Van life proponent and pseudonymic woodsman Foresty Forest comments
on some well-known people’s conjectures about the nature of reality, and his
own motivation for wandering the mountains and valleys of the more obscure
parts of Canada:
“Elon Musk, who thinks that reality is all just a simulation ...
what kind of processing power would you need to model all these rocks, texture-map
them ... what kind of computer would you need for that? That’s the question.
I started losing interest in gaming, and getting into real life
adventures.”
Trudging Up Mountainsides
Mr. Forest likes to make the occasional trenchant
observation as he trudges up mountainsides on the near end of a selfie-stick
for his weekly YouTube videos. This particular point is a good one: that
reality defies satisfactory explanation by the clever-clever crowd. You can be
very rich, very important and very high-IQ, and still say things that are
observably silly from the top of your ivory tower, especially when the cameras
and microphones are on you 24/7. I’m not sure I would want even a fraction
of the attention normally given to Elon Musk’s most trivial and ill-thought-out musings.
On the other hand, when you have gone out and lived in the
natural world, as Foresty Forest has — slept in the woods or in any
half-burnt-down cabin he could find, trudged 26 km a day through the bush,
kayaked in bodies of water where the Coast Guard never patrols, drone-mapped
the Yukon, cut down dead trees in a snowstorm to stay alive in sub-zero weather,
or stared down animals competing with you for dinner — then all the high-falootin’
intellectual explanations for the nature of things may start sounding just a
little bit detached and superfluous.
Now, that doesn’t mean the reason Mr. Forest has
rejected the simulation model of reality is because he is coming from a more biblical worldview —
I have no idea what he believes about God and his creation — but keeping
your eyes on nature rather than a flatscreen and your hands in the earth rather
than banging away on a keyboard are practices that tend to ground you just a
little bit. You learn to say, “Hey, wait, that sort of thing has never been
observed in nature” and “Well, sure, that’s a fun idea, but what are the real-life
odds of THAT happening?” More importantly, you learn to say, “That’s just plain
goofy” to dumb speculations, even when they fall from the lips of well-respected
corporate giants.
I find it a healthy reminder that the average man on
the street sleeping in his van is not by reason of his averageness or his
unusual life choices to be thought stupid. Wisdom and intelligence are two very
different things.
Theorizing and Living
The world of science is full of fascinating-but-entirely-unsubstantiated
theories, especially today, and I find they tend to make the biggest
impression on young men with very little actual life experience; young women
are generally more pragmatic. But when your daily routine is chock full of
video games and the majority of your time spent in high-tech basements, all
kinds of things sound extremely cool, and the notion that reality
is an alien computer simulation can be seriously entertained
notwithstanding its majestic idiocy. In fact, scientists like astrophysicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson, who gives the possibility “better than 50-50 odds”, and philosophers
like University of Oxford professor Nick Bostrom,
who authored a 2003 paper on the subject, are willing to go on record with some
measure of support for Elon Musk’s Matrix-inspired
fantasies. Maybe they never grew up either.
How is it that the rich and powerful find it easier to take
seriously the idea that aliens with advanced technologies are running computer
simulations on us than to accept the claims of the word of God about the world
around us? Sure, the Bible doesn’t answer every idle question we may have
about the nature of our universe, but what it does say about the human condition is
testable in the laboratory of our own experience, and invariably proven
correct.
Uh-Oh, That Looks Familiar ...
Halfway through the story of Eden, we find ourselves saying “Uh
oh” even if we haven’t yet read the ending. That’s because we know ourselves,
at least to some extent. We know who we are, and we know that when you say to
us, “Don’t
cross this particular line here,” the first thing most of us are going to
do is tiptoe right up to that line and do a little shoe-shuffling to see just how
close we can get. Every child ever raised does it the moment his parents start giving him ultimatums.
Or when God says to Cain, “If you do not do well, sin
is crouching at the door,” why is it we have a sneaking suspicion which way
Cain is going to go? Is it not because we ourselves regularly battle temptation
with regrettably inconsistent success?
However refined and 21st-century you and I may pretend
to be, when Simeon
and Levi avenge Dinah’s rape by murdering not just her rapist but his
entire town, is there not some little part of us that says, “Hey, I can
understand how they felt”? There is in me. There is a sense of what constitutes
basic, appropriate human behavior deep down inside me that can become outraged
over such things. It doesn’t mean I will respond like they did, but it
does mean I understand both why the brothers were angry and why their
anger needed to be restrained.
The Human Condition
What the Bible presents to us is the same human condition we
all know and battle with daily: the tension between having what I want
right now and gratifying my impulses later, when there will be an even bigger
payoff; or else not gratifying them at all, ever, because something far more
important than my own will is at stake. We relate to the word of God because,
if we are honest, it describes us perfectly.
When you live in a world of stark good and evil, choices
and consequences, you cannot imagine any other, just as the fundamental earthy
reality of the Canadian backwoods, the sweat of one’s brow and the heat of the
campfire easily dispel the airy pontifications of tech billionaires.
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