Excerpt from The Pomegranate | Viva Obscura Press

Excerpt from The Pomegranate, by Izi Stoll

Andy emailed me the following day. “Hey, can we meet up? I don’t need anything from you, I just want to see you.”

“Why?” I replied.

“A paper came out, positing that our entire world is a simulation. I thought it might be interesting to discuss it.”

I had read a news article about the study, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading the actual paper. The idea sounded intriguing and worth exploring over a pint of beer.

“Alright,” I said, and agreed to meet up at the usual pub later that afternoon.

“It can’t be true,” Andy declared as we sat down. “I just can’t figure out why.”

He handed me the manuscript he had printed. I paged through it as he sipped his beer.

“Honey, they’re not saying they’ve proven it to be true, just that logic dictates it’s highly likely.”

“Yeah, I know,” Andy agreed. “It’s still weird though, right?” The point was that, in any universe where consciousness manifests, like ours, those conscious beings will create systems to simulate intelligent processes, in order to understand them or push them forward or find out what’s possible. And no reasonable entity runs only one simulation; they’d run thousands at once, and many of those would in turn create simulations as well – which means the quantity of simulated worlds would quickly outnumber the quantity of actual worlds. So in conclusion it was statistically likely we were living in one of the simulations.

I put down the paper. “I don’t know, there’s some assumptions about the likelihood of consciousness arising in a real universe and a simulated universe, but they argue convincingly that that problematic variable does not affect the overall mathematics.” I sat back and sipped my pint.

“But it can’t be true,” Andy argued, grabbing the paper.

“Why not?”

“Because, it’s too weird.”

“Because it doesn’t fit with your notion of reality?”

He was silent.

I laughed. “You don’t like the idea there might be a creator?” I chuckled some more,

contemplating the metaphysical implications of the report.

“But this world is not a simulation,” Andy complained. “There’s matter all around us.” This subject was not unfamiliar territory for him. He had studied physics as an undergraduate at Oxford before undertaking a PhD in neuroscience. I only had an amateur interest in the field.

“Well,” I countered carefully, “If we were inside a simulation, everything would seem real to us, because we think we’re real and everything around us is made of the same stuff.”

“Maybe,” Andy replied doubtfully. “But we don’t live in The Matrix. That’s absurd.”

“It’s not like The Matrix, though,” I pointed out. “It’s not like our minds are in a simulation and we can escape back to our bodies elsewhere. Absolutely everything is inside the simulation.”

“The proposition is still absurd. Our world is an entire universe, not a computer program.”

I sighed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. We’d be able to recognize signs, surely.”

“Of course,” Andy agreed. “It would be obvious.”

We sat in silence, sipping our beers.

“So what would the world look like if it were a simulation?” I asked, to provoke the conversation further.

We sat there for a while, thinking to ourselves.

“Uh oh,” I said quietly.

“What?” Andy asked.

“Time would only move in the forward direction.” I took a breath. “It might be theoretically possible to go in either direction, but efficiency would dictate the model only advances.” We both swallowed, knowing that a correction of the systemic parameters or a tweak to an earlier event would be made in a separate simulation.

Andy cleared his throat. “It might start with a few simple rules, then increase in complexity over time.”

I nodded, thinking about the big bang, entropy, the expansion of the universe and the number of galaxies within it, the laws of atomic physics giving rise to chemistry, interactions between carbon- hydrogen- oxygen- and nitrogen-based molecules giving rise to self-replicating organisms which then evolved into more complex creatures, and those living beasts becoming aware not only of their own surroundings but of themselves.

“New properties might emerge within the system too,” I added, now reflecting on our previous conversation about consciousness – how thought was a strange, matter-less emergent property of biological systems that could somehow interact bi-directionally with the physical world.

Andy nodded, catching my drift. “And such phenomena may provide new methods of processing data, which would allow the simulation as a whole to accomplish more complex tasks.”

We nodded thoughtfully, then paused again, pondering other features that might be characteristic of a simulated world.

“Um,” Andy said softly. He cleared his throat again. “Detail would get pixelated if you look too closely.” We sat quietly, thinking about everything that broke down at a quantum level – how light could act as a wave or a particle, depending on what was convenient at the time; how we could not simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a subatomic unit, because that would allow us to predict the future perfectly; how uncertainty gave way to downright eeriness at the point one realized one could change reality by merely observing it; and the fact that we actually changed reality all the time with our thoughts and actions.

There was no way around it; we were creating reality just by living out every day. This simple fact was entirely consistent with our world being a simulation.

“If the simulation was being run to solve a problem,” I postulated, “It would be really useful to have within it multiple galaxies, multiple planets with life on them, multiple conscious entities on each planet, and the ability for these individual conscious units to interact with each other. That would increase ideological diversity within the simulation, and that would increase the rate of novel idea generation, rendering the whole system more likely to hit on a solution.”

“OK, but what kind of problem would this simulation be looking to solve?” Andy asked.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s just a game to see if we can figure out we’re living in a simulation.” I laughed, then stopped. “Or if we can find meaning in life afterwards, when all the mystery of the universe has been removed.”

Andy sat silently, and I did too.

“You think we’re supposed to worship this creator?” Andy asked.

I sighed. “Probably doesn’t matter. If you ran 10,000 simulations and one of them manifested entities that worshipped you, would you care?”

“I think that would get my attention,” Andy said, chuckling now. “I think I’d be flattered.”

I laughed too. “What if everyone argued about what you were like all the time? Tried to say they understood your nature and everyone else was wrong?”

Andy laughed. “That would annoy me.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “The whole point of the exercise was to get everyone focused on solving a problem.”

“Right,” Andy said. “So what problem are we trying to solve?”

“Could be anything.” I shrugged. “Figuring out the purpose of our existence would be worthwhile. That either is the problem, or a necessary step to solving it.”

“So how do we go about doing that?”

“Well, I think it would be sensible to use our magic superpower. The fact that we can create thought and merge on a dimensionless plane of existence with other people, through language.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the thing we were talking about earlier. Thought comes from matter, is not itself matter, but can influence matter? And if we put our brains to the task, we can come up with ideas and interact with our world and create things that were not possible before?”

“Maybe.” He was still stuck on the basic principles. “But if we’re in a simulation, there’s no such thing as matter.”

“Honey, it doesn’t matter what matter is,” I said, patting his arm. “You’re still real, as much as you were yesterday. Maybe the framework of this world is different than what we thought it was – maybe there’s a world outside our world, maybe infinity and eternity are illusions, maybe quantum uncertainty is just a sign that our world is a work in progress – but that’s okay. It doesn’t change the fact that we’re here, and we’re still free to find meaning in life. We might just have to create it ourselves.”

Andy smiled at me then, his eyes warm and grateful. My heart ached a little bit. He didn’t know how much he needed me. He was always talking about how much I relied on him, but he depended on me a lot too, for emotional and intellectual sustenance.

“Hey,” he said, easing into a new conversation. “What do you think about this? I have a theory that cerebellar circuitry and cortical-thalamic circuitry are involved in motor learning task consolidation during sleep, but in different ways.”

“Uh huh.” I gazed at his cunning smile. He knew exactly how much he needed me. That’s why he had brought me out here, to run ideas past me, to develop thoughts together like we had always done. He wanted to continue taking, without giving back.

I was pissed off. But I was also interested in his unfinished theory. He was missing some critical motor control circuits, and it would be important to parse the different ways they too might be involved in goal-directed behavior, in order to understand the entire integrated system.

He was watching me, waiting.

“Go on,” I sighed. “Let’s dig in.”

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