Paul Gude: All right. So...
Can you see me?
Rodney Ascher: Hey! Yeah, there you are. Hey, Paul.
Paul: Hey! So I'm just now starting the audio recorder.
[Rodney indistinctly talking]
All right, so that's set up.
And I'm starting the video recorder.
[beeps]
Paul: And I'm just making sure that it's recording.
Okay. So... Hello!
Rodney: One of the things that
you wrote about was sort of your first primitive idea
- of simulation theory as a kid. - Yeah.
Rodney: Yeah, can you describe what that was like?
Can I do one thing before that?
Rodney: Yeah.
'Cause this is gonna set the tenor for everything.
Rodney: Please.
Paul: Okay. I was in a class when I was in college,
I went to the University of Missouri, Columbia.
This was in the early '90s.
And a teacher was in front of the class
and the teacher said,
"Something interesting about the brain
is that we actually can map what we think
about the human nervous system
by the highest level of technology of the day."
So for example, when the aqueducts were big,
people thought that humors controlled the body.
That different liquids would come in and teach you--
or make you feel a different way.
And then whenever the telegraph came,
then all of a sudden we thought,
"Well, these are nerve impulses
that go down sort of like wires."
And then she said, "Now we know that the brain is a computer."
And I raised my hand, I said,
"Because that's our highest level of technology."
And she said, "No, the brain is a computer."
And I didn't do that well in the class, but the thing is,
so when we talk about simulation theory...
we, right now, are living in a time where,
you know, you have the PS4, PSVR,
you know,
I'm a Sony brand whore, so I apologize
for not throwing out other things.
But the basic, you know,
virtual reality level of simulation
is something that we can use as a model.
But it isn't necessarily what is going on,
and I think that's important.
That we can use it and we can understand
that's what's going on,
but we aren't necessarily in a server room somewhere.
It might be something different.
You know, if you run into a thing in the world
that you don't understand, your brain is gonna go,
"Okay, maybe this is what this is."
And as technology gets more advanced
we'll have better ways of describing it.
So, everything that I describe here
keep in mind, you know, I'm a 21st Century guy,
that's how my brain works.
If you're watching this in the future, we aren't dumb,
it's just that we don't have the tools that you have
to think of this stuff.
[electronic music plays]
Computer voice: In September of 1977,
the writer Philip K. Dick, creator ofMinority Report,
Blade Runner, andTotal Recall,
addressed an audience of fans in Metz, France.
They expected a talk about science fiction but his
lecture explored religion and philosophy as well.
To him, all three subjects were deeply interconnected.
[Indistinct conversations]
The title of my address is...
"If you find this world bad,
you should see some of the others."
[translator speaks French]
The subject of this speech...
is a topic which has been discovered recently,
and which may not exist at all.
I may be talking about something
that does not exist.
Therefore, I am free to say everything or nothing.
[translator speaks French]
We are living in a computer programmed reality
and the only clue we have to it
is when some variable is changed.
and some alteration in our reality occurs.
Computer voice: Philip K. Dick's belief
that we were living in a digitally created,
artificial world sounded like madness in 1977.
But then in 1999, The Matrix introduced
simulation theory to the wider world.
In the years since the film, this idea has begun
to be taken seriously as more than science fiction.
It is fiercely debated online and in real life
in classrooms, laboratories, design studios and courtrooms.
Audience member: So the idea is right,
any sufficiently advanced civilization
could create simulation that's like our existence,
and so the theory follows
that maybe we're in the simulation.
-Have you thought about this?- A lot.
- Audience member: And are we-- - [audience laughs]
I am actually in a simulation, and so are you.
So, are we living in a simulation?
I find it hard to argue against that possibility.
If all of this is some kind of informational process
running in some machine.
The machine is not in this universe,
it's somewhere else,
and this universe is a consequence of its running.
This is kind of getting that artifacting or whatever problem.
Rodney: Brother Mystwood, hey, how are you?
Hello. I am sorry about the strange lighting.
[chuckles]
All I have is Christmas lights.
You talked about, you know, sort of this journey
starting after a spade of synchronicities.
- What were those like? - Yes.
There's a number of rather small examples.
You know, the kind of everyday things that you would,
you know... I'm thinking of someone,
and I turn the corner and there they are.
I would start giving myself sort of tests.
I'm thinking of an orange fish.
I would like to see an orange fish in the next 10 minutes.
And 10 minutes later in the walk,
I turn down a street
and there's a restaurant with an orange fish on it
that I'd never seen before.
So, small things like that occur with enough regularity.
I began to sort of track my days numerically.
And if you'll allow me to go
on a tangent a little bit here, Rodney.
I don't enjoy the average five-day week.
I like to work in weeks of 12 days.
I would notice that sort of on every 12th day
I would see a certain type of thing pop up
and I tracked this over the course of about a year.
And long story short, started to notice
you know, things that would pop up with a certain regularity.
You know, on every third day, for instance, I would kind of--
that would be when something would happen
sort of related to my career.
Or every fifth day I would notice an interesting
synchronicity related to my family,
so on and so forth.
And at a certain point of course,
what becomes hard to delineate, is this regularity
something that I'm noticing or something that I'm making?
You know, is it a Schrodinger type of situation,
where just by virtue of staring at this thing,
it becomes something that it's not.
One of the big things was
that I would go to a lot of places with my parents
and they would be empty.
Or very few people.
Like a shopping mall with not a lot of people in there.
Driving down the road and never seeing another car.
Things like that.
This is because I moved from Pontiac, Illinois,
which had more people,
to Dorsey, Illinois, which had like 500 people.
Our nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile
down the road and all that.
So I didn't interact with a lot of people.
And one of the things that I thought,
again, this is in my little, you know,
I moved there when I was in like second grade...
In my little brain I was like, "A-ha!
This is a great way of saving time and money
because they won't need to have as many people."
Occasionally, I would go to St. Louis...
which was about 50 miles away.
But whenever we did, my Dad had a very tight control
over our schedule and our itinerary, you know.
- Once I saw... - [clamoring, gunshots]
...the idea of a facade,
you know, this is on a western movie thing.
Once I saw the idea of it,
I was like, "Oh, well, that's what's happening."
All this time that we're spending in the car,
this 50 minutes that it takes us,
we're inside this car
they're playing, you know, this film of us driving
while they're changing all the sets into the St. Louis set.
[construction sounds]
But I'm not gonna get to go and see everything
because my dad is gonna be there to make sure
that we hit the points we're supposed to hit
and then we get back in the car and we go.
Can you see me? There!
I am an East Coaster who lives in Los Angeles.
I have an electrical engineering degree from Harvard.
I'm an entrepreneur.
And I've also--
I've got Crohn's disease.
And it all plays in to the simulation.
I think the sort of basic idea is that
if you believed it enough...
incredibly high-power computing devices
are gonna be distributed in society
and that the computers will get stronger and stronger
like our cell phones--
- [dogs barking] - Hey, you guys! Hey! No! Quiet!
So, you know, if there are in fact...
enough machines that are running
video game-style world simulations
the question is, you know, if there's that many fake realities
and only one base reality,
what are the chances that you happen to be in base reality?
The odds that we're in base reality
is one in billions.
Computer voice: The most influential statistics-based
look at simulation theory was a 2003 article
by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.
It was titled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?"
[Skype ringing]
Well, I was at the time a...
kind of post-doctoral fellow at Yale University.
The ideas in some vague form
have been with me for quite some time
that amounted to something more than just idle speculation.
And so I wrote that up
and published that in Philosophical Quarterly.
And it immediately evoked a huge amount of interest.
And has continued to be a huge amount of interest.
It seems to come in waves every year or two.
Some new set of people discover it for the first time.
So I make a distinction between the simulation hypothesis
which is the hypothesis that we are literally
in a computer simulation engineered
by some advanced civilization.
And the simulation argument.
And it uses some simple probability theory,
but the basic idea can be quite easily grasped.
Which is that at least one of three propositions is true.
The first alternative is that most all civilizations
at our current stage of technological development
go extinct before they reach technological maturity.
The second alternative is that there is
a very strong convergence
in virtually all technologically mature civilizations
in that they all lose interest
in creating simulations of this kind.
They all lose interest
in creating ancestor simulations.
And the third alternative is the simulation hypothesis
that we are almost certainly in a computer simulation.
So if you reject these first two propositions, it follows that
almost all people with our kinds of experience are simulated.
And then, conditional on that being the case, I argue
we should think we are probably one of the simulated ones
rather than one of the non-simulated,
exceptional, original ones.
Personally, for me, it's all about probabilities.
I'm someone who thinks in terms of probabilities, anyway.
And I've just found in my life
that there's lots of low probability outcomes
happen again and again and again, and again.
Bam.
If I keep glancing off to the side,
it's 'cause my screen's over there.
Rodney: Oh, okay.
You're actually at my drawing table.
So, if I keep glancing over there,
I'm just looking at you.
And I'll look back to camera.
Rodney: What kind of drawing do you do?
- It depends. You know Moebius? - Sure.
Yeah, I re-drew one of his entire books
with characters fromPeanuts instead of characters from him.
And then I just do painting and stuff like...
just doodling like fake Mignola stuff.
Rodney: Uh-huh.
Nothing that wonderful, but...
I'm working more on the Moebius-style
for an entire new book right now.
Rodney: That's cool. So, are you a full-time...
- professional comic artist? - No, no.
I wish. No, I do Special Ed teaching.
Rodney: When did you start thinking that there's more
to simulation theory than Science Fiction can see?
Well, we know Musk. When he started talking about it
I really started thinking about it more.
The strongest argument for us being in a simulation--
probably being in a simulation, I think is the following.
That 40 years ago, we had Pong.
Like two rectangles and a dot.
That was what games were.
Now, 40 years later,
we have photo-realistic 3D simulations
with millions of people playing simultaneously.
And it's getting better every year.
If you assume any rate of improvement at all
then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.
I think that triggered me to really think hard about it.
Does any one of us remember in any dim fashion
a worse Earth, circa 1977, than this?
Have our young men seen visions and our old men dreamed dreams?
I have.
Nightmare dreams, specifically, of prisons and jailers
and ubiquitous police.
I wrote out these dreams in novel after novel,
story after story.
To name two in which this prior ugly present
obtained most clearly,
I cite The Man in the High Castle
and my 1974 novel about the US as a police state
calledFlow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
I'm going to be very candid with you.
I wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories
of such a horrid slave state world.
Or perhaps the term "world" is the wrong one
and I should say "United States",
since in both novels,
I was writing about my own country.
Some people claim to remember past lives.
I claim to remember a very different present life.
I know of no one who has ever made this claim before,
but I rather suspect
that my experience is not unique.
I can even tell you what caused me to remember.
In late February of 1974, I was given sodium pentothal
for the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth.
Later that day, back home again but still
deeply under the influence of the sodium pentothal,
I had a short, acute flash of recovered memory.
In one instance, I caught it all.
You are free to believe me or to disbelieve,
but please take my word on it that I am not joking.
This is very serious, a matter of importance.
I am sure that, at the very least, you'll agree
that for me even to claim this is in itself amazing.
Computer voice: Philip K. Dick wrote over 8,000 pages
trying to understand the recovered memories
he experienced in February and March of 1974,
an experience he called "2-3-7-4".
This writing is known as "The Exegesis".
Erik Davis,
working with Pamela Davis and Jonathan Lethem,
wrestled with this text to edit a single book from it.
It was a great experience,
although a kind of crazy-making one in a way.
And you're in the antechamber of the guy's problems
and his trauma, and his despair.
It was so-- such a vast text
that you kinda had to do it by attrition, really.
There were a number of things that really worked.
One is that when he was really engaged
in his own writing...
- [typing] - ...we included that.
When he was describing experiences,
we included that.
- [scribbling] - There's a part where
Dick describes the writing in "Exegesis" as a "hell chore".
I think it really shows the challenges
of wrestling with an extraordinary experience,
and particularly experiences
which we can find throughout religious history
of seeming insights into reality that,
for whatever positive vision they give you
about the true nature of things,
do manage to undermine
your sense that the everyday world
is at all a coherent, realistic operation.
And that's quite a harrowing ride.
[wall crashes away]
I could probably put together a list
of all the various small synchronicities
that kept popping up,
but they were just so mundane, but there was so many of them
that eventually I took one of these,
you know, a particularly auspicious day,
I guess, for myself.
And decided I was going to do a sensory deprivation tank.
Which is not something I had done before.
But it was just...
something that felt like it'd be an interesting experience.
And so, I did that.
And there's a guy in New York here,
on 23rd Street
who has a sensory deprivation tank
in his apartment,
which is a strange thing, but you go in,
he gives you the spiel.
You ask him any questions, and then you go into it.
And I, never having had done this before,
I kind of went into it
not really knowing what to expect.
But he said, just sort of ask for what you want
or ask for, you know, what you'd like to know.
And the sense I got was like,
"Yes, I'm asking the universe, or whatever
but I'm also really asking myself."
And maybe those aren't different things, right?
The first few minutes were very...
I was very aware of where I was.
But after a few more minutes,
I sort of stopped sensing my body.
I could now hear my eyelids.
I could actually hear what I thought might be
my nervous system.
I kinda, in that state, had to come out, and said,
"Listen, I get the sense
that you're trying to tell me something."
I'm not sure I even knew who the "you" was I was talking to.
I don't know if it was the universe or...
I'm also an ordained minister, so I was raised with that.
So there's, you know,
there's a God part of it for me.
[machine whirring]
Brother Mystwood: Just sort of asking it,
come out, just come out
and do what it is you'd like to say.
[machine whirring]
[dramatic music playing]
Yeah, and I'm not a New Age guy at all.
Or at least I wasn't before I did this.
But my head started to buzz.
My forehead just started to violent pounding.
A swirling buzz that I--
I felt like I opened up,
and I just became aware like, "Okay
I am not a body at all, I am a code.
I am a string of letters and numbers
and acids, and so forth.
And I knew this, of course, from DNA,
but more than that, it means, you know,
- nothing on me is real." - [shattering]
Brother Mystwood: And nothing on anyone is real.
I'm pattern, I'm a code constantly replicating itself.
I'm a vibration, and that's what it is.
Got out of the tank
and I started talking to the guy.
And he was talking about,
"Oh, it's your third eye opening
and sometimes that happens"
And I asked him, "Well, what do I do with that?"
And he's like, "I don't know. Enjoy it."
I've always had a little bit of a sense of this,
but this is the big event.
I was about 11 or 12...
and I'm adopted.
- I'm a pastor's son. - [pipe organ playing]
Paul: My adopted dad is a pastor,
so I go to church every Sunday.
And I believe at this point in time, though,
it wasn't a Sunday service.
I think it was like an Advent service.
It was at nighttime.
And most people have some reference for church,
but in case you don't,
there are people, they're dressed up
and they're sitting in-- this is in the early 80s,
so people dressed up more than they maybe do now.
And they're seating in pews. Pews are like long benches.
And they have their hymnals open,
and they're singing.
[people singing in church]
Paul: And I look around at everyone singing
and I think to myself, "The way we're making these noises,
is that we have these meat flaps and we're forcing air
through these meat flaps and we're making noise.
And we're animals, basically,
yet we put on all these clothes
and we sit in this place, and we're making these noises
by forcing air through our meat flaps,"
and I start thinking about how bodies move
and how weird it is that they move that way.
And just the absurdity of the situation
keeps on going around, around in my head.
And I'm like, "Oh, none of this is real.
That's what's going on."
And as soon as I had that realization,
the only way I can describe it is,
I was nowhere, I was nothing.
I felt sort of like loneliness was a thing.
I was the personification of it.
I was cut off from everything. It was only me.
And it was soul-crushing and claustrophobic.
But I didn't see anything. It wasn't that I saw blackness.
I wasn't seeing and I wasn't feeling.
It was this almost negation of self
except that I was there
feeling this weird emptiness, this gone-ness.
My entire life, I'm living with family,
and I'm real used to it. Specifically, my brother.
And then I go off.
You know, the parents are always like, "You're 18.
We're kicking you out."
But I kinda beat them to the punch
because, like, the day after graduation,
I was out of town.
I had moved away.
And I didn't come back for years.
But during that time, I was just alone, you know.
I lived with a friend,
but I didn't have my brother with me.
And all we would do for like two straight years
is just play video games.
I worked at a Chili's,
and I would always come home, we would do stupid things
like playGuitar Hero for two straight days,
or we would get a game and do it from front to back,
and then just go back in and just beat it again.
All the time, video games, for years and years,
that's literally all I did.
Didn't draw, didn't do anything.
And so I got into a dark place there.
It's like, "Maybe I'm stuck in this rut on purpose.
Maybe it's not my design. It's whatever."
I'm not religious at all,
but how do I reconcile feeling like I'm in a rut, though?
Like a preprogrammed rut.
I have to go the science route.
And the only really blending of religion in science there is
would probably be a simulation theory,
to be honest with you.
Paul: When I had that first experience
in the church, the analogy that I use is like,
let's say that your grandpa has a favorite radio.
And he listens to it all the time, and all that.
And one day, you decide to take that radio apart.
And you're looking at all the pieces
and "Hey, hey, I took this apart."
And then you realize you can't put it back together again.
That's the feeling that I had
when I was in that sort of null state, if you will.
And in my mind...
that is what's outside of the simulation.
Contemplating this possibility
of a lateral arrangement of worlds,
a plurality of overlapping Earths
along whose linking axis a person can somehow move
and travel in a mysterious way
from worst to fair to good to excellent.
Contemplating this in theological terms,
perhaps we could say that here with we suddenly decipher
the elliptical utterances which Christ expressed
regarding the kingdom of God.
Specifically, where it is located.
He seems to have given contradictory
and puzzling answers.
But suppose, just suppose for an instant
that the cause of the perplexity
lay not in any desire
on his part to baffle or to hide,
but in the inadequacy of the question.
"My kingdom is not of this world,"
he is reported to have said.
"The kingdom is within you, or possibly it is among you."
It was his mission to teach his disciples
the secret of crossing along this orthogonal path.
He did not merely report what lay there.
He taught the method of getting there.
But, tragically, the secret was lost.
The enemy, the Roman authority, crushed it.
When I sawStar Wars this morning
I thought to myself...
déjà vu.
Paul: The simulation idea has been around way before
all of us started thinking about computers.
The concept of people standing at the Pearly Gates
and looking at their lives, right?
What is that if not a debrief, if you will,
after you get out of a simulation?
Hey, Miller, look what I found.
Wow.
Realistic, isn't it, Mr. Miller?
Nick Bostrom: René Descartes tried to build an epistemology
from a foundation of skepticism and radical doubt.
Narrator: I will suppose that some malicious demon
has employed his energies to deceive me.
I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth
and all external things are merely the delusions
which he has devised to ensnare my judgement.
I shall consider myself as not having hands or flesh or senses
but his falsely believing that I have all these things.
A slightly more modern version of the same idea
is the brain in a vat. Where, again,
you try to challenge the philosopher
to prove that the external world exists
and that he or she is not a brain in a vat
in some mad scientist's laboratory
being kind of fed inputs
that mimic what the external world
would have done.
It didn't really matter how realistic
these thought experiments were.
They were just logical possibilities,
and the challenge was, how can you disprove them?
Computer voice: One thousand years
before Descartes' Evil Demon
a similar idea was put forth in Ancient Greece by Plato.
He describes, "Imagine, the situation.
There are figures chained inside of a cave from birth.
They have no experience of what's outside of it.
They're looking at a wall,
and on the wall they kind of see this projection."
Orson Welles: You see men passing along the wall,
carrying all sorts of articles
which they hold projected above the wall.
Statues of men and animals
made of wood and stone and various materials.
Of the objects, which are being carried in like manner,
they would only see the shadows.
Computer voice: Emily Pothast wrote about
this parable's relevance
to both simulation theory and other aspects
of digital communications and miscommunications.
Emily Pothast: It's a very cinematic metaphor,
and I just love that,
how that sort of imagination of how film affects us.
And just like there's like that lossiness between
what is really happening and what perception shows us,
there's sort of lossiness between what media
shows us and what the real world outside
of that media representation is.
So now,
it's not just what their senses decide to show them,
it's what the media decides to show them.
All: And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.
Erik Davis: Let's go back to Hindu myths.
You find these incredible myths of like, you know,
the king's going along and stops for a well and he drinks
and then he goes and has a whole other existence,
a whole other life.
And then pop! He comes back in.
And they'll even have worlds within worlds within worlds.
So, you have the structure of worlds within worlds,
and once you have that
it undermines the primary world.
It really kind of crystalized for me
when I started observing
the experience of the villager in Minecraft.
He's a massively simplified version of us.
He has free will. He moves about the space as he sees fit.
But the interesting thing, though,
is for me what it was with the villager is,
you know, what does he do when you, the avatar
come down into the game ofMinecraft?
When you inhabit your avatar inMinecraft
and you descend to Earth,
what does the villager do when you encounter him?
He looks at you, you know?
He looks at you as if you are the same as him.
Of course, you're not. Because you are being controlled
by an intelligence, a higher power.
Alex Levine: It'd be hilarious if Elon Musk
was a player character.
And he just comes into the game, like,
"Hey, you guys know... [chuckles] ...we're simulated."
This could be some simulation.
It could. Do you entertain that?
Alex: But then he gets to log off, go back to...
Artificer, heaven or whatever,
and laugh with his weird extra-dimensional friends
"Hey, I was just playing around
with that simulation again today.
And I keep dropping them hints, but no one's picking it up."
Brother Mystwood: But it's interesting because,
for me, the villager speaks to,
there are a few different levels of what, you know
being raised in the Christian faith,
I would call God.
There's the God who made the world,
and then there's the avatar
who's descending in front of you, and they're different
because the God who made the world
is not the person who's in front of you.
We don't get to see that. We don't get to see
the creator of the game.
To extend this metaphor to perhaps ridiculous lengths.
You know, one minute, a pixel on your screen
will be representing a flower.
And it is that flower.
And then the next minute, a villager will walk in,
and that pixel represents him.
That pixel is part of him.
It doesn't take much to think about like,
"Well, if I just extrapolate that to three dimensions,
it's the same as atom is in cells. You know, one year
this cell's part of me,
and then tomorrow it'll flake off
and it'll be part of something else.
And every seven years,
our cells replace themselves, anyway."
Computer voice: Artist Chris Ware
was so struck by the implications
ofMinecraft that he created this cover illustration
forThe New Yorker.
Chris Ware: Video game itself...
catches this sort of sense of...
I don't know, more than anything just like death.
Whenever I play it with my daughter,
I feel like we're dead and we're flying around
looking at the world or something.
It's the only experience I've had that kind of
closely approximates what I imagine
a disembodied consciousness might experience, or something.
I don't know how else to really put it.
We build these peculiar sculptures.
She built giant-- Well, "giant" is a relative term
when you're talking digitally being reality.
But giant sculptures of myself and my wife
amidst kind of golden farmhouses
that then would go underground,
and train lines or mine cart lines
that would go underground and connect between...
the landscape that kind of pre-existed.
But now she's 14, so she's kind of passed beyond.
But now she's in this sort of baroque phase
where she and some of her friends
now have gone back to Minecraft
and are now looking at their worlds that they made
in their preadolescence and kind of revisiting them,
and listening to the music again and getting all tearful.
So it's a 14-year-old nostalgia
for a lost world of innocence, or something.
I guess when she's 40 and I'm 85, or whatever
and downloaded onto a flash drive
we can continue to visit.
Philip K. Dick: My relationship with the United States
has always been a very bad one.
It has always seemed to me
that I was about to be arrested by the American police
for some obscure reason.
Perhaps that's because of reading Kafka'sThe Trial.
That book influenced me very much.
You know, where someone is arrested for a crime,
and he's never told what crime he's committed.
When I was a kid, and one of the things I really keyed into
was adults at the time would repeat things
over and over again.
For instance, Newsweekmagazine,
my dad used to get it all the time.
And we'd be sitting around the dinner table
and he'd say, "Well, you know..."
and then he'd say word for word
a sentence that was read from theNewsweek magazine.
So, it was like the magazine
programmed him to say that thing.
This wasn't an original thought that he had.
And that's really where it started, I guess.
You know, in my, like... early childhood,
the concept that the people that I was dealing with were,
I used the term "chemical robots" at the time,
but the concept that they weren't actually conscious.
They had these repeated behaviors
that they would do over and over again.
Computer voice: In his paper,
Nick Bostrom defined a simulation
of the entire mental history of mankind
as an "ancestor simulation"
when estimating the amount of computing power one might need.
Rodney: Does the idea of ancestor simulations
suggest that we are retracing the steps
of the genuine society that created the simulation?
Well, that's one possibility.
There could also be all kinds of variations
ranging from complete fantasy worlds
that bear no resemblance
to anything that existed in physical reality
to variations of history.
All of that is conceptually possible.
But an ancestor simulation that I talk about in the paper
which is to consider the type of simulation
where the simulators would be creating
very detailed simulations of people like
their historical predecessors.
Maybe not exactly the same people,
but the same kind of people.
Back when I was 9? Nine or 10,
I used to joke about with my brothers and sister
that people would just go home, and just like sit down
and stare at walls while no one was watching.
You know, they would just like...
you know, go home and T-pose, effectively,
in their private spaces when they weren't seen
'cause they would just...
deactivate their programming, I guess.
I used to joke about that, but that idea ran with me
a lot when I was older.
It kind of became a little horrifying
that these people I would talk to,
since nobody was watching, the program would stop working.
Does not assume that
all the details of our world would be simulated
to perfect subatomic precision all the time.
And indeed, that kind of simulation
might well be completely intractable.
Obviously, it depends on the kind of computer power
available in the basement simulators.
If you have infinitely fast computers, sure.
But, no, the idea rather
is that you would be able to create
a simulation capturing only enough that,
to the simulated creatures,
they couldn't tell the difference.
And that would involve some pretty clever footwork
on behalf of the simulators
that they would be able, for example,
to leave more detail in a particular part of reality
when we are paying attention.
But then not simulating all of those details all the time.
I'm occupying maybe 20 square feet?
And yet there's a whole world that exists
because I know about it.
It is here in my brain.
I worked with a company for a little while
that launched what is now a very popular app
that is an interactive fiction app.
You know, there's an element of, "Well, it's just like writing
a choose-your-own-adventure. But what became swiftly...
obvious to me...
how simple some of our own decision-making is,
from a coding perspective.
Computer voice: A popular recent Reddit AMA
was with a user who wrote
"I am a real life non-player character."
And... all right, we're all good.
So, a NPC
is a non-player character that you will normally see
in a video game.
They're usually the people thataren't controlled
by the player of the video game.
They are the characters that were programmed in there.
It's kind of like talking to a person in real life,
but they only have a set amount of things that they can say.
Hey, buddy, got a dead cat in there or what?
And you only have specific lines
that you can say back to it in response.
I can only imagine if I was really a gamer,
how I would experience social interaction.
But even as a non-game player, I sometimes find myself
you know, dealing with non-player characters.
I work at a grocery store, and I have a specific...
list of things that I need to accomplish
when greeting a customer and checking out their items.
And because of that, it just made logical sense
that I create kind of a mental script
that I go through with each customer.
Brother Mystwood: When this stimuli happens
to him, generally speaking,
he reacts in this way.
It's not terribly different from
the code that tells the chickens
ofMinecraft what to do
or the turtles inMario Brothers,
or the mosquitoes of me.
You know, they're all kind of
operating on the same principles.
If this then that, if not then don't.
It's not too much of a leap to think that
consciousness may mean...
we are being inhabited
by some sort of player-type intelligence.
The reason everyone loves to be like,
"Oh, small world," is because it is, actually.
There just isn't enough processing power
to render seven billion consciousnesses.
There are not seven billion consciousnesses.
Yeah, there might be seven billion
in the general algorithm of how many people are on Earth.
But when you start talking to people,
there's probably like a couple hundred thousand AI's,
that are serving as the substream for the, you know,
"people you know" experience that everyone's having on Earth.
So, when you find that you know the same people,
or six degrees of separation, it's just not a surprise at all.
In fact, it's a flaw in the system.
And that's just the limit of the actual processing power
of the machine that the sims running on.
Rodney: Well, have you ever encountered
a non-player characters?
Alex: I mean, you encounter them all the time
when you're walking down the street
and you don't interact with people.
Like, it's just like in a video game.
It's just, there's much less processing power
being attributed to the automatons.
But once you start interacting,
then something has to actually serve
as the intelligence behind that so-called human.
Society is rapidly secularizing.
You know, religion is completely falling apart.
And there's elements of that that are wonderful.
You know, I think religion plays
an overly restrictive role in people's lives too often.
Certainly, the religion I was raised in does.
But I do know people
from my childhood
in a fairly Evangelical Christian world
who, you know, wanted to...
would've committed violent acts,
if only God...
if only God wouldn't punish them for it.
Now, why it takes God to do that,
as opposed to one's own honor
and self-worth and love for thy neighbor, I don't know.
But that was case for me.
I believe that this thought,
that we are living in a simulation,
I think that is going to just increase in popularity.
And for people who are content to see
both sides of an argument
and that doesn't split our heads in two,
you know, for people who are content to see shades of grey,
I think that's a fine... it's a fine idea.
Because we don't... you know, it doesn't change anything
about my daily life, necessarily.
And it shouldn't. So I find the simulation okay.
So, if I was created by a creator God, okay.
So, if I'm a random sparking of cells, okay, fine.
It doesn't change much about how I am living day to day.
But there's a lot of people with very absolutist mindsets,
and I think once you tell them, "Hey, you're a simulation,"
the nihilistic side of humanity,
their first reaction would be
"Well, it doesn't matter what they do to anyone else,
because I know that I'm real, and I feel it."
But if there's no proof that they're real,
you know, then what's the point of laws?
What's the point of all this, you know?
I do honestly think there is a certain degree of...
inability to separate real world
from digital realities
when you have something like
the shooter in New Zealand live-streaming what he's doing
and going after people like he's in a first-person shooter.
And going after the people who were like Muslims or, you know,
people shoot up synagogues.
Going after someone who is constructed as an "other"
by the media that they consume.
We must meet the threat with our valor, our blood,
indeed, with our very lives
to ensure that human civilization,
not insect,
dominates this galaxy now and always!
Emily: However, you end up sort of in that place
where everyone you shoot at just kind of disappears
and they were all pod people, you know,
and they weren't real, or the NPC meme,
you get into a place where you kind of treat reality
like these are digital, disposable bodies.
Jesse: And so one guy might plug in,
he's Kanye West.
One person might plug in, instead of doing that,
he's Michael Phelps.
They plug in and they play and they stay at the top level
in some way that they can, doing different exploits.
But then you have people who log in,
they used to play a lot and they were really good,
but then they unplugged and didn't come back.
Years and years since they were plugged in our reality
would be a celebrity who was really good,
and then just fell from grace and never really came back.
I can't name a specific celebrity here,
plus I don't want to throw that into your film.
Anyway, so they would go totally like,
they'd be going straight
and all of a sudden they'll be doing something
that's totally perpendicular
to their normal behavior patterns.
'Cause in a video game, you're doing it well...
then all of a sudden, you just get bored
and you start doing something totally different.
I've done that myself, you know.
I'm playing Grand Theft Auto and...
you know, you have millions and millions of dollars
and all of a sudden it's like, "Yeah, okay...
I think I'm gonna hole up in this apartment building...
and just see how many police I can get to try to kill me."
You know, then you kind of just go for something crazy.
Paul: I once said to my uncle...
"What if this is all fake?
You know, what if none of this is real?"
And he said, "Well, then what's to keep me
from going door to door just shooting people in the head?"
"Or what's to keep me from, you know, shooting you?"
And it always struck me as, "Is that what you want to do?"
"Is the only thing keeping you from doing that
the fact that the world is real and there are consequences?"
Did you see that video of the gentleman
on the East Coast...
West Coast, I'm sorry,
who, he hijacked...
a commercial air flight that was empty?
It was just him onboard,
and he had no training whatsoever.
And he started just flying around the coast.
Woman: What the hell?
Oh, my God. What is happening right now?
Did you ever see that?
He's flying and he's talking about things.
Hijacker: [over radio] This is probably like
jail time for life, huh?
I would hope it is for a guy like me.
Jesse: One of the things he's doing is
he's kind of breaking people's perceptions
'cause he's doing stuff like, he's doing loops and what not.
He's getting remarkably close to the ground.
He's over the ocean, over the land.
He's doing tricks.
Control: [over radio] Just flying the plane around,
do you seem comfortable with that?
Hijacker: [over radio] Oh, hell yeah. It's a blast.
I've played video games before, so...
I... I know what I'm doing a little bit.
And this is shortly before he crashes purposefully
into a, I believe an island.
Just offshore.
But yeah, it's nuts, that one of his last thoughts
is how much it's like a video game to him.
Then he crashes.
But yeah, there is a dark side.
There's people out there
who are gonna be chaotic about it.
Philip: ...very pronounced impression
would probably occur to us, to many of us, again and again
and always without explanation.
The acute, absolute sensation that we had done once before
what we were just about to do now.
We would have the overwhelming impression
that we were reliving the present. Déjà vu.
Déjà vu.
- Switch. Apoc. - What is it?
A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the matrix.
It happens when they change something.
What we need at this point is to locate,
to bring forth as evidence
someone who has managed somehow,
it doesn't matter how,
to retain memories of a different present.
Latent, alternate world impressions,
different in some significant way from this.
Computer voice: Philip K. Dick might have been
surprised to learn
how common memories of a different present
would become in the 21st Century.
If you remember a Kit-Kat looking like this...
then you could be living in an alternate reality.
Welcome to "Conspiracy Chat N'That."
Today's topic is the mind-warping,
reality-bending Mandela Effect.
It's called the Mandela Effect
because hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people
remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison,
and that actually never happened.
But hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are like
"No, I remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison."
But like that never happened.
Lauren Clarke: [over video] So, when reports
of the former South African president's death
became news in 2013,
it re-sparked the previous debate
of whether or not we've somehow slid
into an alternate timeline.
Narrator: The Berenstein Bears children books have changed.
They used to be called "Berenstein Bears,"
and now they've always been known as
"The Berenstain Bears".
Over 10 thousand Mandela effects
have been logged and confirmed.
Tana Mongeau: If you go back
and literally find like a VHS tape
of like Snow White from 1998
and you put it in a VHS player,
they say, "Magic mirror on the wall".
Tell me! Tell me, bitch, that you do not fucking remember
"Mirror, mirror on the wall."
Well, that doesn't exist. Mandela Effect?
Alternate reality? I think yes!
Alex: When I was young, I lived in Mexico.
Very young, like 10 years old.
And then I returned there
for the summer with my mother once.
I was 18 years old,
and I really didn't know anybody.
I finally get a call from some friends,
friends of friends.
These guys pick me up,
and they're in a 1970 Jeep Wagoneer.
Big old machine.
It immediately becomes clear that they have been drinking
because they say, "Hey, help yourself to a beer."
And I look in the back of the Wagoneer,
and there's all these empties rolling around
and couldn't find a seat belt, and I just said,
"All right, fuck it," I opened a beer.
Then, we were driving down a major street
in a city called Cuernavaca.
It had a cement divider between the two sides...
- [car revving] - ...and the driver
for shits and giggles decided to pop--
in an opening, pop onto the wrong direction
and drive until there was another opening.
So we were driving against traffic
in the wrong side
and no cars came, you know, we didn't get in an accident.
So that was the first near miss but I don't count that.
And so we headed off.
They-- We went to a liquor store.
They bought some more liquor.
They said, "What should we do? Let's go to the pyramids."
So there was a pyramid in town, and so we head over...
we climb a fence, we're walking on a Mexican pyramid.
It's, you know, it's...
kind of an awesome experience in and of itself.
And they're getting bored.
They say, "All right, that's it. Let's go home."
[bottle shatters]
And we get back in the Wagoneer, and in Mexico
at that time of year, this was summer,
they have monsoons that last five minutes.
Now the road's completely wet, and these guys are drunk
and I'm sitting in the back seat.
The driver says to the passenger,
"Hey, man, why don't you take the wheel for a sec?"
And I'm sitting in the back and I'm like...
"That's the worst idea I've ever heard!"
But it's too late, right? It's too late.
- And he grabs the wheel... - [tires screeching]
...and the car hits the side of the road right away,
but hits the curve and slides--
So it hits one side of the street
and slides in the other direction,
hits another curb and flies through the air...
[crash]
...probably about a thousand feet through the air
and lands on the roof.
[crashes]
All the windows shattered, and I broke ribs...
'cause I took the impact of the roof.
And gasoline started pouring out of the car,
and I got the wind knocked out of me.
I crawled out of the window and got as far away as I could,
and then a truck pulls up.
And they say, "Oh, great. Banditos."
[police siren]
And then another car pulls up, and it's the Federales,
the Mexican police.
You know, thebanditos just leave.
And I'm like, "Oh, great, the police are here."
And they're like, "No, actually, it's worse.
It's worse that they're here."
"Once they learn that we've been drinking,
they're gonna arrest us all,
and then they're gonna ask for a big bribe for you,
because you're American."
So I was standing in the darkness,
and then another car pulls up.
A guy gets out, and he says...
"Excuse me. I am the chief accountant
of the Cuernavaca Police Department",
so the local city police.
And he knows about the corruption of the Federales.
And my hosts managed to get the information to him
that they had hidden an American in the darkness.
And they got me out of there.
But the whole thing, it seemed so...
so implausible that I had survived.
The likelihood of all of that was just so low.
Somebody's gotta be putting their hand on the scale
'cause I kinda just looked at it in terms of
the algorithm tweaking probabilities,
so that things are essentially more interesting
'cause it's a game.
Okay, so I think the first like "public" place where
I actually was able to put a name to an idea,
probably the Matrixmovies, you know?
You can't mention simulation without mentioning that.
The book he keeps all of his stuff in is...
what is it called, Simulation & Simulacra?
It's right there, beginning of the movie,
just throws it right in your face.
After the trilogy was over, they released that animation
The Animatrix.
Yeah, I think that one really hit it home.
Like, the idea was planted
and that thing really pressed on it.
InRenaissance, Part I and II, it's kinda hosted by
almost like this technology demigod.
Just kind of bringing you in and out of reality.
You know, as far as like what's going on inside the Matrix,
what's going on outside the Matrix,
the history of how the simulation was built.
Paul: I moved to Canada,
I lived in Canada for a couple of months.
And so my friend from Illinois drives up to Canada,
we're hanging out.
"What do you want to see?" "I don't know.
Let's go and see this dumb Keanu Reeves action film."
So we go and see this movie
and it's pretty good, pretty good, pretty good.
And then he gets out of the tank,
and we're like, "Whoa!"
Computer voice: Joshua Cooke
was a Virginia high school student
when he heard about the film.
Joshua Cooke: [over phone] So, I was riding in a car
on the way home, and a friend of mine
- was in the car. -Get in.
Joshua: [over phone] She mentioned this movie
Matrix that people were going crazy over.
People were going to the movie theaters
15 times in a row to see it.
And that people were getting obsessed about it,
raving about it.
"Oh, man, you gotta see it!
You've never seen anything like it. And the graphics.
Oh yeah!"
And then I heard him say something
about a black trench coat and stuff.
And that really hit me for a few reasons.
One is, I had already had a fascination,
an obsession really, with the black trench coat
because of the movie The Crow,
which was my first movie obsession.
So I went to the Blockbuster Video store.
And, from the very beginning of the movie,
it had my attention.
And it had kind of like a rough, aggressive,
you know, Rob Zombie,
heavy metal theme to it.
Narrator: The Matrix.
The soundtrack that makes you go...
Whoa.
See, I thought about the structure
of the whole thing,
like, what would it be structurally?
And an idea came to my mind of what it would look like.
I don't think it's just people in pods somewhere else.
I think it's something completely different than that.
I don't know. When I think about it, I think of like
a giant white, brilliant white marble hallway, right?
And then there's like a pedestal in the center,
and this giant black sphere.
And that black sphere, to these people in this reality,
that's effectively a computer, you know?
No, and that computer's running--
There could be a little art museum card
next to it that says "Universe... whatever".
And they just see what happens out of that black mass
of stars and clouds, and deep, deep, deep down,
people, like us.
And then you go on from that model,
you wonder, "Okay is it important to them?"
"Are we a very special case
that the entire reality is focused on?"
'Cause they're trying to figure out
what the point of life is,
and so they just keep rerunning the universe.
I think what they want us to do is improve upon
the simulation that they've already made.
And this was where we get into GANS.
I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but G-A-N-S.
Generative Adversarial Networks.
Basically, the idea is that you have two AIs...
and they're competing with each other.
AI number one is the Forger.
It wants to make pictures of human beings...
that look like human beings, enough to fool someone.
And then you have another one that's the Inspector.
The Inspector's job is to tell the difference
between fake pictures of people
and actual pictures of people.
And the two of them just run at each other,
boom, boom, boom... Trying to fail,
trying to win, all that...
until, eventually, you and I look at the pictures,
and they look real to us
because they've gone through all these iterations.
But what are people if not...
generative adversarial networks?
Cop tries to solve crime.
Criminal tries to beat cop.
I'm gonna kill you.
You idiot! You made me!
Hacker tries to hack a system.
A programmer tries to fix the system.
Audience gets jaded with this type of media.
So somebody new comes along
and tries to make something better.
We are constantly getting back and forth at each other.
If you look at social media,
maybe this is why we're always arguing
because we exist specifically to refine and hone things.
In the end, what do we want to create
if not another simulation?
Joshua: [over phone] Yeah, I mean,
there were a few lines in there that were pretty deep.
Neo asked Morpheus, "Why do my eyes hurt?"
And Morpheus looks at Neo and says...
"Because you've never used them before."
Well, I felt the same way. And I felt like,
"Man, there's gotta be more than this."
Emily: Okay, "You've never used
your eyes before" when he gets out of the Matrix
and everything's blurry,
that's very, very similar to sort of what happens
in Plato's Cave,when he goes...
When you're taken outside the cave,
it takes a while for your eyes to adjust
to what you're seeing outside the cave.
And then, when he comes back inside the cave
he can't see either
because he's used to seeing things as they really are.
And so, you know, it says,
"Oh, and your friends are sort of watching
on the projection screen, things.
And they give themselves awards for being the fastest
and best at spotting what's going on.
And you just aren't interested in this anymore
because you've seen so much more."
It's funny how this just sort of like
value system that allows us to believe
that we know something that everyone else doesn't.
Like also contributes to that othering,
when he's walking down the street
and everyone is fake, you know?
And then, yeah, the person in the red dress,
and later the guy's like, "Oh, I engineered her."
Yeah, that seems like--
that is such a school shooter fantasy.
You have these unique eyes to see what no one else can see.
and everyone else is just like...
they're just asleep.
Man: Sleep. Sleep.
Paul: Having told you my story
about when I was a kid, when he got out of the tank...
the immediate thing that flashed in my mind was, "Okay,
this is kind of like what happened to me at that point,
but there was no tank to get out of."
And I maybe didn't even have a body, per se.
Joshua: [over phone] I went to a store
in the mall near my house, it's called Hot Topic.
I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
And they had all kind of goth wear,
black clothes, black everything.
There was a line of trench coats hanging on a rack
in the corner of the store.
And I was with my sister, Tiffany.
And I made a beeline straight for the trench coats, you know.
I ran. I ran to them and I grabbed one,
and I held it to my chest real tight...
like it was like my girlfriend or something.
It was, you know--
My sister's looking at me like, "What are you doing?
Whenever I would be going through something really bad,
whether it was being bullied at school
or whether it was being abused at home
I could escape. I could leave the room.
I could escape with the black trench coat on.
It was like the trench coat
was like a living, breathing organism to me.
You know. It made me feel...
when I put it on, it made me feel strong
it made me feel powerful, unassailable.
It made me feel closer to Neo than I ever been.
I would wear the trench coat to the mall mainly.
I would walk around the mall just all day
with theMatrix music on my headphones.
I had the soundtrack-- it was in my CD player,
and people would see me come in,
and they would just kind of back away, you know.
And I had this sick thrill of wearing it.
So being Neo, being Neo was...
I felt for a long time it actually saved me,
but 'til a certain point.
You know, everything that's really happened
with me has kind of dichotomy,
sometimes a paradox.
I've probably watched The Matrix movie...
I don't know exact,
but I know it was hundreds of times.
After I saw it the first time, I had to watch it again.
And then I had to watch it again,
and I watched it again and again and again.
There were days when I would watch it
two or three times in a row.
And like the world that they are in,
this boring, you know, trite, mundane...
you know, just sickening world, I felt the same way.
I just felt like nothing was going right.
What the hell am I doing here?
And I felt like, "Man, there's gotta be
more than this."
Maybe there's something with thisMatrix thing.
Maybe it's real.
Maybe it's not so fake after all. You know, who knows?
Philip: One thing I really want you to know,
these claims can neither be proved
nor can they be even made to sound rational
in the usual sense of the word.
It has taken me over three years to reach the point
where I am willing to tell anyone
but my closest friends about my experience
beginning back at the vernal equinox of 1974.
[translator speaks French]
Philip: One of the reasons motivating me
to speak about it publicly at last
to openly make this claim
is a recent encounter I have undergone
which, by the way, bears a strange resemblance
to Hawthorne Abendsen's experience in my novel
The Man in the High Castle with the woman Juliana Crain.
[translator speaks French]
Juliana read Abendsen's book about a world
in which Germany and Japan and Italy...
Now this is a little difficult if you haven't read the book,
but he wrote a novel in which Germany,
Italy and Japan lost World War II.
And he was living in a world
in which they had won World War II.
She felt she should tell him
what she comprehended about the book.
In other words, that his novel was true.
Chris: When I was working onJimmy Corrigan,
the main character meets his dad, and then his dad dies.
And as I was working on the story itself,
I met my dad for the first time and then he died.
John Updike said something once about...
about the strange predictability of fiction.
And he just kinda let it go at that,
and didn't really follow up on that.
But there is something when you get into this...
imaginary world
of writing stories, or reimagining memories
where you can kind of start to feel like you're...
not necessarily predicting the world, but having some play
in the stream of it, or something.
For several years, I've had the feeling, a growing feeling,
that one day a woman, who would be a complete stranger to me,
would contact me and tell me
that she had some information to impart to me.
And then she would appear at my door
just as Juliana appeared at Hawthorne Abendsen's door.
She would tell me exactly what Juliana told Abendsen,
and that is that my book, like his, was in a certain,
real, literal and physical sense,
not fiction but the truth.
Well, this did finally happen to me.
I even knew that her hair would be black.
One of the first things that a lot
of science fiction critics remind you
when you're talking about science fiction,
"Science fiction is not about prediction."
But of course people think about it anyway.
And Dick has quite a few. Like he's no slacker
in the actually anticipating the future department,
especially around consumer gadgets
and ideas about consumer gadgets.
But I think what's more prophetic
is just...
what if feels like to be alive right now.
You know, to be confused... ontologically confused.
Like, I'm not really sure where reality is exactly.
I'm certainly convinced that there's a lot of
very dark forces on the rise,
and there are things that are trying to manipulate me
using information or using my...
the fact that I'm still a subject of capitalism,
and they're kind of manipulating that.
And, at the same time, there's sort of like
deeper rumblings
in the nature of the world that seem really unclear.
And at the same time, people seem potentially drawn
into their own sort of solipsistic world
of like manipulating with the world
through all these interfaces
and kind of detaching in a way,
even at the same time you're completely bound up.
And that's a primal theme in Dick,
is the tension between our social reality,
the reality as a social construction
that we are always able to kind of fragment away from
in generally harrowing ways.
We go into solipsism, we go into psychosis,
we go into paranoia.
Hey, guys, I used to be one of you!
- Stop selling... - Erik: And so,
I think he captures the texture of our life.
I mean, especially, like, just as a trivial example...
the texture of like lots of little alerts all the time.
You know, pings on the phone and here's your e-mail, ding!
And then, "Oh, don't forget this."
That kind of mind that's constantly distracted
by these little bits of information tugging at us.
Some of which are advertisements trying to like--
Or you start thinking about a trip
and then you write somebody an e-mail,
and Goggle reads your e-mail and then suddenly
all the adds are like, "Trips! Trips! Trips!"
It's just like, "Whoa," that fabric of consciousness
is just straight out of this--
[liquid static]
Joshua: [over phone] I remember typing
"guns for sale"
on like Google.
And-- In Fairfax, Virginia.
And I saw this place called Galyan's Sporting Goods Store.
And I remember...
like a few days after I looked that up, my father.
I was in the basement with my father.
And he said, "I've seen your searches
for guns for sale."
And looked at me,
he had like this worried/angry look on his face.
And I didn't say anything, and I--
We looked at each other for a good minute,
almost like a standoff.
And then I just walked up the basement steps and left.
So we never had another conversation about it.
Erik: He had this great line about, that he thought
that the contemporary world
was sort of recreating the animist world
that people, pre-modern people saw.
And his work captures that sense
of a kind of profane technological animism,
and aliveness
that is not very trustworthy.
I love you, daddy.
Erik: Dick was always aware of the broken.
People are broken. Technologies are broken.
Cosmologies are broken. Gods are broken.
Even though it seems like other people
are just always paying attention to like the new
and how the new technologies can solve this thing...
Narrator: Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!
Erik: ...what I experience my technological life is like
is just a lot of broken things.
Jesse: So, you have your giant developers.
You have Activision Blizzard,
they doWorld of Warcraft andOverwatch.
You have EA, which is...
I think I've seen EA related to the Nazis
more than I've seen them related to video games.
They're pushing out these things now
where you're paying full price for a video game,
but you're only getting like 40% of a video game.
And the portion you get is broken and buggy.
And sometimes like literally, in the case of some games,
like I think the latest one wasAtlas, it's unplayable.
Like it's literally dead on arrival.
People were still paying full price for it
and getting tricked into it. You can't get refunds.
They get patches that don't work.
You're stuck in these digital worlds
that aren't going so well.
And then, when you get out of them,
you're stuck in a reality
that's not going so well either.
And you can't help draw parallels.
The grass is dead on both sides of this thing.
Perhaps right now, maybe our artifices
are a little bit more active than we thought.
And they're just like really hot-fixing a lot of things,
and they're quick-patching reality right now,
and it's just like,
shit's hitting the fan right now.
Emily: That's what's happening
outside the Matrix in Neo's world, too.
It's like the real reality,
if you get outside of the Matrix
is terrible.
The real reality is like war, and you can't breathe.
To me, the subtext of that is maybe there was
a taboo that we transgressed,
that we went past the point of no return.
Joshua: [over phone] February 17th, 2003.
It was a Monday.
I woke up. There was a whole lot of snow outside
from a recent blizzard we had just had.
And I walked downstairs, I saw my father shoveling snow.
So I got my clothes on and helped him shovel the snow.
And in the middle of doing that I remember my mother came out
and she looked up and she said, "There's so much snow.
We're gonna remember this for a long time."
I spent the rest of the day in my room
playing violent video games
and watchingThe Matrix movie with my black trench coat on
and my gun in my hand.
As evening time continued...
paranoia sunk in even further.
Lightning struck my brain.
And this is what hit me.
I said to myself, the only way I could find out for sure,
I could find out for sure
if the Matrix was real
and I wasn't losing my mind
was to simply pick up the phone and call them.
I left my room and I walked precariously
over to the house phone in my parents' bedroom.
I slowly picked the phone up off the hook
and then, taking a deep, nervous breath
I spoke those powerful words, his words,
the final words of Neo,
"I know you're out there. I can feel you now.
I know that you're afraid.
You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
I don't know the future.
I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end.
I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.
You're gonna hang up this phone,
and then I'm going to show these people
what you don't want them to see.
A world without you.
A world without rules and controls,
without borders or boundaries.
A world where anything's possible.
Where we go from there is a choice up to you."
And I hung up the phone
and I walked calmly back to the TV in my room
and began watchingThe Matrix all over again.
[static]
Joshua: And I remember sitting there on my bed
looking up at The Matrix poster,
just saying basically, "Fuck my life," you know?
I got my shotgun out and I...
I put some slugs in there, in the chamber...
and I slid the action forward, and I left my room.
But before I did, I put a CD player on my head,
headphones on my head.
And this one was a little different
thanThe Matrix.
This one was by a band called Drowning Pool.
The words to the song were,
"Beaten why for Can't take much more
Something's got to give Let the bodies hit the floor"
♪ ["Bodies" by Drowning Pool plays] ♪
That's what I was listening to as I left my room
and I went downstairs to get to the basement.
♪ [song continues] ♪
And I remember
when I got to the bottom of the basement stairs
I saw my mother was sitting there at the computer
with a smile on her face.
And she turned, she swiveled in her chair to face me
and when she saw the gun in my hand,
which she's seeing for the first time ever,
her smile disappeared, and I shot her.
I shot her in the chest.
And I turned my attention to my father,
who was on the other side of the basement
and he dove. He was at his computer, too.
And he dove under the table,
and he was looking at me
with a look I've never seen on him before.
And just that look of shock and disbelief.
And I remember I crouched down to be level with him
and I shot him about three times.
I went upstairs to reload
and when I came back down--
Oh, I still had my headphones on.
The words that were forced into my ears were,
"Skin against skin Blood and bone
You're all by yourself But you're not alone
You wanted in Now you're here
Driven by hate Consumed by fear
Let the bodies hit the floor"
That's what I was listening to
when I went down for the second time
to the basement.
I was standing at the top of the basement staircase,
and my mother was standing at the bottom of the staircase,
holding her chest as she bled out.
And I lifted the gun up and I aimed it at her face.
She looked up at me and she said...
she said, "Joshua."
She said, "What did you do?"
And she kept looking at me for a minute, and she said...
she said, "You wouldn't."
And I pulled the trigger.
When I pulled the trigger and...
her face exploded.
Half her face, her eye and her face exploded out
through the back of her head...
and her flesh was just turned into like ripplets,
a bloody mess.
And it messed me up really bad
because it wasn't anything like I had seen onThe Matrix.
You know? Real life was so much more horrific.
It kind of jarred me. I was still pretty numb,
but I remember it jarring me
'cause it was different than what I thought ofThe Matrix.
So I turned around and I went upstairs
into the dining room.
I picked up the phone in the kitchen,
and my sister was on the phone.
I didn't realize at the time
that my sister was on the phone with my father
at the exact moment that I killed him and my mother.
She heard the whole thing, and I didn't realize it.
So here I am,
I'm at the phone in the kitchen and I said, "Hello?"
And my sister said, "Josh?" And I said, "Tiffany?"
I said, "What are you doing here?"
And she said, "Josh, where's Daddy?
I wanna talk to Daddy."
And I told her, I said,
"Hang up the phone, Tiffany. I gotta call someone."
And she didn't hang up, so I let the phone hang
and I went to, my father had a cell phone.
I went to his cell phone. I went outside.
I took a Coca-Cola out of the refrigerator
and I started to drink--
I popped the top and I started drinking it,
and I called 911.
When I hung the phone up...
I got a call on my dad's phone from a friend of his.
And my dad's friend said, "Hey, Josh, is your dad there?"
And I said, "He can't come to the phone right now."
And he said, "Oh, okay.
Will you give him a message for me?
Just tell him I called."
Said, "Will you give him that message for me?"
And I said, "Sure."
And he hung up the phone, I hung up the phone.
And moments later,
the police arrived at the driveway of my house
with their guns drawn.
About five or six of them with their guns drawn on me...
told me to get down on my knees,
and of course they arrested me.
[tinkling]
Philip: I, in my stories and novels,
often write about counterfeit worlds
semi-real worlds, as well as deranged private worlds
inhabited often by just one person,
while meantime the other characters
either remain in their own worlds throughout
or are somehow drawn into one of the peculiar ones.
This theme occurs in the corpus of my 27 years of writing.
At no time did I have a theoretical
or conscious explanation for my preoccupation
with these pluriform pseudo-worlds.
But now I think I understand.
What I was sensing was the manifold
of partially actualized reality lying tangent
to what evidently is the most actualized one.
The one which the majority of us by consensus gentium agree on.
The real nub of it,
morally, ethically, even kind of cosmologically...
is how we deal with each other.
Like, okay I'm in a simulation.
Okay, I'm in a false, phenomenal world.
How do I deal with this person I'm in love with?
How do I deal with this person who is my enemy?
How do I deal with a dying parent?
But if I have the hunch that this is a simulation
and there are other people like me there
who aren't just simulations,
it puts weird pressure on my ethics.
How do I deal with somebody else who's in a false world
but who's actually behind that avatar is someone like me,
that I really want to communicate with,
fall in love with, bond together with.
And that's really key to Phil Dick.
Like yeah, Phil Dick was kinda crazy.
He had visions
he could never decide what they meant,
he's neurotic and pathological and paranoid
and all those things,
but at the same time, constantly,
throughout all of the texts,
there's this very grounded empathy
with people suffering under these false conditions.
This very real portrayal,
very sobering portrayals of human beings that are still--
they have a heart.
And that heart is what kind of keeps you going
as you suffer these various nightmare scenarios
that he throws your way, including the ultimate one
of just not knowing.
And I think that that's one of the ways that people
get attracted to simulation hypothesis
is because it seems to maybe solve problems.
But I think it just makes the problems even more...
you know, kind of poignant and in your face.
Joshua: [over phone] So when I met my lawyers
for the first time in Fairfax jail
they asked me about my crime and...
and I told them I said,
"I did my thing just like Neo inThe Matrix.
Like I was in virtual reality."
And that really took them by surprise.
They weren't expecting that.
I also told them that the moment of my crime,
I had also felt a tinge of remorse,
because it was two strong things
at the same time,
that I was entering the world, or exiting the world
of the Matrix.
And then real life, with what I did to my parents.
My lawyers later went to my house,
and they went upstairs to my room
and they saw my enormous Matrix movie poster on my wall.
And they saw my black trench coat
laying out on my bed, smoothed out on my bed.
They saw my black boots.
The ones like Neo wore.
And they began to think
that they may have an insanity defense.
They said that I, quote, "Harbored a bona fide belief
that I was living in the virtual world ofThe Matrix
at the time of the murders."
That was part of my defense.
- This isn't real? - What is real?
Joshua: Which was later dubbed
The Matrix Defense.
Computer voice: The Matrix Defense
is a version of the insanity defense
and is a descendant of The Taxi Driver Defense
of John Hinckley.
It has been used multiple times since Joshua's trial,
most notably by Lee Malvo, aka The D.C. Sniper.
Joshua: [over phone] The doctor, the psychologist,
Dr. Shostak, he diagnosed me
with a form of schizophrenia called simple schizophrenia,
and that's when he made the declaration
that people are scarcely real to me and things like that.
There were different events that happened in my life,
different things I was feeling that were in a combination
led up to me exploding.
The abuse I had been suffering
from my parents at home for many, many years.
And then I had the bullying at school
and the undiagnosed mental illness I had for years.
And all of that together
kind of formed a ticking time bomb.
I call it the perfect storm.
But I, myself, I never made any excuses for my crime.
And I just wanted to die, you know?
It was like, just forget about all of this stuff, you know.
And as a matter of fact,
at the end of my sentence hearing
I got to say a written statement
to the judge out loud there.
And there I just, I told him that
I wasn't making any excuses,
and I deserved the death penalty,
I deserved to die.
And I think about what I did every day.
I wish I could take it back. You know?
Computer voice: Ultimately, Joshua decided not
to pursue The Matrix Defense and pled guilty.
He was 19 years old when convicted.
He is not due to be released until 2043.
Joshua: [over phone] The movie, The Matrix movie
has affected people in all sorts of different ways.
It all depends on where you're coming from
and the psychology of it.
Mine is just kind of an extreme case.
There are people out there today
who may be listening to this
that are going through the same things that I was.
And this is the whole reason why
I'm even talking about this today
because I know I have a purpose,
a calling in my life to try to reach them.
Computer voice: Joshua wrote a book about his experience
in hopes of reaching other troubled kids
and stopping them from repeating his mistakes.
Now that I'm in my mid-40's...
I am actually finally able to deal with people
as human beings.
And you could think of it one way,
if people are simulated, they're getting better
and they're easier to relate to,
but is it possible that I saw everyone
as these sort of robotic humans walking around
because I couldn't figure them out
because of a problem with my brain?
And that's the thing,
I never wanna get locked into the idea
that this is all fake
if in fact the reason I thought it was fake
is because it was an easier way for me to deal
with the complexity of human existence.
I feel like being fully in the body with another
is like sort of maybe like seeing the light, you know?
It's the "petite mort" of orgasm.
Or just like the fusing of consciousness with an other.
Audre Lorde talks about the erotic.
And I think the erotic as a dynamic in reality
is an antidote to solipsism.
It's an antidote to a lack of empathy.
Because it allows us to sort of
have a playful relationship to the other.
There's that scene inThe Matrix Reloaded
where Morpheus gives a speech and tells everyone
that they're about to be attacked
by the machines.
This might be their last night alive.
The machines have gathered an army, and as I speak
that army is drawing nearer to our home.
[crowd murmuring]
Emily: So, what do they do?
They play music. They dance.
And in the midst of this stew of flesh...
Trinity and Neo sneak off to this catacomb and make love.
This is a scene that gets parodied a lot.
I think it's easy to not take it seriously
because it's so earnest.
But it's also very tender.
It shows the characters at their most vulnerable
with each other.
Neo tells Trinity that he's afraid of losing her.
And she says, "You're not gonna lose me."
She holds his hand, "You feel this?"
"I'm never letting go."
That's love.
You have to be very vulnerable to feel it.
I think loneliness and isolation and trauma
play very heavily in the kinds of realities
that people construct for themselves.
Brother Mystwood: And if there's a player
that is responsible for me and is playing me...
then, you know, maybe he's a genius,
but maybe he's like a 12-year-old kid.
So the thing I've gotta do is I've gotta keep leveling up
and I've gotta stay interesting for him.
Rodney: Do you make different choices than you might
otherwise in order to keep your player interested?
The way I think about is, you know,
if you're playing a video game
and sometimes you see like a giant blinking cursor
telling you to go to a certain place.
I keep looking for those.
And when I see one, I'll stop and I'll pause and I'll say...
"Thank you for that," and I'll, you know--
And then every once in a while,
I'll just make a completely batshit decision
that no one seems to understand. [laughs]
Including myself! Like, "Well, well, well!"
I hope you're interested.
Just like all the other theories,
no one's gonna know until they're dead.
And I don't believe that it's flawed enough
that it could somehow tear...
and we'd find ourselves exposed out ofThe Matrix.
I don't think that's how it works.
I think that it's a solid system.
And whatever it is, ends when you die.
But it's totally plausible that you then wake up
in an arcade in the year 3000 and put another quarter in
and do another life on Earth in the year 2019, you know?
There are these kind of fundamental metaphors
about reality that we develop through being humans
moving through time and space on a planet.
So the metaphor of the journey, "Life is like a journey."
Well, another one we have, and we all have it is,
- waking up from a dream. - [screaming]
"What? Oh, I'm in this world!"
And just that. Not what the nature of this world was,
or the nature of that world is.
We have this fundamental cognitive experience
of shifting between ontological frames,
sometimes quite abruptly.
Sometimes with intense emotions.
And this is just stitched into us.
So it's a fundamental hunch that we all have
that the world is not what it seems.
There's another world behind this world,
or at the very least,
this world is capable of falling apart.
- Truman: What's happening? - Security guard: Nothing.
Rodney: I don't know, does thinking about
the simulation, does that excite you?
Or does it sometimes fill you with unease?
Well, I guess...
I've had this simulation argument
for so long now that it's hard to sort of
consider the counter faction.
'Cause it's kind of become so much a part of
the way I view the world,
the simulation argument.
I do think that...
it makes it quite...
compelling that
this very general notion, that there are more things...
in heaven and on earth
than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
This sense that we are plausibly very, very limited
in our understanding of what the heck is going on.
We have made progress in that maybe we have figured out,
you know, six of the 10 things you need to have figured out
to really know what's going on.
But the thing is that each of the remaining four things
might so radically change the conclusions
that, until we get them all right,
maybe we are as lost
as you would be if you only knew one or zero.
[wheezes]
Jesse: I was lying in bed, I was thinking about it.
So hypothetically,
what if tomorrow I dress in all white
I slick my hair back, and I'm like, "Hey,"
I tell the local media,
"Here's the message that we should be good to each other,
I'm starting a new thing."
Building up almost like a religion,
or just more of a philosophy of,
"Hey, we are in a simulation,
so let's, let's try and gain the attention of those people."
Now, those entities are running the thing.
So going forth here, we could do things like,
you know, gigantic light, like...
simultaneous light displays,
giant monuments, just a giant tablet that says,
"Hey, we know-- " or something profound.
And then in unison just flashing lights out.
So, one person walks by this black sphere
in their great artificer hallway
and all of a sudden there's a red light blinking
that was never there before. They'd be like, "Oh, hey.
Experiment whatever is talking to us."
I mean, who knows, if we just keep going with it
and going with it and going with it.
Do things like organize Earth in a more watchful pattern
to get ourselves spread over the universe.
'Cause the larger screen we have to display our message,
the more attention we'll get.
Lori: You're dreaming.
Doug, was it about Mars?
Elon Musk: Becoming a multi-planet species
beats the hell out of being a single-planet species.
Jesse: Then we get to, like...
Star Wars levels of spread across the galaxy.
Perhaps our science will progress enough
where we can actually
tap on the membrane between...
the universe and what's beyond it
and perhaps get a message out,
an active message to an active listener.
Man: I don't like to fuss or moan,
but if it weren't for you,
I'd be all, all alone.
It would be hilarious if we were something stupid,
like, you know how computers are in everything.
I mean, there's a computer-- this is a vape tank.
There's a computer in here. There's a microchip in here.
But if we're something like...
one of the numerous computer devices
that's been thrown into a basket somewhere
'cause you have too much crap.
That would suck, 'cause then we would never be found.
Maybe this whole project that you're doing, right,
is the simulation sort of flirting with you, if you will.
Like it's going, "Hey, I'm gonna go ahead
and let you see a little bit
what I've got going on under here.
And I'm okay with it as long as you respect me."
What if the simulation is like anesthesia?
Imagine, if you will,
that you're going through surgery...
and all of a sudden somebody
introduces something in your bloodstream
that totally makes
- the anesthetic go away. - [heart beating rapidly]
Paul: Your chest cavity's open,
there's somebody with their hand in it
and they're trying to massage your heart.
And all of a sudden you're back, lucid,
all the pain in the world, and everything like that.
You're gonna mess up that surgery
by freaking out and flipping around
and all that.
Maybe that's what the simulation is.
And by putting this project out there,
we're messing up big time
and you're gonna cause a lot of damage.
[screaming]
[beeping]
Paul: The other option, though,
maybe this is the-- the key, if you will.
Maybe this is a situation where the simulation is bad,
we shouldn't be in it, and this is a failsafe.
[echoes]
Paul: So the person watching this goes,
"Oh, maybe that's what's happening with me."
And maybe, who knows, you know,
they're in suspended animation somewhere.
They're the ones who are supposed
to pilot the ship.
They're knocked out. They're not responsive.
And so they create this movie for them to watch
so that they start questioning reality,
and therefore get out of it.
[dramatic music playing]
[alarms blaring]
[spaceship rumbling]
[alarms blaring]
Paul: I have, through dreaming and waking up,
lived thousands of different lifetimes.
And so I'm not afraid of what happens
when the simulation ends.
I am certain that when I die,
I will simply wake up somewhere else.
How do I know? Because I remember doing it
over and over and over again.
[gunshot]
Alarm: Good morning.
This is your wake-up call.
Thank you for staying at the New Darwin Inn.
- The time is 10:30 A.M. - [clicks]
[fire crackling]