Glitch report

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a YouTube link with the message, "Okay, so what do you make of this?"

It turned out to be a video from a channel called The Mysteria Archive titled, "The Reality Glitch: People Are Waking Up in the Wrong Timeline."  In it, we hear about folks who had the sudden sense -- often just after waking -- that everything was subtly changed.  Nothing quite looks or feels right.  Sometimes it's just an intangible feeling; other times minor details, like the color of a piece of furniture, the title of a book on the shelf, the brand of coffee you'd purchased, are different from what you remember.

In some cases, though, it's not minor.  In a story that got enough traction that (according to the video) it ended up in Newsweek in July of 2023, a woman decided to return after many years to take a look at her childhood home in northern New Jersey.  When she arrived -- although she recognized the street and the rest of the neighborhood -- the house at the address was completely different from the home she'd grown up in.  Neighbors insisted the house had been there for years, and that there'd never been the two-story colonial-style home there that she remembered; additionally, none of them knew of a family with her last name that had ever lived in the neighborhood.  Shaken, she returned home, and after some online research confirmed that the unfamiliar house now standing at her childhood address had been there for decades.

In another strange account, this one that ended up in Medium, an Australian woman named Elsie Harven was detoured by construction on her way to work in Sydney, and passed an office building with a sign saying "Bellridge Solutions."  She distinctly recalled having worked there as an intern when she was in college -- but when she checked her résumé later, she could find no mention of it.  Friends who knew her at the time had no memory of her having worked there, either.  Understandably freaked out, she decided to return to the building the following week to see if they had record of her -- only to find that the sign saying "Bellridge Solutions" was gone, and the building she'd seen was now completely empty.

Very weird.  Kind of a more personalized version of the Mandela Effect, is how I think of it.

So the narrator then goes into the possibility of it being a side-slip into another timeline -- the old "rip in the spacetime continuum" thing that was the genesis of at least two dozen plot twists in Star Trek alone.  He does admit that human memory is remarkably plastic, but seems convinced that this isn't enough to explain all the hundreds of such accounts there are out there.  The most likely explanation, he says, is that there was a glitch in the Matrix -- the software running the simulation we're all in has developed minor inconsistencies that every once in a while become apparent to someone.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of creator Jamie Zawinski]

I have to admit that I've had similar experiences myself.  Nothing so dramatic as finding a different house at my childhood address or having an entire office building more or less erased, of course.  More like feeling things are surreal, like what I'm looking at "isn't quite right."  Not better or worse; just different, as if someone had subtly altered everything while I wasn't looking.  I tried to capture the feeling of this experience in my novel The Accidental Magician:

After hanging up, Carla sat looking out of the sliding glass door into her sheltered back yard, the shadows lengthening as twilight approached.  It all looked so normal.

But things felt off.  It was like those drawings she’d seen in kids’ magazines growing up, the ones labeled, Find twelve things wrong with this picture!  On a glance, everything is as it should be—a brother and a sister in a traditional-looking kitchen, a mom bringing them plates with sandwiches.  But then you looked closer, and the numbers on the clock dial are backwards, the mom is wearing swim fins, the milk-filled glasses on the table are upside down, the cat sitting in the corner is reading a book.

Even as a child, Carla felt a vague sense of unease about those, although they were only drawings.  The problem was that the people in them always seemed completely unaware of the fact that the world around them had gone mad.  Or maybe—they knew.  They knew, and wanted it that way.  The mom wore a reassuring smile, as if to say, No, dear, of course this is normal!  Don’t you know that?  Everything’s fine.  Just eat your sandwich and stop worrying.

So I won't deny the sensation is disorienting and unpleasant.  But what, exactly, is going on here?

I suppose it's unsurprising that I'm inclined to discount the "slipped into a different timeline" response.  This refers, of course, to the famous "Many-Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics, which attempts to explain the baffling "collapse of the wave function" phenomenon -- the fact that a particle is in a superposition of probabilities until it's observed -- by positing that every possible outcome for the collapse happens, only in different timelines.  The thing is, though, those timelines afterward become completely isolated from one another; Geordi LaForge notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be possible to jump into a different timeline (more's the pity for most of us here in the United States, who seem to have had our wave function collapsed into the stupidest, cruelest, and greediest timeline imaginable).

The other explanation he offers is the computer simulation one, and to me that's at least marginally more plausible.  Some of these occurrences do have the feel of an elaborate computer game glitching.  But "it feels similar" is light years away from any kind of rigorous scientific explanation.

The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a brain phenomenon.  Most of us remember the past poorly and incompletely, while simultaneously believing that our memories are one hundred percent reliable (and therefore, that anyone who remembers differently is just plain wrong).  I have to admit that remembering your childhood address -- and the rest of the neighborhood -- and having a different house show up there is a pretty major glitch, but it seems like there should be some way to cross-check more deeply than the woman in New Jersey did.  Surely she had to have some record of her address, photographs of her home, school records, something.

Isn't it easier to believe she'd done something like transposed two digits in the address than the entirety of reality being a glitchy computer simulation?

Now, mind you, this isn't a rigorous proof either.  I'm not saying the simulation explanation is impossible, just that the evidence we have doesn't get anywhere near the standard required by science.  At the moment, it's a weird, surreal phenomenon that happens to people sometimes, and that's kind of where we have to leave it.

On the other hand, if we are in a computer simulation, can we have something positive come out of it?  No Agent Smith or evil tracking devices being inserted into Keanu Reeves's navel, nothing like that.  But a targeted lightning strike on a golf course near Mar-a-Lago?

I'd happily reconsider my stance.

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Escaping the bottle

Two years ago, I wrote a post about the work of Nick Bostrom (of Oxford University) and David Kipping (of Columbia University) regarding the unsettling possibility that we -- and by "we," I mean the entire observable universe -- might be a giant computer simulation.

There are a lot of other scientists who take this possibility seriously.  In fact, back in 2016 there was a fascinating panel discussion (well worth watching in its entirety), moderated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, considering the question.  Interestingly, Tyson -- who I consider to be a skeptic's skeptic -- was himself very accepting of the claim, and said at the end that if hard evidence is ever found that we are living in a simulation, he'll "be the only one in the room who's not surprised."

Other participants brought up some mind-boggling points.  The brilliant Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark, of MIT, asked the question of why the fundamental rules of physics are mathematical.  He went on to point out that if you were a character inside a computer game (even a simple one), and you started to analyze the behavior of things in the game from within the game -- i.e., to do science -- you'd see the same thing.  Okay, in our universe the math is more complicated than the rules governing a computer game, but when you get down to the most basic levels, it still is just math.  "Everything is mathematical," he said.  "And if everything is mathematical, then it's programmable."

One of the most interesting approaches came from Zohreh Davoudi, also of MIT.  Davoudi is studying high-energy cosmic rays -- orders of magnitude more energetic than anything we can create in the lab -- as a way of probing the universe for what amount to glitches in the simulation.  It's analogous to the screen-door effect , a well-known phenomenon in visual displays, where (because there isn't sufficient resolution or computing power to give an infinitely smooth picture) if you zoom in too much, images pixellate.  The same thing, Davoudi says, could happen at extremely high energies; since you'd need an infinite amount of information to simulate behavior of particles on those scales, glitchiness in extreme conditions could be a hint we're inside a simulation.  "We're looking for evidence of cutting corners to make the simulation run with less demand on memory," she said.  "It's one way to test the claim empirically."

The reason this comes up is because of a recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy (of the University of Louisville) called, simply, "How to Hack the Simulation?"  Yampolskiy springboards from the arguments of Bostrom, Kipping, and others -- if you accept that it's possible, or even likely, that we're in a simulation, is there a way to hack our way out of it?

The open question, of course, is whether we should.  As I recall from The Matrix, the world inside the Matrix was a hell of a lot more pleasant than the apocalyptic hellscape outside it.

Be that as it may, Yampolskiy presents a detailed argument about whether it's even possible to hack ourselves out of a simulation (and answers the question "yes").  Not only does he, like Tegmark, use examples from computer games, but also describes an astonishing experiment I'd never heard of where the connectome (map of neural connections in the brain) of a roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, was uploaded into a robot body which then was able to navigate its environment exactly as the real, living worm did.  (The more I think about this experiment, the more freaked out I become.  Did the robotic worm know it was in a simulated body?)

Evaluating the strength of Yampolskiy's technical arguments is a bit beyond me, but to me where it becomes really interesting is when he gets into concrete suggestions of how we could get a glimpse of the world outside the simulation.  One method, he says, is get enormous numbers of people to do something identical and (presumably) easy to simulate, and then simultaneously all doing something different.  He writes:

If, say, 100 million of us do nothing (maybe by closing our eyes and meditating and thinking nothing), then the forecasting load-balancing algorithms will pack more and more of us in the same machine.  The next step is, then, for all of us to get very active very quickly (doing something that requires intense processing and I/O) all at the same time.  This has a chance to overload some machines, making them run short of resources, being unable to meet the computation/communication needed for the simulation.  Upon being overloaded, some basic checks will start to be dropped, and the system will be open for exploitation in this period...  The system may not be able to perform all those checks in an overloaded state...  We can... try to break causality.  Maybe by catching a ball before someone throws it to you.  Or we can try to attack this by playing with the timing, trying to make things asynchronous.

Of course, the problem here is that it's damn near impossible to get a hundred people to cooperate and follow directions, much less a hundred million.

Another suggestion is to increase the demand on the system by creating our own simulation -- a possibility Bostrom and Kipping considered, that we could be in a near-infinite nesting of universes within universes.  Yampolskiy says the problem is computing power; even if we're positing a simulator way smarter than we are, there's a limit, and we might be able to exploit that:

The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process.  And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole.  If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

In which case the triumph of being right would be cancelled out rather spectacularly by the fact that we'd immediately afterward cease to exist.

The whole question is as fascinating as it is unsettling, and Yampolskiy's analysis is at least is a start (along with more technical approaches like Davoudi's cosmic ray experiments) toward putting this on firmer scientific ground.  Until we can do that, I tend to agree with theoretical physicist James Sylvester Gates, of the University of Maryland, who criticizes the simulator argument as not being science at all.  "The simulator hypothesis is equivalent to God," Gates said.  "At its heart, it is a theological argument -- that there's a programmer who lives outside our universe and is controlling things here from out there.  The fact is, if the simulator's universe is inaccessible to us, it puts the claim outside the realm of science entirely."

So despite Bostrom and Kipping's mathematical argument and Tyson's statement that he won't be surprised to find evidence, I'm still dubious -- not because I don't think it's possible we're in a simulation, but because I don't believe that it's going to turn out to be testable.  I doubt very much that Mario knows he's a two-dimensional image on a computer monitor, for example; even though he actually is, I don't see how he could figure that out from inside the program.  (That particular problem was dealt with in brilliant fashion in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ship in a Bottle" -- where in the end even the brilliant Professor Moriarty never did figure out that he was still trapped on the Holodeck.)

So those are our unsettling thoughts for the day.  Me, I have to wonder why, if we are in a simulation, the Great Simulators chose to make this place so freakin' weird.  Maybe it's just for the entertainment value.  As Max Tegmark put it, "If you're unsure at the end of the day if you live in a simulation, go out there and live really interesting lives and do unexpected things so the simulators don't get bored and shut you down." 

Which seems like good advice whether we're in a simulation or not.

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Invasion of the randonauts

Today the following happened:

• In the last few months I've been watching episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot, and last night I watched the amazing "And Then There Were None."  Today on Facebook, one of my friends was participating in the thing that's going around to post your seven favorite book covers, and she posted the cover of the book by the same name.
• When I went outside ten minutes ago, the cows in the field across the street were all staring in my direction.
• An acquaintance who moved away five years ago emailed me last night saying he was in town for a couple of days and asking if I wanted to get together for coffee.  Today I went to the grocery store, and who should be there but him.
• I looked out of my office window a few minutes ago, exactly at the right time to see a hawk zoom by, only about ten feet from the window.
• I noticed that my angel's trumpet plant has nine new flowers on it.  The scientific name of the plant, Brugmansia, has ten letters, and today is September 9 (9-10).

Why all this stuff comes up is because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday, about a new hobby some people have -- they call themselves the "Randonauts."  The gist is that these folks are trying to prove that we're either in some kind of computer simulation, or else there's some Weird Shit going on, or both.

The way they do it is that you log into a site with a random number generator (the full instructions are in the link), and it will use those to plot out latitudes and longitudes of places near you.  After doing this a bunch of times, it will spit out the set of coordinates that got the most hits.  You go there, and...

... stuff is supposed to happen.  Here are a few things people have reported when doing this:

• an upside-down airplane
• a llama, standing totally still
• three identical black cats
• a family of horses in a public park
• a bird that also refused to move
• various "derelict locales and creepy signage"

All of this is supposed to signify that our lives are being controlled, either by some super-intelligent power or by a simulation, and this is making the random number generator not so random -- and directing us to where there are leaks in the matrix, or something.

Tamlin Magee, who wrote the article for The Outline I linked above, was only mildly impressed by her experiences, which I encourage you to read about.  Here's her conclusion:

Whatever you think of the validity of hacking reality or the nature of our possibly deterministic universe, my time randonauting pushed me to pay closer attention to my environment, to stop and notice things, like artwork, signs, symbols, nature, and objects, that I might have otherwise filtered out by default. 

Do I understand the theories behind it all?  Absolutely not.  Do I think I’m challenging a demiurgical Great Programmer, jumping into alternate dimensions or tearing apart the space-time continuum?  Probably also not.  But my trips, nonetheless, felt imbued by a strangely comforting, esoteric mindfulness.  And if only for that reason, I will be randonauting again.

Now, far be it from me to criticize weird and semi-pointless hobbies.  I'm a geocacher, after all, not to mention a birdwatcher (a hobby a former student aptly described as "Pokémon for adults").  So I'm glad Magee had fun, and in that spirit, I'd like to participate myself.

But I don't buy the conclusion any more than she did -- that you're more likely to see weird stuff when you do this than you are at any other time.  I think, as Magee points out, what happens is you're more likely to notice it.

I mean, think about it.  You go anywhere, and your instructions are: notice anything weird.  No restrictions.  Not even any definition of what qualifies as "weird."

My guess is that this would work in every single location in the world you might consider going to.  Because, face it, Weird Shit is everywhere.

So what we have here is a bad case of dart-thrower's bias -- our naturally-evolved tendency to notice outliers.  That, and the desire -- also natural -- that there be some meaning in what happens around us, that it isn't all just chaos.  (We took a look at the darker side of this drive yesterday.)

Anyhow, I think this sounds like it could be entertaining, as long as you don't put too much stock in your results showing that we're in a simulation.  Although I have to admit, given how bizarre the news has been lately, it's crossed my mind more than once that maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the aliens running the simulation have gotten bored, and now they're just fucking with us.

Certainly would explain a lot of what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun: science historian James Burke's Circles: Fifty Round Trips Through History, Technology, Science, and Culture.  Burke made a name for himself with his brilliant show Connections, where he showed how one thing leads to another in discoveries, and sometimes two seemingly unconnected events can have a causal link (my favorite one is his episode about how the invention of the loom led to the invention of the computer).

In Circles, he takes us through fifty examples of connections that run in a loop -- jumping from one person or event to the next in his signature whimsical fashion, and somehow ending up in the end right back where he started.  His writing (and his films) always have an air of magic to me.  They're like watching a master conjuror create an illusion, and seeing what he's done with only the vaguest sense of how he pulled it off.

So if you're an aficionado of curiosities of the history of science, get Circles.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Escaping the simulation

It's undeniable that things have been a little weird lately.

To cite one example, just look at the revelations -- if I can use that word -- from the report on the Mueller investigation this past weekend.  At the time of this writing, outside of Mueller and his team, no one has seen the actual report except for Attorney General William Barr.  But this hasn't stopped everyone from having an opinion about what it says.  Democrats are livid because they're assuming Barr's statement -- that the report exonerates Trump from collusion and obstruction of justice -- accurately reflects the report itself.  Republicans are crowing for the same reason.  And Trump, who has been squawking "No collusion!  No collusion!" like some kind of demented, brain-damaged parrot for months, immediately responded via (of course) Twitter that he was now completely off the hook.

I'm feeling dazed enough by the whole thing that I'm planning on avoiding the news for a couple of weeks.  At this point, my desire to stay well-informed is at odds with my desire to stay sane.

But it's the surreal aspect that I'm thinking about.  As a friend of mine put it, "It's like we've been living in a computer simulation being run by aliens.  And the aliens have gotten bored with their experiments, and now they're just fucking with us to see how we'll react."

Apparently he's not the only one thinking this way.  Because according to a guy who spoke at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas, we're not only in a simulation, but he's founding a church dedicated to getting us out of the matrix.

His name is George Hotz, and he's a 29-year-old hacker and founder of the self-driving car startup company Comma.ai.  The talk was entitled "Jailbreaking the Simulation," and here's a bit of it to give you the flavor of his claim:

We are in a simulation.  Has it occurred to you that means God is real?  By drawing parallels to worlds we have created, we ask, from inside our simulator, what actions do we have available?  Can we get out?  Meet God?  Kill him?

Well, that escalated quickly.

There’s no evidence this is not true.  It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.

There's no evidence that the universe is not being controlled by a Giant Green Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy, either.  Because that's not how evidence works.  And I'm a fiction writer, so trust me that I can easily imagine things that would blow your mind, or at least make you wonder if I was dropped on my head as an infant.  But my ability to imagine them is no indicator that any of them are real, which is why all of my books have the word "fiction" on the spine.

I’m thinking about starting a church. There are a lot of structural problems with companies — there’s no real way to win...  With companies, you only really lose.  I think churches might be much more aligned toward these goals, and the goal of the church would be realigning society’s efforts toward getting out [of the simulation].

I don't know about you, but I'm not getting the chain of reasoning, here.  "Companies aren't as lucrative as churches, so we need a church to figure out how to escape from the computer simulation we're trapped in" seems like a leap, logic-wise.

He finished up with a bit of a head-scratcher:

Do I actually believe it?  Some days yes.  Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it out loud.

Which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.

So I'm of two minds about all this.  The idea of being in a computer simulation has some appeal, because then it would mean that the last two years has been the result of some super-intelligent beings creating bizarre scenarios for experimental purposes, or at least for their own amusement.  I don't know about you, but I'd be much more comfortable in a universe where Donald Trump was fictional, although I must say that even my own imagination is insufficient to dream up a scenario where a grandstanding narcissistic reality-show host not only became president, but was treated by Christian evangelicals as the Second Coming of Christ despite being a walking encyclopedia of sins.

On the other hand, if we are in a simulation, it's a little alarming to consider the repercussions.  In The Matrix it didn't seem like it was all that great a choice for Neo to take the red pill, because the real reality kind of sucked.  You know, giant tentacled monsters trying to destroy your ship, multiple copies of Agent Smith gunning for you every where you go, and creepy albino twins zooming around destroying cars.  My opinion is that he might have been better off, all things considered, to wake up in his own bed and believe whatever he wanted to believe.

So offered the choice, I don't know what I'd do.  I guess it'd boil down to which was worse, carnivorous metallic squid trying to eat you for lunch, or having to put up with Donald Trump.  I guess I'll make that choice when and if it arises.

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I've been a bit of a geology buff since I was a kid.  My dad was a skilled lapidary artist, and made beautiful jewelry from agates, jaspers, and turquoise, so every summer he and I would go on a two-week trip to southern Arizona to find cool rocks.  It was truly the high point of my year, and ever since I have always given rock outcroppings and road cuts more than just the typical passing glance.

So I absolutely loved John McPhee's four-part look at the geology of the United States -- Basin and Range, Rising From the Plains, In Suspect Terrain, and Assembling California.  Told in his signature lucid style, McPhee doesn't just geek out over the science, but gets to know the people involved -- the scientists, the researchers, the miners, the oil-well drillers -- who are vitally interested in how North America was put together.  In the process, you're taken on a cross-country trip to learn about what's underneath the surface of our country.  And if, like me, you're curious about rocks, it will keep you reading until the last page.

Note: the link below is to the first in the series, Basin and Range.  If you want to purchase it, click on the link, and part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia.  And if you like it, you'll no doubt easily find the others!

A glitch in the matrix

No matter what your views, on politics or other things, I think there's something we can all agree on:

The last few months have been pretty weird.

First, there was the Brexit vote, followed by the revelation afterwards that over a million people apparently voted to leave the EU because they thought "remain" would win, and after the votes were tallied said that they wished they'd voted the other way.  One person actually said, "I feel genuinely robbed of my vote," as if some supernatural power was controlling his hand when he voted.

Then, we had damn near every political poll predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, and election night resulted in an unequivocal win in the Electoral College for Donald Trump, something that left people on both sides of the aisle feeling more than a little stunned.

Then we had the Superbowl.  The Patriots were widely favored to win without any difficulty.  Sports writer Paul Kasabian, of Bleacher Report, wrote that the likeliest scenario was that the "Patriots jump out to an early lead and go to running back LeGarrette Blount consistently in the second half of the game to control the time of possession and keep Atlanta's high-powered offense off the field. It's certainly possible that will lead to success, as the Falcons finished 29th this year in run defense DVOA...  The Falcons' defense has improved over the last couple of months, but it's hard to see them slowing down the versatile Pats too much."

And of course, that's not what happened.  The Falcons hit an early and completely unexpected lead, only to have the Patriots stage one of the most stunning comebacks in football history to win 34-28.

Then there was the Oscars, with the bizarre and now-notorious flub wherein Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner of Best Film, causing a surge of horrified people onto the stage -- and the producer of La La Land, Jordan Horowitz, was the one to make the correction.

"I'm sorry, there's a mistake," Horowitz said, to gasps from the audience.  "Moonlight, you guys won best picture.  This is not a joke."

And that's not even considering the number of times that I and others have looked at what is happening in the U.S. government -- hell, in the whole world -- and said, "I keep thinking things can't get any weirder, and then it happens."

So apparently all of this loony stuff has left people searching for an explanation.  And they've found one.

There are now people who are using this as evidence that we're living inside a computer simulation gone haywire.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote:

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix.  There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win?  How would they react?”  “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!”  And then it happened.  We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

Apparently this isn't just the idle speculation of a handful of woo-woos.  Clara Moskowitz, senior editor of space and physics at Scientific American, wrote about this very idea a year ago.  "A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors," Moskowitz wrote.  "They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds.  So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds."

But now, Gopnik says, the controllers of the simulation have either lost their grip, or else they're just fucking around with us.  And we shouldn't comfort ourselves with thinking that it's going to be over any time soon:

Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands.  Terrible things did happen as the cold-blooded, unemotional machines that ran it experimented with the effects of traumatic events—wars, plagues, “Gilligan’s Island”—on hyper-emotionalized programs such as us.  And yet the basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound.  Things pinned down did not suddenly drift toward the ceiling; cats did not go to Westminster; Donald Trump did not get elected President; the movie that won Best Picture was the movie that won Best Picture.  Now everything has gone haywire, and anything can happen. 

Whether we are at the mercy of an omniscient adolescent prankster or suddenly the subjects of a more harrowing experiment than any we have been subject to before (is our alien overlords’ funding threatened, thus forcing them to “show results” to the grant-giving institution that doubtless oversees all the simulations?), we can now expect nothing remotely normal to take place for a long time to come.  They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end.

I'm not sure how to think about this.  I've always been a hard-headed materialist; what you see in front of you is real, of course it's real; the Ockham's Razorish least-ad-hoc-assumptions model is that what you're experiencing is, at its essence, the real external universe.  But I've run into people who were idealists -- who believed that what we observe isn't real, that it's a construct of our minds, and that our sensory experience is the only reality.  (I actually knew one guy who was a solipsist -- he believed, apparently seriously, that his perceptions were the only reality, and the rest of us were figments of his imagination who ceased to exist when he wasn't directly observing us.  We used to piss him off by sneaking up behind him and whispering, "We're still heeeere.")

But apparently there are some honest-to-goodness scientific types who are seriously considering the idea that we might be part of a big computer simulation being run by an amazingly advanced race.  And I don't know about you, but this creeps me out.  I had a hard enough time, in the days when I was still attempting to be a practicing Catholic, thinking about a god who was watching me all the time.  Every moment of the day.  While I was showering, while I was taking a piss, and... other times.  You get the picture.  I often wondered how people could possibly find this thought comforting; for me, it was like presupposing that the entire universe was being run by a demented stalker.

So now we're back in the same predicament, but here the Perverted Master Stalker is some superpowerful alien race who not only created me as part of their simulation for some unknown reason, but is watching me to see what I'll do, and probably wondering why their creation picks his nose and plays air guitar when Tommy Shaw's "Girls With Guns" pops up on his iPod.  (Not simultaneously.)

On the other hand, if the being running the simulation really is some kind of Loki-like trickster who is just messing around with us, I suppose it serves him right that some of his creations behave in bizarre ways.

Turnabout's fair play, and all of that sort of stuff.

I guess the upshot is that we should all prepare ourselves for further weirdness.  I'm not sure whether to be apprehensive, or just to leap into the chaos with both feet.  Either way, my reaction probably isn't going to make much difference; however the simulation is being run, I highly doubt that the Alien Master Race is gearing their universe to conform to my desires.  So bring it on.  If the world is going to be crazy, may as well enjoy it.