The Simulated World Across the Ages

Humans are hysterically predictable: the second someone knocks together a wobbly wooden stool or solders a cheap microchip, they instantly rebrand it as the supreme operating system of the cosmos. Once personal computers invaded our desks and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix turned collective paranoia into a 1999 box-office smash, mainstream pop culture finally yelled in shared triumph: “Eureka! We’re all just glitchy NPCs stuck inside a video game hosted on someone else’s overpriced server!”

Yet long before silicon wafers and Elon Musk’s podcast appearances, ancient thinkers were already asking the very same awkward question: aren’t we mistaking stage decorations for the bedrock of reality? They merely called it something else—maya, shadows on a wall, a bizarre dream, a mirrored reflection, or an appearance within the mind.

We do not intend to claim that modern physics has validated ancient dogma, nor that ancient sages secretly cribbed their notes from a single universal guru. Our authorial lens and working hypothesis are far more modest: to look upon this colorful, centuries-long parade of doubts as a chain of strikingly resonant attempts to question the infallibility of the wallpaper of human perception.

Part I. Ancient India: The Snake, the Rope, and a Sober Shankara

In the tradition of the Upanishads and the Advaita Vedanta developed by Adi Shankara, the world of multiple, diverse things was never dismissed as a cheap circus hoax or an absolute void. It was granted a relative, dependent reality. The true ground of all that exists is undivided Brahman, while the bustling kaleidoscope of names and forms arises from maya and the mechanism of adhyasa—superimposition. It is what happens when a nearsighted traveler in twilight jumps back in terror from a harmless rope lying on the path, mistaking it for a venomous snake.

At the same time, Shankara never advised anyone to ignore gravity or happily step on actual vipers: recognising world-illusion does not negate mundane practical responsibility. Discernment (viveka) is meant not for fleeing into an abyss, but for ceasing to confuse the cinematic projection on the screen with the blank white canvas itself.

Part II. Classical Greece: Chained to the Screen and the Rungs of Plotinus

Plato packaged this exact existential dread without drowning it in dry academic jargon. In Book VII of the Republic, he pitched a horror premise that would leave any modern binge-watcher sweating: prisoners chained neck and foot inside a cave, forced to stare blankly at a bare wall, passionately grading flickering shadows of carried objects cast by a fire burning behind them. For Plato, the clumsy tangible junk we cling to isn’t the main event at all, but merely a pale, degraded photocopy of eternal, intelligible Forms that make every physical table look like bad garage-sale cardboard.

Later, Plotinus arranged this intuition into a Neoplatonic hierarchy: being emanates down in stages from the incomprehensible One through cosmic Intellect (Nous) and Soul (Psyche) all the way to the material cosmos. Matter here is not a forgery, but an echo of its source. The Greeks did not discover The Matrix, but these teachings firmly refused to worship clay pots as the outer limit of existence.

Part III. Mahayana Buddhism: Emptiness Without a Hidden Absolute, and Mirrors of Mind

With Nagarjuna, the conversation about illusion takes a decidedly different turn. Nagarjuna and his concept of shunyata (emptiness) did not hide any secret supreme Brahman or latent world-soul behind the theatrical curtains. Emptiness signifies solely that phenomena lack independent, intrinsic existence (svabhava): any given thing exists only via an intricate web of conditions, relations, and causes (pratityasamutpada). This is not an edgy claim that “nothing exists”; it is a sober recognition that no object exists autonomously or in isolation.

The Yogacara school turned this inquiry toward the structures of cognition with the term vijnaptimatra (“consciousness-only” or “representation-only”). This is not a proven brand of individual solipsism along the lines of “close your eyes and the universe gets deleted,” but a sophisticated tradition of interpreting experience, where scholars still debate the exact boundaries between ontology and phenomenology: we invariably deal with images constructed by perception. Later, the Chinese Huayan school crystallized this radical interdependence into the poetic image of Indra’s Net—a cosmic garland of jewels where every single facet endlessly reflects all the others.

Part IV. Daoist China: Zhuangzi’s Awakening and Effortless Action

In the book of Zhuangzi, a paradoxical tale delivers a sharp blow to intellectual self-assurance. As the famous parable is retold, a newly awakened Zhuang Zhou wonders whether he is Zhuang Zhou who just dreamed of fluttering joyfully as a butterfly, or whether he is a butterfly right now dreaming that it is an honorable Chinese philosopher. This is not a claim that the world has been scientifically proven to be a virtual dream, but an elegant question concerning the fragility of cognitive boundaries and the perpetual fluidity of forms.

From this same soil grows the principle of wu wei, which lazy interpreters routinely mistake for an invitation to lie on the couch all day. Wu wei is not total abstinence from action; it is effortless, natural action aligned with the flow of the Dao—free of strain, egotistical obstinacy, or attempts to bash through brick walls with one's forehead.

Part V. Abrahamic Traditions: The Breath of Ecclesiastes, Sufi Mirrors, and the Coincidence of Opposites

In the biblical tradition, doubts about the solidity of the world carry the weight of an existential sigh. The ancient Hebrew word hevel in the Book of Ecclesiastes, conventionally rendered as “vanity,” literally denotes a transient breath, an exhalation, or evaporating vapor. The world is not declared a glitch in the software; it simply slips through our fingers, exposing the fragility of mortal ambitions. Augustine, with his division between the Earthly City and the City of God, was likewise not designing a two-tier arcade game split into a fake and an original, but speaking of earthly and heavenly cities in a strictly theological sense.

In Sufism, Ibn ʿArabi (to whom later commentators attached the label wahdat al-wujud, although he never employed the term himself) used the concept of khayal—imagination in a fundamental ontological sense. For him, the world is neither a cruel deception nor the mundane dream of a sleeping deity, but an intermediate reality of reflections in which the single Real (al-Haqq) displays Its infinite divine names. Meanwhile, in a Christian setting, Nicholas of Cusa formulated the theological doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence of opposites): in an infinite God, opposites coincide, whereas every finite worldly thing is merely a limited contraction of that unfathomable fullness—a stance worlds apart from any primitive simulation theory.

Part VI. Early Modern Europe: The Methodical Demon, Idealism, and the Limits of Knowledge

Early modern Europe shifted the inquiry onto the tracks of rigorous epistemology, without tossing theology out the window overnight. René Descartes introduced the thought experiment of an evil demon capable of manipulating our thoughts even regarding mathematical truths. The demon was never for Descartes a verified architect of a matrix; it served as an instrument of radical methodical doubt, allowing him to uncover the unshakeable bedrock of thought: cogito, ergo sum.

Lumping all thinkers of this era into a single bucket would be absurd. George Berkeley advanced subjective idealism (esse est percipi—“to be is to be perceived”), wherein the stability of tables and trees behind our backs is sustained not by human whim, but by the omnipresent perception of God. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, separated the world of appearances (phenomena) from things-in-themselves (noumena). Kant never claimed our sensory experience was a fabrication or an illusion: empirically, the world is entirely real; it is just that human reason inevitably perceives it through built-in filters of space, time, and conceptual categories. The wallpaper is real enough, but we can never inspect the concrete behind it.

Part VII. The 19th and 20th Centuries: Encounters of Traditions, Perennialism, and the Physicists’ Equations

In the early 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer immersed himself in the Latin translation of the Upanishads and spliced Eastern motifs into his Kantian framework. In The World as Will and Representation, the visible world became a subjective mental pageant, behind the curtain of which churns a blind, insatiable, metaphysical Will—a vivid, albeit idiosyncratic adaptation when measured against classical Indian sources.

By the mid-20th century, Aldous Huxley sought to reduce humanity's mystical insights to a common denominator in The Perennial Philosophy. It was an ambitious perennialist project, yet critics rightly remind us: forcing every faith into pieces of a single jigsaw puzzle requires turning a blind eye to their fundamental contradictions.

Around the same time, physics entered the fray. Quantum mechanics baffled scientists with the measurement problem, generating competing interpretations; yet the mathematical formalism of the wave function hardly asserts that “particles do not exist until a human looks at them” or that we manifest reality by pure willpower. David Bohm’s model of the “implicate” and “explicate” order remained a daring theoretical hypothesis rather than experimental proof of a matrix. Finally, the holographic principle (tracing back to Gerard ’t Hooft and Leonard Susskind’s 1994 preprint concerning degrees of freedom and quantum information on black hole horizons) mathematically describes a volume of space via data on its boundary. This is a rigorous conjecture in theoretical physics, not proof that the universe is a video file stored on a cosmic hard drive.

Part VIII. The 21st Century: Bostrom’s Argument Stripped of Mysticism

Bostrom’s 2003 conditional argument assumes computational consciousness is possible: either almost no civilizations reach a posthuman stage, or almost none run many ancestor simulations, or most observers of our type are simulated. Treating ourselves as typical among comparable observers matters. This does not establish the third alternative or assign a numerical probability to our world.

In mainstream retellings, this conditional reasoning is easily degraded into the flashy slogan “we’re in the Matrix.” Yet technical jargon about servers and rendering engines has simply redressed age-old philosophical skepticism in fashionable jeans.

Part IX. Discordant Voices in a Shared Chorus

The temptation to insist that ancient rishis, Greek logicians, Daoist recluses, and modern computer architects were all saying the exact same thing is understandable, but naive. Their aims were completely disparate: Plato sought the eternal Good, Nagarjuna dismantled cognitive clinging to conceptual extremes, Descartes sought a sterile foundation for natural science, and Bostrom dissected conditional probability. Metaphors of a dream, a mirror, a shadow, an insatiable will, and compiled server code are fundamentally non-equivalent.

And yet, if forced to choose a single lens capable of organizing these inquiries into a coherent coordinate system, our authorial preference leans toward Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta. This is neither an established scientific truth nor an assertion of supremacy over other traditions; it is our subjective interpretive hypothesis. To us, Advaita's vocabulary feels the most conceptually capacious: it harmoniously holds together a metaphysical foundation, a nuanced analysis of cognitive errors, and a practical ethics of everyday action, reminding us that the game of life retains its rules even after the audience peeks behind the curtain.

Part X. United Wisdom: The Crystal as a Working Metaphor

This very perspective underpins the United Wisdom project and its platform at https://unitedwisdom.world. Our premise is to cultivate a space for the comparative juxtaposition of traditions; we do not proclaim any historically proven consensus among ancient sages. The motto “One Source · Many Languages” serves us not as dogma, but as a working metaphor and an intellectually generative horizon.

We view world traditions as facets of a single crystal. Different eras and different thinkers scrutinized the riddle of existence from their own angles. Juxtaposing their texts without condescension and without blind fanaticism helps us appreciate not a flat snapshot, but the breathtaking depth of human thought refusing to surrender before the limits of the obvious.

In Lieu of a Conclusion

Talking about the illusory nature of the world is no excuse to sink into apathy, stare at the ceiling, and wait for the cosmic sysadmin to reboot the server. It is an inoculation against dogmatism and intellectual myopia.

When an Indian philosopher speaks of maya, a Greek expounds on shadows, a Sufi contemplates the mirror of divine imagination, and a physicist argues over the limits of the observable, our comparative reading highlights a shared underlying question: what are we missing when we mistake our very first glance for total understanding? Illusoriness is not an eviction notice served to reality; it is an invitation to inhabit it with sobriety, attentiveness, and honesty.

Key Quote

“All conditioned phenomena are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow; like a drop of dew and a flash of lightning—thus should they be seen.”

— Diamond Sutra; English rendering of the wording quoted in the Russian source article; original translator not specified.

Connections with Other Traditions

• Upanishads and Advaita Vedanta: The concepts of maya, Brahman, epistemological superimposition (adhyasa), and discrimination (viveka).

• Mahayana Buddhism: Nagarjuna’s analysis of emptiness (shunyata), Yogacara’s experiential inquiries (vijnaptimatra), and the image of universal interconnectedness in Indra’s Net.

• Daoism: Zhuangzi’s problematization of waking life and dreaming, and natural action (wu wei).

• Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Allegory of the Cave, Plato’s world of Forms, and Plotinus’s rungs of emanation from the One.

• Abrahamic Thought: The notion of fleeting breath (hevel) in the Book of Ecclesiastes; Augustine’s City of God.

• Sufism and Christian Theology: The ontology of imagination (khayal) in Ibn ʿArabi; Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum).

• Early Modern Europe and Idealism: Descartes’ methodical demon, Berkeley’s idealism, Kant’s phenomena and noumena, and Schopenhauer’s blind Will.

• Perennialism: Aldous Huxley’s proposal of a common mystical core across religions.

• Modern Science and Simulation Philosophy: Interpretations of quantum theory, the holographic principle, and Nick Bostrom’s trilemma.

Reading Materials

Targeted Reference Materials and Source Excerpts:

• Nāgārjuna, §2 — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Academic treatment of emptiness (śūnyatā) and the absence of intrinsic nature (svabhāva).

• Ibn ʿArabī, §§3.1, 3.3 — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The contextual status of the label waḥdat al-wujūd and the ontology of imagination (khayāl).

• Quantum Mechanics, Introduction and The Measurement Problem — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Introduction to mathematical formalism and the quantum measurement problem.

• Bostrom 2003, Abstract and Sections I–II, IV–V — Nick Bostrom, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?: The substrate-independence assumption and the formal trilemma.

• Susskind 1994, Abstract only — Leonard Susskind, The World as a Hologram: Preprint on estimating degrees of freedom and quantum information.

Additional Materials for Further Reading:

(A list of works referenced in the context of these traditions, without implying complete page-by-page study within the scope of this article)

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: entries on Śaṅkara, Yogācāra, George Berkeley, Descartes’ Epistemology, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer.

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: entry on Plotinus.

• Plato, Republic, Book VII (The Allegory of the Cave).

• TheTorah.com: Hevel: The Meaning of Life (linguistic analysis of the Book of Ecclesiastes).

• Encyclopedic overviews: Diamond Sutra, Indra’s Net, Zhuangzi, The City of God, Coincidentia oppositorum, The Perennial Philosophy, Implicate and explicate order, Holographic principle, and the Simulation hypothesis.

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut