 2: It's just preloaded lore.
Speaker 1: Preloaded lore, like when you start a new game and
Speaker 1: the world already has one thousand year history written in
Speaker 1: books you can find on shelves.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it points to a reality that is both terrifying
Speaker 2: and all inspiring. The scientists analyzing the data, the electron microscopes,
Speaker 2: they use, the carbon dating algorithms, the text. It is
Speaker 2: all rendered code.
Speaker 1: So the universe might not be fourteen billion years old.
Speaker 2: The universe might have literally been booted up yesterday or
Speaker 2: five minutes ago. The entire thirteen point eight billion year
Speaker 2: backstory might have just been pre written into the initialization
Speaker 2: code to give the simulation a sense of absolute verisimilitude.
Speaker 1: To make it feel lived in.
Speaker 2: It is designed to feel ancient, continuous, and flawlessly real
Speaker 2: to the inhabitants, so we don't realize we are in
Speaker 2: a sandbox. We have absolutely zero empirical scientific way to
Speaker 2: prove that any history before this exact, immediate second actually
Speaker 2: happened in base reality.
Speaker 1: But I want to pull this back from total existential
Speaker 1: nihilism for a second, because it's easy to hear all
Speaker 1: this and feel like nothing matters.
Speaker 2: Oh, definitely.
Speaker 1: David Chalmers in Reality plus Ala tackles this exact dread,
Speaker 1: and he makes a beautifully grounding argument. He emphasizes the
Speaker 1: concept of structuralism. He argues that even if the universe
Speaker 1: is a simulation, it is still undeniably our reality. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's fake exactly. It doesn't mean it is
Speaker 1: an illusion in a way that devalues the experience. If
Speaker 1: you sit on a simulated chair and the simulated physics
Speaker 1: engine perfectly supports your simulated body, then for all functional
Speaker 1: intents and purposes, it is a real chair, right.
Speaker 2: A simulated tears still stems from real structural sets.
Speaker 1: Yes, the deep connections we make with other people, the
Speaker 1: pain we endure, the joy we experience, they are fundamentally
Speaker 1: real to the conscious mind that is processing them. This
Speaker 1: aligns beautifully with Descartes's famous realization. Kajito ergosum I think,
Speaker 1: therefore I am.
Speaker 2: The consciousness is the irreducible truth.
Speaker 1: Descartes realized that a demon could be deceiving his senses
Speaker 1: entirely projecting a fake world around him. But the demon
Speaker 1: couldn't fake the fact that descart was experiencing the deception.
Speaker 1: The consciousness is the irreducible truth.
Speaker 2: The substrate might be silicon instead of carbon, or quantum
Speaker 2: probability feels instead of solid matter, but the experience of
Speaker 2: existence is authentic.
Speaker 1: The profound urgency we feel to find our creator, to
Speaker 1: look up at the stars and ask why might just
Speaker 1: be our latent out of game awareness, bleeding through the code,
Speaker 1: a subconscious memory of the terminal we left behind.
Speaker 2: However, embracing that reality leads us to one final ultimate
Speaker 2: philosophical trap door. Oh boy, what is it? Is the
Speaker 2: concept of infinite regress. Let's say Bostrom is right. Let's
Speaker 2: say future humans simulated us. Okay, well, if they reached
Speaker 2: a point of technological mastery to simulate entire universes, how
Speaker 2: do they know they are in base reality?
Speaker 1: Oh no, how do.
Speaker 2: They know they are in a simulation being run by
Speaker 2: an even more advanced civilization above them? And who simulated
Speaker 2: the civilization above them.
Speaker 1: It's the classic turtles all the way down paradox.
Speaker 2: Exactly, do we just hit an endless, fractal ladder of
Speaker 2: simulations nested within simulations, going all the way up forever
Speaker 2: with no base.
Speaker 3: Reality at all that is dizzying, Or do we eventually
Speaker 3: reach a prime singular awareness, a base reality that isn't
Speaker 3: physical being sitting at a keyboard, but just pure unstructured
Speaker 3: consciousness that wanted to experience itself from infinite angles, so
Speaker 3: it shattered itself into a trillion simulated realities to play
Speaker 3: every role in the cosmos.
Speaker 1: My brain is officially at capacity. That is the ultimate
Speaker 1: thrilling thread. We started with the simple act of checking
Speaker 1: the calendar and ended up as fractured shards of a
Speaker 1: prime cosmic consciousness playing a hyper advanced video game just
Speaker 1: to feel the friction of existence.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to process.
Speaker 1: It really is. And we want you, the listener, to
Speaker 1: carry this perspective with you as you go about your
Speaker 1: rendered day today. As you drink your simulated coffee, commute
Speaker 1: to your simulated job, and interact with the avatars around you,
Speaker 1: I want you to think about the choices you made
Speaker 1: to get here.
Speaker 2: Think about the game you're playing.
Speaker 1: If you are playing a game right now and you
Speaker 1: have the option to log out, look at the Grand
Speaker 1: Cosmic menu screen and respawn, where in history would you
Speaker 1: respawn into this game?
Speaker 2: That's a great question.
Speaker 1: Would you choose to be exactly where you are right now? Again?
Speaker 1: Do you think we are future versions of ourselves playing
Speaker 1: the most immersive historical drama ever coded? Drop a comment
Speaker 1: below let us know your answers, your theories, and where
Speaker 1: you would choose to spawn if you had the controller.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for sharing your time, your processing power,
Speaker 1: and your conscious awareness with us.
Speaker 2: It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: Keep questioning. The code will catch you next time. On
Speaker 1: Thrilling Threads