Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. When I was a boy in Bangkok, I used to lie on my wooden bed and stare at the ceiling. And I would imagine tiny people living under that bed. Whole cities down there, with their own newspapers and their own comic books. And the only subject of those comic books was me.
They lived by my clock. They wanted my news. I was the most interesting thing in their entire world, and I was a small boy who had not done his homework.
This is a special, for the show's first month. And I want to talk about the idea I have been obsessed with for longer than almost anything else. That we are probably living inside a simulation. And why, if that is true, you can relax.
Here is the thought that bed gave me, and it has never really left.
If I can imagine being the king of a kingdom nobody cares about, maybe I am an actor in one. Someone else's small world, under someone else's bed.
This is not a new worry. It is one of the oldest in philosophy. About two thousand three hundred years ago, the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, flying about and enjoying itself, with no idea it was Zhuangzi. Then he woke up, and he was Zhuangzi again.
And he wrote this. "Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man."
For years I thought that was just a pretty riddle. Then one night I had a dream so long it felt like a lifetime. I woke up in the dark and genuinely did not know where I was, or whether I was still dreaming. It had probably been two hours. It felt like I had been someone else for years.
That is when I understood that Zhuangzi was not talking about butterflies. He was talking about consciousness. About how little proof any of us has, from the inside, that this is the real thing.
So why do I think it is probably true, and not just a strange feeling left over from a dream?
Because of the arithmetic. And I will give you the sources, so you can check me.
In nineteen sixty-five, the engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would keep doubling on a regular schedule. He later settled on roughly every two years. That became Moore's Law, and it held for decades. It is why the phone in your pocket outruns the computers that sent people to the Moon.
Now look at what that does to games. In nineteen seventy-two, the game that started the arcade boom was Pong. Two paddles and a square dot. Fifty years later, games look like films. Elon Musk made exactly this point on stage in twenty sixteen. If the improvement continues at almost any rate, he said, games eventually become indistinguishable from reality.
Then the philosopher Nick Bostrom turned that hunch into a proper argument, in a paper published in two thousand three. It is harder to escape than it sounds.
He says one of three things must be true. Either almost every civilisation like ours dies out before it can build realistic simulations. Or almost every civilisation that could build them decides not to bother. Or we are almost certainly living inside one.
Sit with that third option for a moment. If simulated worlds can be built at all, one advanced civilisation could run millions of them. That means millions of simulated minds for every real one. So if you pick a conscious being at random, the odds say that being is simulated.
You are a conscious being, picked at random. That is you.
Bostrom himself does not claim certainty, and I will be honest with you too. Nobody has proven this. But I watched computers go from Pong to photoreal in less than one human lifetime, and I stopped believing it was unlikely. I believe we are in a simulation. Computers develop too fast for me to believe anything else.
Now the part that actually matters. So what?
Most people hear this and feel a little sick. If none of this is real, what is the point of anything?
I felt the opposite. If it is a simulation, we don't have to care quite so much. The stakes on every bad meeting, every rejection, and every stupid argument just dropped.
Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on how people make decisions, had a line for this. Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.
A simulation just makes that official.
But "don't care" is a lazy place to stop. So let me give you my three theories about why we are in here, because each one tells you to live a little differently.
The first theory is that the simulation is a test.
There is a film, I think it was SWAT with Colin Farrell, where a recruit is put through a training exercise that feels completely real. He does not know it is fake until the very end, when the walls come down. And by then, he has already cracked.
Or think of a pilot in a flight simulator. The instructor throws an engine failure at them. Not to be cruel, but to see whether they can still land the plane calmly.
If life is that kind of test, our memories are on hold and we don't know where it leads. The only way to fail is to crack.
So what do you do? I wrote the answer on my blog last year. Do not take life too seriously. Get through calm.
This is the theory I like best, because it is optimistic. You pass if you don't break. And maybe something real is waiting at the end.
The second theory is darker. The simulation is a loop.
We have lived this exact life before. Maybe millions of times. I have typed this same thought a million times. The same family, the same love, and the same breakup, with the same girl, in the same spot. And every single time, there is a Diet Coke sitting on my table.
Nothing changes, because I always act the same way.
If that is the prison, the way out is almost insultingly simple. Notice the loop. Then don't put the Coke there. Try something new, and then you are free.
It sounds like a joke. But it is also close to Buddhism, as I understand it. We give meaning to things that are meaningless, and that is why we suffer. Stop doing it, and you are free.
So in the loop theory, your job is not to be calm. Your job is to be different. Do one thing today that the last million versions of you never did.
The third theory is the one I like least. The simulation is entertainment.
Imagine a future where machines do all the work. Nobody has to earn a living. Every disease is cured, and nobody has to die. And everybody is bored out of their minds.
So they rent lives. Someone bored picks my life and lives in it for a while. Then they wake up, and pick another one, forever.
I find this one depressing, and I will tell you why. It means humans got everything they asked for, and it still was not enough. Endless life with no meaning is not heaven. It sounds a lot more like hell.
But even here there is a lesson. If someone chose your life as their entertainment, the worst thing you could do is make it boring. So don't.
So which one is true? I honestly don't know, and they cannot all be. I lean toward the test, because it is the kindest.
But look at what all three have in common. In every one of them, the advice comes out the same. Hold it lightly. Stay calm when the walls shake. Break your own loops. And don't waste the run.
Here is what I will not tell you. I will not tell you that nothing matters. The people you love inside this thing are as real as anything you will ever touch. How you treat them is the only score I would bet on.
The ceiling is still there. The tiny cities under the bed are still reading about me. I just take myself a lot less seriously now.
And whatever kind of simulation this turns out to be, I keep one rule. Never a day without a line.