The Simulation Hypothesis Is Gnosticism in Silicon
In 2003, an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom published a short paper asking whether we live inside a computer simulation. It became that rarest of things, a philosophy paper with a fan base. Tech founders cite it on stage, physicists argue about testing it, and one billionaire famously put the odds that we inhabit “base reality” at one in billions. Here’s what almost never comes up in those conversations. Mystics in the early centuries of Christianity mapped this territory already, fabricated world and all. And they went further than the modern version does, because they left instructions for what to do about it. ...