I recently read a fascinating little book called Simulacron-3. It’s a sci-fi from the sixties, and it’s kind of the first major work of fiction to explore the idea of simulated worlds. Downstream from it are all of our more modern things like Tron, The Matrix, Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and so on. And even though it serves as a original, it isn’t boring just because the reader has seen all the tropes down before. Additionally, to someone like me who has only seen tapes and touched a floppy disk once in her life, the analog computer technology is alien enough to seem like a carefully-constructed sci-fi world.
I’ve already talked about The Matrix, and how it is thematically tied to Plato’s cave allegory. And there’s plenty of food for thought about that topic in Simulacron-3, too.
But what really struck me about this book is how it made me think of my own physical body’s mortality. About the temporary nature of everything material. The – to pull from a recent watch, Tron: Ares, – impermanence of it all.
The Story
Simulacron-3 does an excellent job of putting you in the head of Doug, a man who suddenly – SPOILER ALERT – realizes that he is a simulated, computer-generated being. He looks around at his world and realizes that none of what he thought was material is actually so. Since he’s a dedicated materialist, endowed with of confidently-atheist-and-humanist sensibilities, this is a massive thing for him to grapple with.
When he comes to grips with it, his immediate next desire is to break free. To find the real material world.
And that’s our desire as Christians, too. When plagued by the brokeneness, the injustice, the pain and frustration of this world, we long to break out into the perfect world.
Except, our future perfect world isn’t going to be another material world. Our future perfect body won’t be a material body. (I speak of the way we understand material now, that is, physical, tangible matter belonging to this sin-broken world. We have no idea what our eternal bodies will be like. But I digress.)
When Doug does break free, he finds that the new world is mostly like his own. He’s now in a human body and he’s free to enjoy life with his love interest. But it’s just another material world, and there are only a few minor societal differences. He even still looks the same, since his character in the simulation happened to be a replica of the sim builder.
In fact, one of the themes of the story, as represented through a drawing of Zeno’s paradox, is the theory of endless, infinite series’. Doug helps build a simulation in his own world. Then he finds out he’s in a simulation himself. Who’s to say that the next world he breaks into isn’t also a simulation? That question is hinted at, just slightly, and kind of ignored for the sake of a happy ending, but it’s rather depressing and nihilistic to think about.
I mean, it is called Simulacron-3, and there could possibly be three simulations: the one Doug’s company builds, the one Doug lives in, and the ‘real world’ he escapes into. Doug could be breaking through layer after layer and never reaching the top. I imagine at some point, he’d probably just pull a Crypt and decide he’s satisfied with the illusion, even though he knows it’s one. Eventually, he’d probably just grow exhausted and plunge into despair, finally resolving himself to accept ‘the way things are,’ just like many atheists view themselves as stronger and more reasonable than Christians because they can accept the world instead of live for the hope of a Savior, and confront reality instead of believe in a God to put happenings in this chaotic world into order.
However, Doug doesn’t have the luxury of thinking about the possibility of infinite simulations much, as he quickly realizes that his world’s creator knows Doug knows that he’s a simulation, and is about to destroy him like he’s destroyed everyone else who’s figured it out – such as the man whose disappearance is the inciting event to the novel. Suddenly, all the murder-mystery esque pieces scattered through the story begin to line up, and Doug realizes that he now has to race against the sadistic sim builder, or outwit him, to prevent being deprogrammed.
There are even some phrases dropped that bring about a comparison/contrast between the evil creator and God. But the author doesn’t take a stance either way, and I couldn’t find out anything about his religion in my digging. I’m sure there could be some great discussion in that area if I had the penetrating mind of my literature teacher, but alas, my attention kept being pulled in other directions by the other themes expounded upon here.
Doug, when struggling with the concept of whether or not he is real, since he is a simulation, reassures himself with that old foundational tenet of materialism: “I think, therefore I am.” Never mind discussions of objective reality or things that exist even if they cannot be perceived by a human’s five senses. If you think, if you are aware of your own self, then you exist.
And yet – things do exist that can’t be perceived by the senses. One such thing Phil, one of the ‘fake’ people in Doug’s simulation, who becomes aware of what he is and briefly escapes by possessing the body of a scientist who plugs into the sim to check on it. He thinks, as do all the other simulated people (yes, it’s a stretch to believe science could ever do that but one suspends disbelief for the novel) and yet he doesn’t actually exist. Phil is simply data on analog computer drums and tapes. Smart data, that can think and adapt like an eerie precursor to AI, but nonetheless data only. He has nothing material about him.
Another is the ‘real’ world that created Doug’s sim. He would have had no idea it existed if it had not been revealed to him, through the words of other characters and through mysterious happenings that led him to reason it out.
Meant for Another World
It’s very similar to how the Christian, by logic and observation alone, can deduct that a God exists, but it requires special revelation through the Scriptures for that Christian to know the God of the Bible, the God who sent His Son to take on the punishment for our sins.
In the same way, we’d have no knowledge of heaven without it being revealed to us. Oh sure, we have longings. Feelings of disconnect. Wonderings if this is all there is.
“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” ― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I have memories from my tween years of being on a long car ride and having nothing better to do than to think, and for some reason, I started considering my own existence. Considering how strange it was that I, some distant, analyzing personality that was ‘me,’ could experience the world out of my eyes, ears, nerve endings, and all other senses. I’d feel vaguely kind of disconnected from my body at those moments, like I was observing my own observations, if that makes any sense at all. I wasn’t living in the moment, taking everything as I experienced it and just reacting. A part of me tasted that there was more to me than just a physical body.
I haven’t experienced that sensation in a long time, until just recently, while meditating on my Bible reading for the night, when I dwelt on eternity. I get so bogged down in the immediate and the here-and-now. My thoughts are constantly focused on the immediate next goal, or on my plans and dreams for the future. But they’re always limited to the scope of my short human life. Frankly, most of the time they’re limited to within the next year or two. Perks of being a worrying planner.
But it is a very valuable thing to reflect on eternity. This life will go on for however long God has allotted it to. Maybe I’ll pass away in my late eighties. Maybe I’ll die in an accident tomorrow. Maybe God will return two months from now, or I’ll get a condition that’ll kill me in a few years. You have no idea when your end is coming. It’s not up to you. This world reminds us of it often with sudden and striking shows of brutality. A drugged-up criminal flees the police and ends up killing someone in a head-on collision. Thieves break in and abruptly murder people in their homes. Freak accidents happen at work, or apparently healthy people pass away in their sleep. Wars break out.
This life could end at any time.
But the next life never will.
Infinite and Eternal
Isn’t that kind of crazy to think about? We are so used to everything ending. Food expires. Things break. Pets die. Tech becomes obsolete. Natural disasters destroy. Moth, mold, and decay cause decomposition. Even computers, tapes and harddrives alike, are subject to ruin by fire, water, or age. We’re accustomed to thinking that that’s just the way of things.
Yet, it’s not the way of everything.
2 Corinthians 4:18 NIV
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
The unseen things are eternal.
God is eternal. Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines eternity as “duration or continuance without beginning or end.” God promises Christians an eternity with Him in heaven.
That means we exist forever. We will be in heaven forever, and ever, and ever, and ever. When you dwell on it, really dwell on it, do you ever feel your soul straining at its tethers? Do you ever realize how finite and limited this earthly existence is, but come to sense, just a little bit, that there’s some part of you that is not finite?
Unlike Doug, we are guaranteed that one day we will break out into the real world. That we will go further up, and further in.
We get so lost sometimes in the menial day-to-day. In the million little tasks that have to be accomplished, and their order, and the how of doing them, and yet when it comes down to it, most of it doesn’t have an eternal impact.
So we fix our eyes on the unseen. Focus our attention on the things that really matter: souls.
How do you affect the souls around you with your speech and actions? How do you affect your own soul with the things you let in and the things you discipline yourself to put out? There is no such thing as an unimportant encounter, or a mere mortal. Is what you are doing each day helping you in your pursuit of holiness?
Transcendence will not come by breaking through into a new world via drugs or hypnosis, or by losing self in some absorption into the circle of life around you, or whatever else you might try. It will not come through building post-human bodies for ourselves, or by transmuting our minds into computers. (Which again, is impossible. Human minds cannot be replicated by ones and zeroes, let alone personalities or souls.)
Transcendence will come through a Being who is already transcendent, stepping down into our world and lifting us out.
May we rejoice in how blessed we are that our Creator stooped for us and personally gave us the revelation of His Son and His salvation through the Word.
In Simulacron-3, a scientist above communicates with Doug while he’s in the simulation he built using messages flashed on billboards. Similarly, we have Words from above – but a whole book of them.
Praise the Lord for giving us the Scriptures, for telling us the way to eternity, and far more than that, providing a way for us, pathetic rebellious little creations running around in a world that we have the audacity to think popped into existence of its own volition, to be right with Him, our disrespected and forgotten Creator and Provider. Praise the Lord for His goodness and mercy, that He is not like the Creator of Doug’s world, sadistic and reveling in the torture of his creatures, but that He actually offers us a way to join Him in the real reality.
You are not of this world.
It’s an over-familiar slogan, but don’t forget it.
All of the story worlds I write are similacrums within the similacrum of this real world just like similacrum that Doug creates. I can only hope that like the one that Doug created, what I write helps the people in this fake world to realize that their own existence is not everything there is either.
Until next time, keep shining.
Cheers!
Leave a Reply