کتاب پنجم، فصل 5: زندگی در دستگاه شبیه‌سازی

Book 5: Being Alive Means Taking Certain Risks

Chapter 5 Life in the Simulation Machine

How to dress while reading Borges and Proust—There are many ways to convince with an ice pick—Councils of bickering bishops—Theosis—Why Trump will win (he actually did win) Ionce sat in a dinner party at a large round table across from a courteous fellow called David. The host was a physicist, Edgar C., in his New York club, a literary sort of club, where, except for David, almost everyone was dressed like people who either read Borges and Proust, wanted to be known as readers of Borges and Proust, or just liked to spend time with people who read Borges and Proust (corduroy, ascot, suede shoes, or just business suit). As for David, he was dressed like someone who didn’t know that people who read Borges and Proust needed to dress in a certain way when they congregated. At some point during the dinner, David unexpectedly pulled out an ice pick and made it go through his hand. I had no clue what the fellow did for a living—nor was I aware that Edgar was into magic as a side hobby. It turned out that the David in question was a magician (his name is David Blaine), and that he was very famous.

I knew very little about magicians, assumed it was all about optical illusions—the central inverse problem we mentioned in Prologue 2 that makes it easier to engineer than reverse-engineer. But something struck me at the end of the party. David was standing by the coat check using a handkerchief to sop up drops of blood coming out of his hand.

So the fellow was really making an icepick go through his hand—with all the risks that entailed. He suddenly became another person in my eyes. He was now real. He took risks. He had skin in the game.

I met him again a few months later and, as I tried to shake hands with him, noticed a scar where the icepick had come out of his hand.

JESUS WAS A RISK TAKER

This allowed me to finally figure out this business of the Trinity. The Christian religion, throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and other ecumenical councils and various synods of argumentative bishops, kept insisting on the dual nature of Jesus Christ. It would be theologically simpler if God were god and Jesus were man, just like another prophet, the way Islam views him, or the way Judaism views Abraham. But no, he had to be both man and god; the duality is so central it kept coming back though all manner of refinement: whether the duality allowed sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), the same will (Monothelites), the same nature (Monophysites). The trinity is what caused other monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity, and caused many Christians who fell into the hands of the Islamic State to be beheaded.

So it appears that the church founders really wanted Christ to have skin in the game; he did actually suffer on the cross, sacrifice himself, and experience death. He was a risk taker. More crucially to our story, he sacrificed himself for the sake of others. A god stripped of humanity cannot have skin in the game in such a manner, cannot really suffer (or, if he does, such a redefinition of a god injected with a human nature would back up our argument). A god who didn’t really suffer on the cross would be like a magician who performed an illusion, not someone who actually bled after sliding an icepick between his carpal bones.

The Orthodox Church goes further, making the human side flow upward rather than downward. The fourth-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: “Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God” (emphasis mine). It is the very human character of Jesus that can allow us mortals to access God and merge with him, become part of him, in order to partake of the divine. That fusion is called theosis. The human nature of Christ makes the divine possible for all of us.

“The Son of God shares our nature so we can share His; as He has us in Him, so we have Him in us.”—Chrysostom

PASCAL’S WAGER

This argument (that real life is risk taking) reveals the theological weakness of Pascal’s wager, which stipulates that believing in the creator has a positive payoff in case he truly exists, and no downside in case he doesn’t. Hence the wager would be to believe in God as a free option. But there are no free options. If you follow the idea to its logical end, you can see that it proposes religion without skin in the game, making it a purely academic and sterile activity. But what applies to Jesus should also apply to other believers. We will see that, traditionally, there is no religion without some skin in the game.

THE MATRIX

Philosophers, unlike the equally argumentative but vastly more sophisticated (and more colorfully dressed) bishops, don’t get the point with their experience machine thought experiment. The procedure is as follows. Simply, you sit in an apparatus and a technician plugs a few cables into your brain, after which you undergo an “experience.” You feel exactly as if an event took place, except that it all happened in virtual reality; it was all mental. Alas, such an experience will never be in the same category as the real—only an academic philosopher who never took risk can believe such nonsense. Why?

Because, to repeat, life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn’t entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

Our argument—that the real requires peril—can lead to niceties about the mind-body problem, but don’t tell your local philosopher.

Now, one may argue: once inside the machine, you may believe that you have skin in the game, and experience the pains and consequences as if you were living the actual harm. But this is once inside, not outside, and there is no risk of irreversible harm, things that linger and make time flow in one direction not the other. The reason a dream is not reality is that when you suddenly wake up from falling from a Chinese skyscraper, life continues, and there is no absorbing barrier, the mathematical name for that irreversible state that we will discuss at length in Chapter 19, along with ergodicity, the most powerful concept I know.

Next, let us consider the signaling benefits of overt flaws.

THE DONALD

I have a tendency to watch television with the sound off. When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Actually, it was because he had visible deficiencies. Why? Because he was real, and the public—composed of people who usually take risks, not the lifeless non-risk-taking analysts we will present in the next chapter—would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand rather than someone who did not. Arguments that Trump was a failed entrepreneur, even if true, actually prop up this argument: you’d even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost.

I note that even the fact that Trump expressed himself in an unconventional manner was a signal that he never had a boss before, no supervisor to convince, impress, or seek approval from: people who have been employed are more careful in their choice of words.

Scars signal skin in the game.

And

People can detect the difference between front- and back-office operators.

NEXT

Before we end, take some Fat Tony wisdom: always do more than you talk. And precede talk with action. For it will always remain that action without talk supersedes talk without action.

Otherwise you will resemble the person we expose in the next chapter (which hopefully will offend many “intellectuals”), the insidious disease of modern times: back-office people (that is, support staff) acting as front-office ones (business generators).