The Simulation, the Torah, and the Christ

This newsletter is a little different from my usual. But the idea caught in my mind, and I had to write it.

You have to track the tech world a little bit (too) closely to know this, but there is a techie-seducing train of thought that we are living in an extremely sophisticated and complex simulation being run on a profoundly powerful “computer” by an unimaginably intelligent alien being. Tech celebrities like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have publicly postulated this.

I kind of laugh. I mean, anyone with even a shred of intellectual integrity can see the bias that drove to this conclusion. These people are immersed in a world of abstraction and simulation. If one of them feels compelled to explain the world, of course we are living in the mother of all simulations! What else could it possibly be?

Sarcasm aside, I think this is a tiny bit reassuring, very entertaining, and pretty fascinating. Why would anyone even be driven to think about that possibility? What question are they answering here?

I think that the question is “The Question.”

It seems to be an artifact of human existence to have a sense that there is something “more,” or something “other,” or some higher meaning; the sense that something just beyond our experience or comprehension will explain it all, or at least make us feel ‘complete’ in some way. Think of the movie “The Matrix.”

This seems to be humanity’s primal dis-ease, the unsettlement that launched a thousand religions. The Torah, the Bible, and a hundred other texts strive to address the exact same question. “What is that just out of view, just beyond my grasp?”

I’m not foolish enough to try to answer THAT question. But, in a tiny way, it’s reassuring to know that there are tech world denizens who hear this question as well. They’re human! It’s hilarious that they respond by concluding we live in a simulation, but it also points to a useful insight.

The insight is that when you are immersed in the ocean, you tend to swim in it. You never even realize that the clouds remain in the sky, unimagined and unexplained.

There’s a Japanese word, samadhi, that means “one with.” In Zen practice, the word samadhi is used to describe “meditation mind,” i.e., a mind that is totally immersed in whatever the universe is presenting at that moment - no grasping, no judging, no analysis. Just sitting in it, immersed.

I am told that in Japan, people joke about the “samadhi of academia” or the “samadhi of wealth.” In other words, minds that are so immersed in their ‘world’ that they don’t even see the assumptions and orthodoxies that their world is based on. Consequently, they fail to challenge them or recognize the biases and limits they impose on their own thoughts and conclusions.

You could say that Musk and Thiel and all the other ‘simulationists’ are caught up in the samadhi of tech. And maybe the even bigger samadhi of hubris.

In any event, their simulation serves the same purpose as the Torah and the Bible and all the other religious texts. They are stories trying to explain that primal human longing and dis-ease. They try to explain things in a way that is comforting and sometimes insightful. The main difference is that established scriptures are imbued with more cultural wisdom and moral guidance than simulationism is. But it’s essentially the same function.

I feel like there is a lesson in the simulationists not seeing how their own biases drove them to their conclusions. The lesson I see is that whatever dis-ease you feel, whichever ocean you swim in, you are NOT being called to study the water more carefully. That just reinforces your biases. No, we’re being called to practice opening our experience beyond the ocean. The call is to the surface, to the unseen and unimagined clouds. To feel the ripple of a too soft air across your skin, the unearthly warmth of the sun. And to do this - not to absorb them into your own way of thinking - but to experience them in their (and your) raw genuineness, to know them without the words that carry your biases, to enter into a shared existence that brings genuinely new knowledge and understanding.

To mix metaphors, that, to me, is what would scratch the itch - yours, mine, and Elon Musk’s.

And the question becomes, not what are you going to think, but what are you going to do?

MUSICAL CODA:

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