Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
Maya and Digital Reality: Ancient Intuitions of Simulated Worlds
Summary: Thousands of years before Nick Bostrom, mystics and philosophers across cultures arrived at a similar insight: reality might not be what it appears. Hindu maya, Buddhist sunyata, Plato’s Cave, Gnostic cosmology - these traditions describe a world that is, in some sense, illusory or constructed. Did they intuit what physicists are now formalizing?
The Common Thread
Across continents and centuries, a pattern emerges. Different cultures, using different vocabularies, reached similar conclusions:
- What we perceive is not ultimate reality
- A deeper truth lies behind appearances
- The apparent solidity of the world is somehow constructed
- Consciousness might be more fundamental than matter
This could be coincidence. Or it could be convergent discovery - different explorers mapping the same territory.
Hindu Maya: The Divine Play
In Hindu philosophy, maya is often translated as “illusion,” but that’s not quite right. Maya is more like the creative power by which ultimate reality (Brahman) manifests as the multiplicity we experience.
Key Features
Not “fake” but “constructed”: Maya doesn’t mean the world is unreal. It means the world’s apparent separateness - this tree distinct from that rock distinct from you - is a kind of divine art project. The separations are real at one level, illusory at another.
Lila (divine play): In some schools, maya is God playing hide-and-seek with itself. The universe is Brahman pretending to be many, then gradually remembering it was one all along. Reality as game.
Veiling and projection: Maya has two functions - avarana (veiling the ultimate) and vikshepa (projecting the apparent). Like a video game that both hides its code and projects its graphics.
Simulation Parallel
If we’re in a simulation:
- The “code” (Brahman) is hidden behind the “graphics” (maya)
- The appearance of separate objects is rendered, not fundamental
- The player gradually realizes they’re playing a game
- The game is meaningful despite being “just” a game
Buddhist Sunyata: Emptiness of Inherent Existence
Buddhism teaches that phenomena are sunya - empty of inherent existence. This doesn’t mean nothing exists; it means nothing exists independently, from its own side, in the way it appears to.
Key Features
Dependent origination: Everything arises in dependence on causes and conditions. Nothing has standalone existence. This is remarkably similar to saying everything is relational information, not independent substance.
The two truths: Buddhism distinguishes conventional truth (how things appear) from ultimate truth (how things are). Conventional truth isn’t false - it’s useful but not final. Like the difference between the user interface and the underlying code.
Impermanence: Nothing persists unchanged. What appears solid is actually process. Again: patterns, not things.
Simulation Parallel
If reality is computational:
- Objects are patterns of information, not independent substances
- Everything depends on everything else (no isolated modules)
- The apparent solidity of objects masks their processual nature
- Understanding this changes your relationship to what appears
Plato’s Cave: Shadows on the Wall
In the Republic, Plato describes prisoners chained in a cave, watching shadows cast on a wall. They think the shadows are reality. One prisoner escapes, sees the sun, realizes the shadows were projections.
Key Features
Levels of reality: The shadows are real shadows of real objects, which are themselves imperfect copies of perfect Forms. Reality has layers.
The deception isn’t malicious: The prisoners aren’t being tricked by an evil demon. They’re just in a limited position. Enlightenment is a change of position, not discovery of conspiracy.
The return: The escaped prisoner goes back to tell the others. They don’t believe him. Truth is hard to communicate to those who haven’t seen it.
Simulation Parallel
We are the prisoners. Our perceptions are the shadows. The “real” world might be:
- The physical processes behind our experiences
- The computational substrate running the simulation
- A higher-dimensional reality we can’t directly perceive
The escaped prisoner might be the mystic, the physicist, or the philosopher who glimpses the larger frame.
Gnostic Cosmology: The Flawed Creator
Gnosticism (a collection of early Christian and pre-Christian movements) proposed that the material world was created not by the ultimate God but by a lesser being - the Demiurge - who was ignorant or malevolent.
Key Features
Nested creators: The ultimate divine reality didn’t directly create our world. An intermediate being did, imperfectly. This creates the problem of evil: the world has suffering because its immediate creator was flawed.
Sparks of the divine: Human souls contain sparks of the true divine, trapped in matter. Liberation is remembering your true origin.
Knowledge as salvation: Gnosis (knowledge) of your true nature liberates you from the Demiurge’s creation.
Simulation Parallel
The Gnostic frame maps surprisingly well:
- The ultimate reality (base reality, if it exists) didn’t directly create us
- Our immediate creators (the simulators) might be advanced but not perfect
- We contain something (consciousness?) that connects to the ultimate
- Understanding our situation changes our relationship to it
Indigenous and Shamanic Traditions
Many indigenous cultures describe reality as dream-like, or as one layer of a multi-layered cosmos.
Australian Dreamtime
Aboriginal Australian traditions describe the Dreamtime - an eternal present underlying ordinary time, where ancestral beings created the world and continue to create it. The everyday world is an expression of Dreamtime, not separate from it.
Shamanic Journeys
Shamanic traditions worldwide describe practitioners traveling to “other worlds” that are as real as this one, just differently accessed. Reality has multiple valid perspectives, multiple valid layers.
The Pattern
These traditions share with simulation theory the sense that:
- Ordinary reality isn’t the only reality
- Different modes of consciousness access different layers
- What appears solid and fixed is more fluid than it seems
What the Ancients Didn’t Have
The simulation hypothesis adds vocabulary and mechanisms that ancient traditions lacked:
Computational Frames
The ancients couldn’t talk about rendering, processing, or lazy evaluation. They used the tools they had: divine play, veiling, dreaming. We can now say more precisely what “illusory but not unreal” might mean.
Testability (Maybe)
Ancient intuitions were wisdom traditions, not scientific hypotheses. The simulation hypothesis, while not currently testable, at least specifies what evidence might look like. Computational constraints might leave traces.
Naturalized Transcendence
Ancient traditions required accepting supernatural frameworks. The simulation hypothesis achieves similar conclusions through naturalistic means - the simulators are advanced beings, not gods. (Though the distinction might collapse under examination.)
What the Ancients Had That We Don’t
Integration with Practice
Hindu, Buddhist, and Gnostic traditions weren’t just theories but paths of practice. Knowing maya is illusion isn’t enough - you have to realize it through meditation, discipline, transformation.
The simulation hypothesis, by contrast, is usually just intellectual. Knowing we might be simulated doesn’t change how you live. The ancient traditions knew that knowledge without practice is incomplete.
Moral Integration
These traditions connected their metaphysics to ethics. If we’re all Brahman, harming you is harming myself. If everything is empty, attachment causes suffering. If divine sparks are trapped in matter, liberation is a moral imperative.
The simulation hypothesis has no built-in ethics. The Unscarcity framework attempts to provide one: Law 1 (Experience is Sacred) applies regardless of substrate.
The Convergence
Here’s what’s striking: minds across millennia, working with different tools, reached similar maps.
| Tradition | Appearance | Reality | Liberation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hindu | Maya (constructed world) | Brahman (unified consciousness) | Moksha (recognition of unity) |
| Buddhist | Conventional truth | Ultimate truth (sunyata) | Nirvana (cessation of grasping) |
| Platonic | Shadows | Forms | Philosophical ascent |
| Gnostic | Material world | True divine | Gnosis (saving knowledge) |
| Simulation | Rendered reality | Base reality/code | ??? |
The last row has a question mark because the simulation hypothesis doesn’t include a liberation narrative. Unless you count consciousness upload as a form of ascent?
The Practical Upshot
Whether reality is maya, sunyata, shadows, Demiurge’s creation, or simulation, certain practical implications follow:
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Don’t grasp too tightly. What appears solid is less fixed than it seems.
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Consciousness is special. In all these frames, awareness is more fundamental than matter.
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Perspective matters. What you see depends on where you stand. Expanding perspective is valuable.
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The mystery is real. We’re not going to fully understand this from inside it.
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Compassion remains appropriate. Even if suffering is illusory, the beings suffering experience it as real. Treat their experience as sacred.
Related Articles
- The Sacred Question - Where religion and technology converge
- Simulation Science - The physics of the hypothesis
- Karma as Quest System - Moral causation reframed
- Sacred Diversity - How different views coexist
- Consciousness Grants Existence - Why awareness matters
Further Reading
- Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
- David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (1988)
- Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (1958)
- Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (1979)
- Shankara, Vivekachudamani (8th century)
