Living in a simulation is not good, particularly if you knew the Truth.
Obviously. One can already, from the outside looking in, see those addicted to simulations and see their repressed misery. Through the wired, twitchy eyes of one jacked into the feed, the ache for Real Life lies writhing in sheets like an unsatisfiable libido.
Devs was the most recent screen treatment of the simulation, a sort-of philosophical prequel to the Matrix. The show treats reality as a series of deterministic dominoes, as it necessitated by the plot: the ‘brilliant’ Steve-Jobs-Elon-Musk-type entrepreneur constructs a revolutionary quantum computer that can retrace (and push over) those dominoes within a simulation of 1:1 scale. The idea being, eventually, to create a simulation so complete that the emergent properties of the quantum mechanics they’re simulating arise — including human consciousness.
The game is revealed over the course of the show. Forest has hired truly brilliant programmers to create his machine. His ultimate goal is to resurrect his daughter. The final episode of the show reveals the name “Devs”, which was thought to have referred to the secretiveness of the development project, is actually a joke on Forest’s part: The ‘v’ is Roman, so the name of the project is “Deus”.
[Spoiler] Forest is ultimately successful in creating God, but merely a minor God. Lily, our protagonist, believes herself to be moving along the tracks predicted by the quantum computer’s simulation. She sees herself performing the exact actions as predicted. The rest of Devs had already been acting under this pretense — their illusions of free will had long since been shattered. The climax shows Lily breaking the laws of determinism Devs thought they had discovered by veering from her predicted path. As predicted, though, both Forest and Lily end up dead, although the quantum dominoes pushed to that result differed.
Back at the machine’s controls, Lily’s and Forest’s consciousnesses are uploaded into the simulation, and their resurrection within the minor god is complete.
It’s fitting that the writers chose the visualization and sound reconstruction of Jesus of Nazareth as the test Devs’ programmers used to gauge the machine’s ability. Success is first attained when they reconstruct the image of Jesus on the cross by extrapolating determined quantum interactions backwards, and further success when they reconstruct Jesus’ voice with complete clarity. Lily is the Messiah of the group: She disproves the determinism that the Devs’ team had thought was law. Her final act was a miracle. God, if by God we refer to some principle above determinism that allows such miracles to happen, exists.
Inside the machine, Lily and Forest are resurrected in an existentialist reality. God has abandoned them; they are left with Deus. Deus is determinist. Lily and Forest are a summation of quantum particles, their lives mere illusions. Worst of all, they are aware of this. Forest is fulfilled, his daughter and wife illusions alongside him. Lily is shown to return to a lover she now believes she never should’ve left. Deus will play out this return as a mere matter of bouncing particles.
I imagine the world of The Midnight Gospel to be something akin to the future of Devs. Devs was intentional in its decision to present the world as identical to the present, but for the quantum computing advancements. Forest is intended to be a strong parallel to the Big Tech CEOs of the era. I wrote about Midnight Gospel already here, with ideas much aligned with what I’ve written in this post.
The world of Midnight Gospel is a strange hellscape of atomized people and full virtualization. Devs and Gospel end on this discordant optimism, pretending the virtual is every bit as valuable as Real Life. Almost like some insidious propaganda, desperate to convince us that when the time comes, jumping headlong into the simulation will be acceptable.
Somewhere in Patchwork, Moldbug argues that prisons should be replaced with grids of VR pods, like the real world of the Matrix. Horrifying. We’ll become no better than the cold machine Deus, the nihilistic producers of Gospel’s simulators, or the oppressive machines of The Matrix.