End of Simulation

A single line of embroidered code, the closing tag </simulation>. In HTML and XML a tag with a slash marks the end of an element – so the design quietly announces that the simulation we may be living in has just been closed. A small joke for programmers and a large one for metaphysicians.

The idea that our world, including our minds and everything we experience, could be a computer simulation run by a more advanced civilisation. It is a modern form of an old sceptical worry – that reality might not be what it appears to be – rephrased in the language of computing.

In his 2003 paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, published in The Philosophical Quarterly, Bostrom argues that at least one of three claims is true – almost all civilisations die out before they can run detailed simulations of minds, or almost none of those that could are interested in doing so, or we are almost certainly living in a simulation. He does not say which one holds.

Nobody knows, and there is no empirical evidence either way. Critics argue the hypothesis cannot be tested and therefore explains nothing. David Chalmers, in Reality+ (2022), takes a different line – even if we were simulated, tables, people and our lives would still be real, just made of digital rather than fundamental physical stuff.

Only its technology is new. Plato's allegory of the cave pictures prisoners who take shadows for reality; Zhuangzi wondered whether he was a man who dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man; Descartes imagined an evil demon deceiving him about everything. The simulation hypothesis replaces the demon with a computer.

In Book VII of the Republic, Plato describes prisoners chained in a cave since birth, seeing only shadows of objects cast on a wall, which they take for the whole of reality. One prisoner is freed, climbs into the sunlight and slowly grasps the real world. The story illustrates education as a turning of the soul from appearances towards truth and the Good.

In the second chapter of the Zhuangzi, the Daoist thinker dreams he is a butterfly, happily fluttering about. On waking he cannot tell whether he is Zhuangzi who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being Zhuangzi. The passage questions how firmly we can separate dream from waking, and is often read as a reflection on the transformation of things.

Yes – it suits developers, computer science and philosophy students and anyone who has wondered whether reality has a source code. The minimalist design comes embroidered on a classic T-shirt, sweatshirt and premium hoodie, and also on a cap, a mug and a sticker.