When the 1999 film “The Martix” came out, one of the early reviews of the film opened with the following paragraph:

“Before his first or physical birth man was in the world of the matrix. He had no knowledge of this world; his eyes could not see; his ears could not hear. When he was born from the world of the matrix, he beheld another world,” wrote Abdul Baha, son of the Bahai prophet Baha’ullah, nearly a century ago. Truth is, “the majority of people are captives in the matrix of nature, submerged in the sea of materiality.” [1]

Later some claimed to follow a new religion Matrixism which cites Abdu’l-Baha’s writings on the topic as foundational scripture. If you are familiar with the Baha’i scripture, especially the writings of Abdu’l-Baha, it is not surprising that the whole conceit of this film resonated so strongly with it. There is a scene where Neo, the main protagonist, is offered a choice between a blue and red pill. If he takes the blue pill he forgets all the strange events that have happened up until then and wakes up like it was all just a dream. If he takes the red pill, he really wakes up from the simulated reality he is living in. This along with the whole pretext of the matrix reality in the movie, operates as metaphor for spiritual versus the material nature of our existence. One view is that taking the red pill is analogous to receiving the words of God and the soul’s awaking to their power and ultimate spiritual re-birth. The scene after Neo takes the red pill and wakes up from his uterus-like existence seems to mirror this description of a souls birth from the matrix of the world, albeit with more darker result than what Abdu’l-Baha described.

Since the Matrix came out, the idea that we might be actually living in a simulated reality appears to grow in legitimacy with each step of technological progress. The most recent popularized version of this theory was put forward by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. This idea has been championed by individuals like Elon Musk, of Tesla and Space-X fame. Yet beyond this, it has been seriously discussed and debated by many of the premier theoretical physicists of our day.

As physics presses harder on the nature of the physical reality, we are finding that it is rooted in relational information or a math which is not so dissimilar to computer code. There is even a strong contention that space-time itself represents a sort of holographic projection with elements similar to an error-correcting code.

Of course what should be obvious is that the logical consequence of this line of reasoning is not that we are living in a computer simulation that resides in some base physical reality. Rather that the true base reality is not physical. We are really rediscovering the ideas which Plato put forward several millennia ago. If it is taken to its logical conclusion, the simulation hypothesis is really a modern retelling of Plato’s cave. Only now instead of prisoners being deceived into believing shadows are reality, we are taking a computer simulation to be real. Yet if one was ever to wakeup from a simulation to a supposed base reality, the same rational would apply to the reality of that world. Indeed there would needs be an infinite recursions of simulations within simulations without any ‘true’ base physical reality. To put another way, if our physical reality is so flimsy that it can be easily simulated, then perhaps were are mistaken in assuming that the ‘physical’ can represent any true ‘base reality’. In the words of Abdu’l-Baha: