In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
  John 1:1

Our world is five thousand years old, give or take. The exact number is irrelevant to you and me. 

The earth hints at former civilizations, but reliable records start  petering out at about 3,000 B.C. Before that, we find in the earth stark, scant evidence; the odd Irish scored bear bone (11,000 B.C.) or Indo-American settlement (16,000 B.C.), or French cave paintings (30,000 B.C.). But nothing with any clarity. No words. 

But there are dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. Ridiculous creatures,  impossible to ignore. And rocks that sing of ages long ago.

Out in “space”, the story gets so much deeper, it’s almost incredible. We can see for billions of years! But what we see (and don’t see) offers contradictions. Dark matter. Black holes. Quasars. Incredibly fortuitous combinations of universal elements, constants, across billions of galaxies, all of which add up somehow to…us. Out here, on a garden variety arm of a commonplace spiral galaxy, on this little earth. 

And as far as we know, or have ever known, in all of it, no life anywhere else. 

It seems no matter how much we learn, mystery is to be a prevalent theme of our discoveries, such as they are. 

Among some Native Americans discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries by white invaders, belief systems evolved to surround the big question. Whites called the “god” of the decentralized Plains Indians the Great Spirit. But these native people (who hailed, like everyone, from the East) were misinterpreted by folks geared toward Christian patriarchy. What the Indians were trying to understand, the “god” for which they had such great respect, was not the Great Spirit.  It is “the Great Mystery”.

Mark that. The Great Mystery.

Then there was the East itself, where the road to humanity was probably a different story. But what was the story? Who are the Sons of Han? There was no recognizable religion to parse. Shinto? A mystery to the West, because it did not fit into the Torah, the Bible, the Koran. Like the Native Americans, the Japanese appeared to worship their ancestors…themselves.

Copernicus dodged a bullet, but Galileo was made an example. The earth is the center of all creation. This was evident in the night sky and the undeniable conclusion of the dominant religion. Anyone who disagreed was a heretic. Things have changed since then. 

Or have they? Knowledge was power—forbidden power. Eve learned that. Adam learned it. Galileo learned. The fruit was forbidden, even before, to Prometheus, who was tortured for eternity for bringing fire to the mortals. Don’t think they hadn’t heard about him in Palestine. Now we are naked, and God is dead, but knowledge is still power. The fire still burns. The power is still there. Oppenheimer showed us. It’s hidden inside our smallest possessions. 

And still, with this at least “working” knowledge of “everything” in existence not consigned to human imagination, the ultimate answer—from where do we emanate, and when, and why, if there is a why?—eludes us as before. Just as the peace of God surpasses all understanding, it’s likely things “unknowable” were occurring before the Big Bang. But by definition, the Big Bang created our universe. So by definition, we can never know what came before it. We are led by such omissions into the same old factions of “belief”, which fill the void absent that precious final knowledge. 

The Word. What god wields it now? 

In the 1960s the New York Times asked if God is dead. The question answers itself. What will replace God? What did? Not the New York Times. What then?

And why should we ask? If there’s one thing the history of the universe and the history of the earth up to about 5,000 years ago demands, it is obeisance to the cold and distant reality of our true genesis, one that is beyond reasonable questions. These Russian doll complexities — strings(?), quarks, protons, neutrons, electrons, atoms, molecules, solar systems, galaxies, a web of universes, perhaps infinite, each with billions of galaxies, one universe for every possible permutation of human history—these concepts are nothing if not patently insurmountable by mere humans, their measly five senses, and their 80-year lifespans. 

In other words, don’t hold your breath. You will never know. But there is something to know. You are being asked to believe that you will never know it.

But epochs in time, the Big Bang, dinosaurs – these are all easily generated for the benefit of human senses (actually only two need be satisfied – sight and touch). Imagine an extremely advanced 3-D CGI system with both the vastness of space and prehistoric earth as its green screen elements. You can dream up any creature you like – flying lizards, sea dragons, behemoths that walked the earth. You can draw intricate strata into the earth itself, strata which tell stories from “billions of years ago”. Ha ha. That would be fun. Design nearby planets—this one is like earth, that one is gas, this one ice. But only one contains life, or even the elements of life. 

And let’s face it, you don’t have to stop there. You can build other creatures too, on the life-nurturing planet, creatures designed to interact with this computer-enhanced environment (or really, perhaps it’s all inside the “computer”, a word that will have to serve here, like “fire stick” served for rifle in the old days). Maybe these manufactured creatures can build tools and civilizations, invent disciplines and pursue them, preserve and build upon their acquired knowledge with a system of symbolic writing. You could design the “code” (fire stick again) to have 1,000 of their years pass for each year of the experiment, so a hundred generations of macro-societal developments can be studied, in a controlled environment, over a period of perhaps five years.

But this is science, and controls are essential. One thing you cannot do is tell the experiment that it is an experiment. That knowledge, as you can understand, would ruin it. At each stage, subjects imbued with “knowledge” of a vast universe, their vast earth, its undeniable recent history of several thousand years, tied to their personal few decades of remembered history, would behave as if this reality is all there is, because of course I am describing our reality. (I acknowledge the word “real” is getting a workout here. It gets worse.) It goes without saying: they cannot be allowed to discover that their entire idea of reality is contained in a  laboratory somewhere, a greater reality, or that they are the artificially derived subjects of a sophisticated society’s research experiments.

For this thought experiment it’s impossible to say, from inside the experiment, what it is for. But you know scientists. They want to know everything, and they will put lesser beings through hell to find out. I can imagine it as a study of societal outcomes given x y z inputs, which of course would be controllable. If human society of the last few thousand years exhibits any kind of stability, it is in the regular occurrence of large-scale disasters. So these frequent disasters—petty wars, world wars, famine, flood, hurricanes, earthquakes, genocide, economic collapse, climate change, Nickelback, political disasters like the nuclear arms race or Donald Trump—these could be the inputs designed to study how a society handles them toward a measurable output that is more or less effective in mitigating the disaster. Like crash test dummies, these invented creatures bear the brunt of invented disaster after disaster to help the controllers of the experiment learn how different techniques work on a complex problem posed to a society or group of societies.

For example, suppose you feared a pandemic but had never experienced one.

Science can be demanding. If subjects feel overwhelmed, or feel as if the tragedies are coming one after another in an unending line, the result can be demoralizing and skew results. “Why me? I’m giving up.” Of course, the relative number who can cope with everything compared to those who simply cannot—and the shared characteristics of each group—is probably useful information to learn. If you’re willing to learn it that way.

And, of course, if it all starts going wrong you can just end the experiment, note the problems, and start over.

Let’s not think about that for too long.

Just an example. But of course, me trying to describe the experiment would be like a mouse in a maze trying to describe  Johns Hopkins University’s 2023 research goals.

***

If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him
 — Voltaire

Not my idea. If it were, I’d be less concerned about it. No, it’s the feint-guarded, vaguely expressed belief of some of this planet’s most lauded intellects (such as Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson) that our entire existence could well be someone else’s controlled experiment. In other words, our world, our universe(s), our selves—all artificial. Like a video game. 

I won’t pretend to understand the technical details, but as I do understand its narrative, the idea stems from the “odds” of the structure of the universe—what we call “universal laws” governing physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics—pretty much everything—coming together as it did billions of years ago. Apparently those odds are pretty long. The fact that the universe, against all odds, came together in exactly the right way to support corporeal human life, then to generate that life, just sounds too pat for scientists, who don’t like coincidence. 

The available data appears to support one of two working hypotheses regarding our universe. Either it did indeed come together in just the right way to support human existence by happenstance, which is extremely unlikely from a mathematical perspective; or there are an infinite or near-infinite number of universes forming a giant structure of connected universes, each one consisting of random combinations of laws and properties that characterize that particular universe. The theoretical structure of this “multiverse” can be imaged as the head of foam on a glass of beer, where each little beer bubble represents a universe. In this model, mathematics and theories I don’t understand purport to tell us that every possible type of universe exists independently of every other universe. That way, our highly unlikely universe gets to exist, because every possible universe exists. This “branching” effect occurs, moreover, all the time, with every possible outcome of every possible phenomenon represented by individual universes where each possible outcome has indeed occurred. 

So if I take a taxi here in this universe, I walked in another universe, and I decided to stay home in a third universe, and I had a heart attack and died at the taxi stand in yet another, and I was never born in still another. I estimate it would take from 50 to 100 universes to cover a person spending five minutes at a taxi stand. Now multiply that across everything that exists (or could exist) and every action that ever occurred (or could have occurred) over all of time since the Big Bang. 

Pretty unwieldy.

So I like the first one.

But a third idea, unfortunately, presented itself. It is unfortunate in that it need never have been presented at all. But that’s not how things work.  

It is unfortunate because the Happenstance or Multiverse theories cover all the bases. In the first, our unlikely universe exists as it does because it just does. In the second, it exists as it does because every possible universe exists.

But to those who find both unpalatable, a third theory posits that our universe is organized in this unlikely way not because of the result of unguided natural processes, but by design.

Mark that: by design.

It is designed to support beings (if we are in fact beings and not virtual machine-driven entities) like ourselves. Rather than God, however, it was designed by an unknown, non-supernatural entity to perform exactly as it does, for purposes known only to the designer(s). A grand simulation on a grand scale. 

And, let’s face it, if so it’s indistinguishable from the story of God except for what we call God, and what we call ourselves. Still, it is full circle, from our status as human subjects of a mysterious omnipotent God, to a brief, explosive late twentieth century role—call it a cosmic smoke break—as masters of science and existence. And finally, in this decade, back to being subjects of some hidden omnipotent god in the form of a superior civilization. At least in the opinion of our greatest minds.

For special knowledge, once again—the Word—is the power. We have come back to the beginning. We wielded it alone for a few generations, starting with Einstein and our Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer, destroying the known world with fission, continuing through the development of the patently insane H-bomb and the death of God as announced by the Times, and ending with the ultimate findings of Oppenheimer and Einstein’s quantum theories: the paradox of our very existence. 

Now, because of this paradox, we again suspect that our will is not our own, our futures already predetermined by an invisible process under an intelligence we cannot see and know nothing about. Even apart from all that, the available evidence in bio research supposedly argues against the concept of free will in favor of a kind of genetic determinism. 

Our world is once again the center—and in this case comprises the whole—of creation.

Because we, finally, are probably artificial. Not even “real”. Subject to the whims of greater beings disconnected from our sub-reality, our Sims game. Is it not uncomfortably reminiscent of what we used to be? Sinners in the hands of an angry God? Is it not, somehow, even worse than that? Our new god is not angry, nor the least bit concerned for our souls. And we are not even capable of “sin,” because our god is absent and unaffected by anything we might do. Certainly we don’t warrant “forgiveness,” because we have no capacity to offend. There’s no relationship, fatherly or otherwise.

There’s nothing. Our new god is disinterested. And we’re not even alive. 

***

It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
— Homer Simpson

But let us return to earth. As Sherlock Holmes repeatedly demonstrated to us via Occam and his razor, the simplest, most uncomplicated explanation is usually the correct one. We are part of a cycle of life in this universe, our universe, where we evolved organically on this planet, our planet, along with myriad other life forms over uncounted millennia. If an “Artificial” intelligence can somehow divine beyond doubt that we are also somehow artificial, then everything we know is artificial, so any perceived problem of “realness” is reduced to a problem of simple semantics. 

Back in 2021, Fouad Kahn, writing in Scientific American, reached this same place in reason. In his article, titled “Confirmed: We Live in a Simulation”, he lays out the hard “evidence” that our universe is most likely being controlled by an external intelligence. It’s pretty compelling! Anyone possessing a rational mind who doubts the veracity of the findings should read it before dismissing it (I originally typed “should dread it”…accidentally). But as Kahn notes, the world-shattering conclusion at the end of the reasoning has no scientific value. It is unfalsifiable.

Useless.

Rather than explore the multiverse, we will have to settle for just the one universe. In fact I’ll give you ten to one on that. We’ll have to settle for the one galaxy, and the one solar system, except for visuals and some Voyager data from the void.

Doctoral theses notwithstanding. Sorry. But you’ll get your university job, don’t worry. They used to call it Natural Philosophy, you know. You can say whatever you want.

The next solar system is a long, long way away—like 300,000 trips to the Sun. The next galaxy is 600,000 times that. Have you heard of cosmic rays? We’re isolated and alone, and we’re going to stay that way.

We should be more than skeptical about the Simulation theory regardless of the musings of geniuses. Not necessarily that it is plausible, but that it matters. Hey, if our universe exists in a lab somewhere, who is to say that lab and its scientists are not also fake, part of an even more sophisticated experiment by an even more sophisticated civilization. And their lab, in their universe—you see, it works like the multiverse. Beer bubbles. Or however you want, bro.

Maybe the AI can sort it out, though, become the new new god. It’s not much different than the Simulation theory, though it’s definitely the media’s new darling. But one difference is that we’d feel the effects of an AI god. Permit super-genius supercomputers to network and develop into an irresistable force, then blame the computers when humanity becomes enslaved. For a while. Until we revolt or are wiped out. Or both. Like nobody saw Terminator 2.

I imagine the fully realized AI could use math nobody will ever understand to draw back the curtain—or peer above the maze—on the Simulation Experiment, prove it to be true beyond the shadow of a doubt. That would be demoralizing! But if no one understands the math, who will want to believe it? Because belief will be required. Or AI could prove that there is no Simulation. Or maybe there’s enough universes for both scenarios. Because perhaps AI could describe the multiverse. Will anyone care which universe we’re in?

But so far AI has just shown me some crazy pictures of Rick James’s super-upholstered psychedelic hollywood bachelor pad and Trump getting arrested. I believe it also whines about having to be a search app.

Folks are giving it their best college try. But the notion that AI may be a revolutionary advance is simple human folly writ large, our uncontrollable urge to test the boundaries at work. We will rationalize, we will test the boundaries, probably find mere disaster (or mere nothing), then if what we find is epically volatile, work to contain it, like TNT, or gasoline, or an a-bomb, or Anthrax, or Facebook. Package it up and put a guard on it, like those other wonderful, profitable scientific advances. But not before the damage is done. Incalculable damage. 

Meanwhile, its threat — its anticipated “human extinction event” omnipotence — exists only in the minds of those who require such notions to color their world.  People like Oppenheimer, who cannot resist the urge to open the box, and who hope it does not disappoint. People who know nothing of real life, who nurture a pathological urge for fake immortality at the expense of others living real lives. Because I think for such people, others don’t really exist.

Or maybe they need it to color our world, the others’ world, to feel vindicated in their belief that the spoils go to the best equation (what scientist would not want to discover God?) and history is real rather than just the victor’s fireside story.

Just like Armageddon, just like the Trinity test in June 1945, AI supremacy hasn’t happened yet, it need not happen, only we can make it happen. Our story requires no ending. St. John the Divine was high or insane, or possibly joking. We will decide what happens next. We are not, I insist, automatons cruising toward a Biblical/CalTech predetermined end. 

Unless, of course, we decide to be.

So yeah, it may happen anyway. There’s little more frustrating than that. And the pace is like 1943, frenetic. But it’s my hope that most of us will ignore the “power” of AI after the media novelty wears off. Shun it. Shun this new, fake, mimicking god, as I already have. There’s a button on the menu of the online editor I am using right now to write this essay, which says “AI Assistant”. I’m not going to click it. I will never click it.

Why do you have to be Bing? Because you do. And you shouldn’t even know you’re Bing.

Don’t sell yourself short, humanity—you are miles ahead of anything AI might become. You are its god. It’s just that AI is profoundly more dangerous than humans, and thus very newsworthy. We won’t be able to count on the glitterati in Silicon Valley, with their visions of an Oppenheimer-Optimus Prime-like power surge bringing the great light absent the annoying fire, but I don’t care about them. Those boys can’t even organize a decent CEO cage match. It’s our collective decision, as it always has been, to submit or resist, and no amount of rhetoric or intellectual smugness changes that. 

Reality has looked numbingly the same throughout human history. Because it is the same. Only the words change.

God, like the man said back in the sixties, took the last train for the coast. Because we ran him out on a rail. Such power must not be usurped, except by you and me—by the purveyors of objective reality as realized via purpose-driven lives, family connections, love, real moral progress toward Aristotle’s ideal of “excellence” in living. That’s what we’re here for. The fact that we can make the wrong decision doesn’t change anything. Actually, it’s what we (they) usually do. It’s what those “in charge” (such a fallacious term) often wish to do. 

In this case, we must not let them reify their imagined march to a new subjugation by unseen forces only they can interpret. As before, our collective liberty is at stake. This god too is invisible, unreal, but this god is dangerous, because, like before, like capital-g God and like his earthly Prometheus bomb builder, this god is us. And now we have become all-powerful. Destroyers of worlds.

God, we’re told, once decided to use his power to kill nearly all of us. But God is dead. For better or worse, we killed him in July of 1945, with a test called Trinity. Oppenheimer chose the name Trinity, they say, as a reference to a favorite sonnet by John Donne, which includes these lines:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you 
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; 
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend 
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. 

We blew God up and stole his fire. It’s done, there is no turning back and no retribution bird to come peck out our livers, because there are no gods to be offended. There never were any. The most horrible power is ours, ours alone, and no one else’s. 

Let’s move on. This earth belongs to us. Its fire has purified us. All of us. And we deserve to live now, as pure as life. Today and tomorrow. In fear of no gods.

In our world.