Thoughts on
IDLE EYES
“A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its ‘surroundings’ in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. ‘Simulated consciousness’ was as oxymoronic as ‘simulated addition.’”
In the case of Idle Eyes, the purpose of the simulation is to test one’s moral compass. This is a terrifying prospect.
Imagine you are the only actual self-aware consciousness existing in your universe, and you only exist because your every moral decision is being observed and judged in order to prove to some employer or jury in base reality that the version of you in base reality is an honest person. Maybe you’ve only existed for a few minutes; every memory you have before this moment is a fabrication, and the only decision you are being tested on is how productive your brain is will be at the office today, or how empathetic you are when your family members calls asking for money at this evening.
What I’ve described sounds a lot like Judeo-Christian religions in the sense that an all-knowing God observes one’s actions as a basis for whether or not that person is worthy of an afterlife. Indeed, simulation theory and creationism are two sides of the same coin. That said, Idle Eyes’ version of simulation theory ends up correlating more closely with Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.
I need to be careful here; it is all too easy to fall victim to quantum mysticism and the western romanticization of eastern religions. Still, many prominent meditators have made observations on the nature of reality that coincide nicely with observations from quantum mechanics and the ETHOS’s version of simulation theory. For example, how ETHOS’ software connects the rest of reality to the consciousness of the mindscan client (interconnectedness), and how the subject treats other beings and reacts to the universe around them is the entire point of the simulation (compassion).
Sure, all the other “people” in the simulation were fabricated, non-conscious beings, but they were were still a part of the experience of a verifiably thinking being. Though his entire universe might have been a throwaway for some shady corporation, it was a valid reality for him. The decisions he made mattered, and his life had purpose. He realized this only at the very end, right before his digital consciousness became “reincarnated” into a new instance of the ETHOS simulation.
Was this all just a way to process my own sense of crippling disassociation with reality I was experiencing at the time?
Probably, yeah.
As painfully cryptic as this story is, would you find it appropriate that I conceived it while blazed out of my skull on thirty or so milligrams of marijuana gummies? Naturally, I devolved into pondering something I am unqualified to write about: quantum physics, the observer effect specifically, and how it reminded me a lot of how a video game will only render what you are looking at in order to save processing power.
But wait: the stoner logic gets better.
One thing I wish people would consider more often when discussing simulation theory would be the purpose of the simulation. The go-to is usually something like “base reality is so bad and pointless that we uploaded ourselves into a digital world,” but that’s a cliché at this point. I prefer toying with the idea that the simulation is a quantum computer computing a very specific outcome and creating its own reality in the process. The purpose could be anything—a dating app, a video game, a torture device. Black Mirror did this a few times, as have Alex Garland, Greg Egan, and Iain Banks.
“Concentration of the mind is in a way common to both Knowledge and Yoga. Yoga aims at union of the individual with the universal, the Reality. This Reality cannot be new. It must exist even now, and it does exist.”