Is it Possible that We are Living in a Simulation? Part 1 With Rodney Ascher
Interview with Rodney Ascher
In the first of a three-part ‘Smart Dust Investigates’ series, we will take you on an adventure through the possible truths behind one of techs biggest (and possibly craziest) theories – “Is it possible that we live in a simulation”? Elon Musk believes we are living in a sim – he says “There is a billion to one chance we are living in a true base reality.” While popular physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says it is “very likely” that our universe is a simulation.
Tune into part 1 – Introduction to the SIM Theory debate: Interview with Rodney Ascher, Director of Sundance hit doco ’A Glitch in the Matrix’. Be prepared to have your mind stretched.
Transcript
Douglas Nicol:
Hello, I’m Douglas Nichol.
Nick Abrahams:
And I’m Nick Abrahams.
Douglas Nicol:
And welcome to episode one in a new three part special series from Smart Dust called Smart Dust Tech Mysteries, in which we investigate some of the great mysteries of the world of technology. And in this series of three, we’re going to ask the question, could we, in fact, be living in a simulation? Now this is a much discussed and mind bending topic. And quite often it’s a topic discussed late at night after a beer and when we’re all feeling maybe a little philosophical. But the simulation hypothesis, if you don’t know, sets forward the proposition that our current existence that we know in everyday life, could in fact be an artificial simulation, such as maybe a computer simulation. In essence, are we living in a SIM?
Nick Abrahams:
Can I just say how excited I am about the new long form webinar format. NPR are going to want this, I can just say, we’ll probably end up selling out at some stage, but let’s get on with the show first. This idea of are we living in a SIM? It’s really created a lot of division in people who I’ve spoken to about it. There’s definitely those who are quite comfortable with the idea that we do live in a SIM, and there are those who are definitely not. And a lot of people sitting on the fence. It’s a fascinating blend of, is it possible that’s science and technology can actually delivering a convincing all immersive simulated human experience?
Douglas Nicol:
And we’re going to investigate, over three special episodes, because this topic is so big that you can’t do it all in one episode. And what we’re going to be doing is in this episode, you’re going to meet the director of the definitive documentary movie on this topic, Rodney Asher, his movie was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. And in this episode we’ll explore the history to date of the simulation hypothesis. And then in episode two, we’re going to talk the fantastic Rizwan Virk, who is the founder of MIT Labs in Massachusetts, and an incredible expert in simulated reality gaming. And what we discussed with him is how close are we to being able to program a convincing, true to reality, immersive virtual world. And that was a particularly interesting conversation.
Douglas Nicol:
And finally, we’re going to widen the conversation to chat with Lawrence Crumpton in episode three. And he is from Microsoft HoloLens and a real expert on extended reality, to examine whether the shared virtual world, the metaverse, that has been discussed a lot at the moment, is a first step towards the evolution of a SIM. So we are going to really put this mystery through its paces and hopefully at the end of it come to some conclusions, if not some defining personal views as to where we personally sit on whether it’s true or false.
Nick Abrahams:
I think that’s right, Douglas. I think if there’s one thing that Smart Dust is about, it’s about really being part of the zeitgeist. And we couldn’t get more zeitgeisty than whether we are living in a SIM because we’re actually on the eve of the new Matrix Four movie. And I know Douglas, you’ve long had a bit of a crush on Keanu, and who hasn’t frankly, but you remember the original Matrix movie, which catapulted the SIM topic into the main stream. And I must say when I first watched it, I was a little confused by it, obviously blown away by the special effects, which were amazing. But if you cast your mind back, it was 1999.
Nick Abrahams:
So the original Matrix depicted a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside a simulated reality, called the Matrix, which intelligent machines have created to distract humans while using our bodies as an energy source. Douglas, disgusting, but anyway, they made a movie out of it and they’ve made three, in fact of aliens misusing humans. And the fourth one is due out, The Matrix Resurrections, scheduled for release on December 22. So good Christmas holiday viewing. And I think one of the critical questions that we came out of the original Matrix movie was, would you take the red pill and cope with your reality, or would you take the blue pill and stay in a delighted ignorance?
Douglas Nicol:
And Nick, we’re going into this investigation, we’re meeting some pretty interesting people on the way to form our own opinion as to whether we think this is true or not. Whether we’re living in a SIM. I’d like to know, going into this investigation, where you stand, do you believe it could be true that we’re living in a simulation?
Nick Abrahams:
So I think, maybe to even drag it back to the red or blue pill concept, after watching the Matrix, I was very much of the opinion that I’d be in the red pill, sort of brave. But then I think about the joy that there is in ignorance of the true reality. I’ve got to say I’m hopeful that I would be in a quest for truth, which as you know, Douglas, as a lawyer, that’s what I spend my time doing on a day to day basis, the quest for truth and justice. And so really I’m just interested to find out, what is the true reality. But because I’m a natural skeptic, I need to see some evidence. And as we’ll see with Rodney’s film, The Glitch, that’s what we’re searching for. Where’s the evidence. So I think I’m going to be hard to convince, got an open mind, but I really need to see some evidence that we do live in some sort of matrix. You remember, in the film, it was that cat that Keanu saw twice, and that triggered him. So let’s see if over the course of the next three episodes, do I see my Keanu cat?
Douglas Nicol:
I think from my point of view going into this, I’m slightly on the fence. What I do know, and I’ve talked to a lot of people on this topic since we’ve been researching this, and yes, we have researched it, and some people get quite aggressive about how this is not true. And then some people go, “Oh, no, this is definitely true.” And actually I’m quite surprised at some of the people, because these are often quite senior intelligent people who are doing it. So the thing that worries me is that is this hypothesis the stuff of modern day philosophers and overpaid intellectuals, and can it actually be granded into some kind of truth. And of course your close personal friend, Elon Musk, has a point of view on this, Nick.
Nick Abrahams:
He does. And on many things. And you’ve got to admit, Elon, he’s not too bad. He’s picked some winners over time. So maybe there is something to this. But Elon Musk says that we are sort of at a billionth of a chance of living in a true reality. And Neil Degrasse Tyson, the very famous American physicist, says that it’s a 50/50 possibility that we live in a simulation. So they’re two brilliant minds who have really thought long and hard about a whole lot of tangential issues to this and a lot of very direct issues. So it is interesting that they both believe quite strongly that there’s a real possibility that we live in a simulation.
Nick Abrahams:
If you look at, Elon looks at it from the point of view of, you look at where gaming has come in the last 10 years, it’s so immersive now [inaudible 00:08:00] the opportunities with mixed reality that the ability to tell the difference between what your physical experience is and what your experience is through a virtual reality lens will be quite difficult. And so once we reach that peak, then it’ll be interesting to see you what is the difference between true reality and a virtualized reality?
Douglas Nicol:
Now we’ve looked at creating some data because it’s nice to have a bit of data to try and quantify how widely people believe in this or refute this hypothesis. And Nick, you polled 187 of your LinkedIn connections, and I am sure your LinkedIn connections are absolute pillars of society, to ask them whether they believe they could be living in a SIM or not and share with us the results.
Nick Abrahams:
Yeah. So it was very interesting. And can I say, thank you to my LinkedIn connections for partaking in this, and I’ve got to say it was fascinating how split people were. And LinkedIn is, it’s not like Twitter, it doesn’t have that fringe feel to it. People are quite honest, I think, on LinkedIn. And so it was interesting to see that on the 187 people who respond, 40% said we were not living in a SIM, but 33% said yes, they believed that we were living in a simulation, 33%. And 27% don’t know. So if you look at that, that’s over… Well, that’s 60%. It’s a small sample size for sure, but 60% of people either think we are living in a SIM or are prepared to believe that we are living in a SIM, which I thought was really, really quite a lot compared to what I would’ve expected.
Douglas Nicol:
And I think that underlines why it’s such an interesting topic to investigate over the next three episodes. And our first step on investigating this actually starts on a cold wet night, a few months ago, at the Randwick Ritz Cinema, at the fabulous film festival, to look at the premiere of the new doco that looks at this very topic.
Nick Abrahams:
That’s exactly right. We were, Douglas and I, on the red carpet at the Randwick Ritz, going to the premiere of A Glitch in the Matrix. And so, it’s a 2021 American documentary film, directed by Rodney Ascher, and he’s directed a number of fascinating films in the past, all documentaries. The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival at the end of January in 2021, and was released theatrically and on digital in February 2021, by Magnolia Pictures, to generally very positive reviews. And so, the director as I mentioned, is Rodney Ascher, and we recently had the pleasure of interviewing Rodney.
Douglas Nicol:
Rodney, it’s a wonderful movie. It really takes you on a journey. And I found it quite a mind scrabbler, and I have a particular quote that really stuck with me from the movie. One of the quotes was, “I have through dreaming and waking up, lived thousands of lifetimes.” And that is the kind of conversation you enter when you watch A Glitch in the Matrix, your new movie. It really does get you thinking about whether we live in a simulation. So, for some of our listeners who are maybe less familiar with the basic hypothesis in your movie, can you break it down for us?
Rodney Ascher:
There’s a distinction between, I think the simulation hypothesis and the simulation argument, both of which are coming from a professor, Nick Bostrom. And in broadest terms, simulation hypothesis, simulation theory, is the idea that we’re all living in some sort of digital universe, created in perhaps an incredibly powerful computer out there someplace. And the out there could be our own future, another planet, another dimension, some sort of place that is beyond our understanding.
Rodney Ascher:
I think the way that most people come to understand it, or just get the idea in their head, is from films like The Matrix. In the world of that film, like 1999, America is a digital simulation. And the real people are in pods out there, outside of that world. And their minds are all trapped in this digital creation.
Douglas Nicol:
I mean, it’s quite extraordinary sort of thought. Elon Musk, who seems to know quite a lot about a few things, when questioned on it, he had a view that what we’re seeing with video game capability and virtual reality is just increasing and the immersive nature of it, that in Elon’s words, it seems a one in a billionth chance that we are living in a so-called, as he called it, a base reality.
Douglas Nicol:
Because in one sense, it’s like, we are living in some sort of simulation, created by something or another. But also, technology seems to be pushing us towards a world where it will become harder to distinguish between reality and what is synthetic, if you like. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Rodney Ascher:
A lot.
Douglas Nicol:
Somehow after watching the movie, I thought that you might. So that’s the next hour and a half. Don’t [crosstalk 00:13:35] [inaudible 00:13:37].
Rodney Ascher:
You can pull me back to earth if I divert too far, but I saw maybe a half dozen entrance ramps to long monologues within the course of that question. One of them, I think is a really interesting part of a lot of people’s sort of arguments for simulation theory. And in particular, the idea that the quote unquote real world is our own future. And that comes from … There’s a press conference, a panel that Elon Musk was on kind of famously, and it’s been circulating on the internet ever since he appeared on it, where he uses that video game argument, looking at video game development from the course of the ’70s till today. The amount of increased fidelity, increased reality is growing by leaps and bounds constantly.
Rodney Ascher:
And therefore, you project that into the future. We will add a certain point, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, get to the place where those imageries in those worlds are indistinguishable from reality. And then there’s a very interesting kind of piece of sleight of hand, which is from there, you take a big step back into the entirety of history, including the future. And you say, if it is more likely than not, that perfectly realistic simulations will exist, then it’s probable that they already do.
Rodney Ascher:
And that billionth to one thing, I think what he’s arguing there, and it’s similar to something that Nick Bostrom talked about, is thinking about an extended history that includes the future, that there will be a number of very realistic realities of simulated realities that are perfectly realistic. And as soon as that number is greater than two, statistically, it’s more likely that we’re in one of them, than we’re in the one true real world, the base reality that he describes.
Rodney Ascher:
Now, there’s a lot of things about that argument. There’s a lot of pros and cons for that argument. And I wanted to quickly make the distinction that I did not invent that argument. And I’m not necessarily the one lobbying for it. Elon Musk does it pretty well. And so do Bostrom and other folks. And even Bostrom kind of includes that as one possibility among three sort of, he calls it a trilemma of the different possibilities, that one of them would be simulations are inevitable. In fact, we’re already in one.
Douglas Nicol:
I’m interested to understand the origins of this hypothesis. And in your movie, you talk about the writing of Philip Dick, the American science fiction writer, whose books influenced great movies like Blade Runner and Minority Report and Total Recall. Is that where it started?
Rodney Ascher:
Not exactly. One thing I try to do in the movie is sort of mark milestones in its increasing mainstreaming. He’s a huge milestone in the idea of becoming better known. He wrote many books and many stories that included digital simulations, computer generated realities, going back at least to the ’60s. And there might even be one in ’59, if memory serves. So he wasn’t the first science fiction author to talk about it. He was certainly an early one.
Rodney Ascher:
And we use excerpts from a speech where later in his life, after he had this sort of mind-expanding experience, he came to believe that that was true. And in 1977, he talked to an audience in France about it for over an hour. And I think one of the things that really struck me, the more I thought about that was in the ’60s and ’70s, if you think about what computers were, and even from that first wave of computer graphics with games like Space War, which were more primitive than Asteroids and Space Invaders, the idea that that was going to advance the level of complete reality is a unbelievable leap.
Rodney Ascher:
It’s a gigantic idea. But I was actually at Sundance, the physical festival was canceled because of the pandemic, but they had a couple of events in virtual reality. And in order to experience them, I got my hands on an Oculus. And it was interesting, because I was talking to a critic in a virtual bar on the moon about the movie. And on the one hand, he asked me, why did I use digital avatars for some of the characters in the movie while he was a three-foot tall alien, and I was a seven-foot tall mummy, speaking very matter of factly about our shared love of different movies and of how interesting it was to see.
Rodney Ascher:
Just the Sundance graphic design on the wall of some of these spaces made it feel like we were really there. Just like look around. We’re living in it. And even if that world had sort of a cartoonish artificiality to it, it still felt like a real space that we were really sharing and inhabiting from … I don’t even know where in the country he was, if he was in the United States.
Rodney Ascher:
So I might say, from where we are today, I can see a simulated reality from here, and I can put on my Oculus and play ping pong with a friend, living halfway across the country and talk to him about our lives, our families, our work in a very matter of fact way in this artificial world. So to see that possibility from the ’60s, from the ’70s seems really pretty unbelievable. It’s almost prophecy.
Rodney Ascher:
But by the same token, and this is something else we try to do in the movie a little bit, is Phillip K Dick was one of the first to talk about this reality as being generated in a computer. But depending on how strictly you’re going to define the idea of simulation, you can go back to The Wizard of Oz.
Rodney Ascher:
You can go back to Descartes, you can go back to the allegory of Plato’s cave or endless stories within sort of Eastern traditions as well that go back thousands of years.
Speaker 1:
I mean, it’s a deeply philosophical question, isn’t it? Because that’s obviously undertones of religious belief and so forth. Yeah. Just that Philip K Dick, the speech that you excerpt from in the movie, it seems extraordinary quite right. It does sort of seem to verge on prophecy in some respect, but do you have any sense of what was the reaction to that at the time? Because it seems pretty out there.
Rodney Ascher:
I have not come across any contemporary written reactions at least specifically to the speech, but the camera does pan around the audience and… Let’s say their response was restrained.
Speaker 2:
Yes, it’s certainly a muted approach from the audience there. A lot of quizzical looking French people who I think were expecting something quite different. It’s a lovely part in the film.
Rodney Ascher:
Well, it is a science fiction convention, so I suppose they were hoping to hear about science fiction and not about the true nature of reality.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Nick Abrahams:
Yes, wasn’t a sort of a Buddhist session. Just on the Oculus thing, it’s interesting and it’s a slight tangent, but the whole virtual world thing fascinates me. So we had Second Life which was quite popular a few years ago. I’m not sure if you came across Abydos virtual world. And I remember being very positive on it saying, a lot of other people that it would replace physical meetings and change the way we do education. Everyone will meet in these virtual worlds and then the FBI shut down gambling on Second Life and Second Life subsequently became a shadow of its former self.
Nick Abrahams:
But my sense is that the virtual world and synthetic realities are really starting to pick up steam. And a couple of weeks ago, the US military announced that they were buying 2$2 billion worth of Microsoft HoloLenses, I think 120,000 of them for troops. And when you think $22 billion, you compare that in 2019, I think virtual reality as an industry only generated $19 billion. So I mean, do you see that as pushing the edge of the envelope in terms of how we will interact?
Rodney Ascher:
Well, it’s interesting. Yeah, I know what you’re saying about Second Life. In fact, there’s a documentary I saw years ago, Life 2.0, that was just fantastic showing the way that people’s lives were taking place in both realities at once. And I loved that the filmmaker was able to do interviews within your Second Life, as well as within, I suppose we’d call first life. Talk about the Oculus, it’s hard for me to get a sense of how much it’s actually taking off. The military quote you’ve given me is news to me, is really interesting.
Rodney Ascher:
I can totally see its value in training exercise, right? Like there’s a boxing game that I play and I’m literally in a fist fight, dodging and weaving. And assuming that the behavior of the other boxers are all realistic, it’s a great way to practice that kind of combat without actually injuring yourself and all the experiences in there are so much more body conscious, even that the shooting games. It’s the physicality is much closer to what happens in the real world.
Rodney Ascher:
As I’ve been thinking about these ideas and trying to imagine, well, what would the purpose of building a simulated earth be and what I come back to and of course, I don’t have any evidence for this other than a gut instinct, but the idea of using it as training, using it as ways of safely doing experiments of things that could be like crises that are happening in the world outside. So yeah, it makes perfect sense for me for the military to get behind it, even if it’s just right, like putting a live VR camera on a soldier in the front lines head as a way for a general back at headquarters to have a vivid, accurate to-the-second update of what’s going on a can imagine that that would just be invaluable. I mean, scary in its way, but…
Douglas Nicol:
In the movie, just picking up on that point, you do look at the different purposes of the simulation, this world behind the world we live in. Because in theory, I’m here, I’m Douglas and based on the hypothesis, Nick is code, and Rodney is code, you’re both code, and I presume I’m real living in a simulation. And-
Speaker 2:
How do you get to be real?
Rodney Ascher:
Well, it’s sort of a fork in the road, right? That one of the first questions, when you talk about the simulation is, well, what does that mean for other people? And there are conceptions of simulation theory where everybody is equally real or artificial. We’re either all tethered to real people out there someplace, or we are all AI generated with the same code. But then there’s also versions of it where it’s some sort of hybrid model, whether there’s a handful of super achievers who are connected to real people and everyone else are those NPCs, or even it’s a single person experience for some reason or another.
Douglas Nicol:
And then it leads on in the doco. You talk about the purpose of the SIM. You’ve just mentioned research. So it could be that we are living at as a sort of almost like a digital twin existence to see what happens if a certain type of president comes to power in the world and what the impact of that would be, or might be entertainment. I mean, Nick’s entire career could just be entertainment for some greater [crosstalk 00:25:37]. What are the range of theories as to why this simulation happening?
Rodney Ascher:
Well, it’s doomed to be a completely incomplete range of them, but the ones I’ve heard discussed most, right? Nick Bostrom uses the phrase ancestor simulations and the best that I can understand that is that it is almost a historical exhibit for the people in the future who have recreated us in our past, right? At one point, I asked him how accurate do you imagine if this is an ancestor simulation and my great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren or however many generations are looking back like how accurate a reproduction of the real Rodney am I? And I just look at the clutter at my desk and the random trash in my garbage can, things that I imagine there will never be any kind of a permanent record for, and I have to wonder even considering basically infinite technology, could that ever be accurately reproduced in the future?
Rodney Ascher:
And he said, “Well, they may not be the actual people, but there are people like them.” But in any case, you can see it if it is… You can see one version of this where it’s a simulation of the past as sort of a encyclopedia museum exhibit for people from out there to come and do their research for is one scenario. There’s the game scenario though. I mean, I look at it and think about let’s just say some people’s lives have as many downs as ups, and this doesn’t seem to be the most entertaining world that you could create for an outsider. Though maybe it’s not that each of us are playing the game, right? That there could be a handful of what they call player characters and then a bunch of us NPCs keeping the water running. The ones that attract me again are things like you said, well, let’s see what happens with this kind of president.
Rodney Ascher:
And I might even say, well, let’s say we have a problem like a viral pandemic. Well, can we solve it more easily with this kind of president or that, or this kind of government or that, this kind of society or that? Let’s say we’re in an armed conflict, let’s try on a smaller scale simulating those things and watching them play out. There’s a moment where one of our interviewees, Paul, talks or compares people to what he calls GANs. I think it’s a term of art, the generative adversarial networks, which are [inaudible 00:28:15] of pairs of AIs that come at a problem from opposite directions.
Rodney Ascher:
And he uses the example of those computers that generate very realistic-looking human faces, right? So that if the first AI makes a realistic-looking face, the second one looks at it for problems. And when they find an error and report it, then the other one goes back and tries again. And by that back and forth ping pong, that creates a better and better, more refined output. And what I like about that one, what I find the most reassuring about it is it seems to suggest that everybody on earth, all of our conflict, all of our blood, sweat, and tears, all of our struggles, that it’s for something, right? That there’s a reason for it. And that seems to me, [inaudible 00:29:00] maybe the most optimistic version of it from my point of view.
Nick Abrahams:
That’s a much nicer way of thinking that there’s actually a purpose. I did love your first one where some sort of historical display, future museum, like a really complicated diorama and school kids are looking at us going, “Oh my Lord, what’s happened there?” You mentioned evidence, which is tricky thing for this particular theory, because how do you find the evidence that in fact, the title of your movie, A Glitch in the Matrix, is about that evidence, which is, I guess, at its core, that if we find a glitch that could be evidence.
Nick Abrahams:
So I was speaking to a technologist about this and I suspect he comes from, I believe that we are in a SIM. And he said, well, the evidence that I see is in the way DNA is put together that there’s basically four chemicals and you’ve got G, C, A and T and they’re just put together like we would put together software code. It’s sort of elegant and beautiful, but you’ve looked in this in a great deal of detail. Do you see any compelling evidence other than anecdotal stuff around where there have been glitches in the Matrix?
Rodney Ascher:
Well, the glitch thing is popularly seen as evidence. I don’t know that I’m convinced that it’s decisive. There’s a moment in the Matrix film where they talk about it. Right. Where he sees the same cat twice. And Morpheus and Trinity talk about, “Well, when you see déjà vu or that kind of thing is evidence that somebody is lurking around in the Matrix.
Rodney Ascher:
And by the same token, Phillip K. Dick said the same thing, that memories of different pasts that persist. And he got really literal at one point talking about a light switch changed into a pull chain for him at one point, or that one window would move from one wall to the other. And what I loved about that, and he talks about trying to find more people who believe that thing.
Rodney Ascher:
And I mean, but he had gigantic world scale memories that were different. Things like the Nazis one World War II. Right. That Nixon survived impeachment. That the Roman empire never fell. That his mind, that history got rewritten very, very bold strokes, not just the spelling of candy bars or the names of cartoon bears in children books.
Rodney Ascher:
But nonetheless, I found a real interesting connection in my mind to what people call Mandela Effects. Large numbers of people, remembering things differently than how they seem to be. Right. The spelling of the Berenstein Bears or what the wicked witch says in Snow White. And that people keep track of those message boards and see that as evidence.
Rodney Ascher:
Nick Bostrom is not super impressed by that stuff. And for me, I just don’t quite know what to make of it, other than it can be very troubling sometimes when you find things are so different from what you remember, especially when other people believe it as well. I know that if this were different and kind of movie, we might have spent more time with people like your friend, who talk about both things in our world that feel like code, whether you’re talking about DNA, or the limit of Planck’s constant, or theories of the holographic universe and string theory.
Rodney Ascher:
And a lot of it boils down to notion of if this is a digital world, can we find the smallest pixel? In some video games, there’s a thing called frustrum colored, which is only rendering in perfect fidelity those things that the player sees. You move your character, you swim around to the right. Then everything that falls out screen will disappear. And people talk about trying to find evidence of that in our world as well.
Rodney Ascher:
And there’s ways to get at it through quantum physics and one person after another are fond of saying that we’re close to a breakthrough in somebody proving the digital nature of the world via some end of bleeding edge physics. But what I chose to focus on were these everyday people who’ve come to believe this based on unusual life experience. Right. And talk about that experience and how they tried to make sense of this idea, what it means to them about the world.
Rodney Ascher:
And there’s also a notion that you can talk about simulation theory in great detail, quite literally. Right. And looking, trying to find the pixel resolution of the world around us, but it’s also, I think very useful and very provocative to talk about it as a metaphor. That in many ways, everybody is living in their own simulated world, put together from their ideas of history and what their experience growing up with their family, their peer group, their political bias, their media diet.
Rodney Ascher:
And not to mention the fact that, we’re all navigating the world via our five senses, which are transforming light waves and sound waves in things, into sensory data and making a model of the world inside of our minds. In those ways, it can be a really helpful I think metaphor, which is almost an entirely different conversation than taking it literally, that we’re in a big, futuristic video game.
Douglas Nicol:
And you just mentioned the impact on everyday people, people who believe that they are living in the simulation. And for me in your movie, there’s a dark side that you exposed when somebody genuinely believes they’re living in a sim. And you talk about the Matrix defense in law that has been used to justify some pretty incredibly evil acts in the world. Tell us a bit about that.
Rodney Ascher:
Yeah. Well, I was struck to discover, while working on the movie, that there is such a thing as the Matrix defense, which I’m sure law is different in Australia than it is here. Great assumed overlaps, but we have, there is the insanity to defense. The idea that you are not responsible for your actions, if you are not fully aware of their ramifications and where you are in your head. And multiple people have used a variation of the insanity defense.
Rodney Ascher:
In this case, colloquially called the Matrix defense while facing charges of, well, murder. That there was a woman who murdered her landlord, that famously one of the DC snipers was part of his defense. And in his courtroom drawings, there were lots of images from the Matrix. And there was a young man that we talked to in the movie, Joshua Cook, who’s in prison, well, for murdering his stepparents. And his lawyers were considering using the Matrix defense. And it was a big part of most of the news stories that were written about him.
Rodney Ascher:
Ultimately, he didn’t wind up using it, but the idea that he was living in something like the Matrix really took over his life. Though, even as he describes it, he uses the phrase, the perfect storm. That he came to believe that he was living in something like the Matrix. He was also going through a lot of bullying. He was suffering from undiagnosed mental illness. He was in a period of his life where nothing was going his way. It was certainly part of what he was struggling with. But even he wouldn’t say that it was as simple as because of X, therefore Y.
Nick Abrahams:
Rodney, maybe just one last thing because it’s a wonderful achievement, the movie, a Glitch in the Matrix. And you obviously premiered at Sundance, which is an amazing achieve in itself. What’s the reaction been to the movie? And have you uncovered a deep counterculture that believe in simulation theory and so forth? What’s been the response to it?
Rodney Ascher:
Largely positive, but I think all my films have been a little divisive.
Nick Abrahams:
Yes.
Rodney Ascher:
But they’ve all been a little divisive, which-
Nick Abrahams:
I feel like by choice, Rodney. I don’t…
Rodney Ascher:
Well, I know most of the movies that I love are divisive as well. And I would much rather be the sort of person who people either love it or hate it. Than everyone’s sort of loves, grudgingly gives it a passing grade and then immediately forget about it.
Nick Abrahams:
Oh, That’s good. Look. And just our final question will be, now you’ve looked at this more than most people, other than obviously, Oxford professor, Nick Bostrom and so forth. But what do you think, Rodney? Do we live in a sim?
Rodney Ascher:
Well, I have no idea. But I might say, if it were true, simulation wouldn’t be the right word for us because this is the only world that we know. And it may be that the world outside of our world has elements to it, aspects, dimensions that are unimaginable to us. But that doesn’t make us any less real. And until somebody comes up with a red pill and the blue pill, and a quick and easy opportunity to leave it, this is still going to be the only world that we know. And we best make the most of it.
Douglas Nicol:
Rodney, thank you so much for joining us. The movie is called a Glitch in the Matrix. It is still in theaters. Go and have a look and be prepared to have your mind scrambled. Thank you for your time and your incredible insight into this topic.
Rodney Ascher:
Thanks for having me. It’s been great talking to you.
Nick Abrahams:
Thanks, Rodney.
Douglas Nicol:
Look out for our next episode in Smart Dust Investigates. Whether we’re living in the sim, where we meet Chris Burke from MIT, the leading games designer, to understand how close technology is, notably AR, VR and XR to creating a convincing simulated world. And it’s sooner than you might think. From me, Douglas Nicol.
Nick Abrahams:
And me, Nick Abrahams, goodbye.
Douglas Nicol:
Goodbye.