The reason so many gnostics like The Matrix because it brings the idea of Archons to life. One might even say they manage and control the material reality. The powers created angels.Ĭrucially, Yaldabaoth had a spark of his mother’s divine power within him, so he, along with his fellow Archons was able to use this power to shape and organize the material world. He said, “I am God and there is no other god beside me,” since he did not know from where his own strength had come.įurthermore, Yaldabaoth went on to create other rulers and authorities, who were “wicked in their mindlessness” in the same way he was. is wicked in the mindlessness within him. In The Secret Book of John he is even described as downright wicked: Yet he was the first ruler of the material world we live in. This deformed child of hers, called Yaldabaoth, was imperfect. Ashamed, she cast it off, outside of the spiritual world of the Aeons into a lower realm. These Aeons are essentially aspects of The One.Īs the story goes, the lowest emanation, Sophia (Wisdom) had a thought independently of her male partner and this thought became deformed. If you are familiar with Qabalah the emanational metaphysics are similar.Įventually, The One emanated into a number of contrapoised male-female dyads called Aeons. It is the source of all being but it can only be approached via negativa.Īccording to the gnostic myth, The One reflected upon itself and from this thought emanations came into existence. The key aspect of The One is that it is beyond all human categorization, beyond all limitation, beyond all division, beyond all contingency, beyond all necessity, beyond space, beyond time, beyond finitude, beyond infinitude. They are lower gods and, in fact, there is a higher God, a God above gods, a transcendent Monad or unity that the Gnostics called by names such as The One, The Deep, The Invisible Virgin Spirit, The Father, etc. Similarly, in gnostic metaphysics, the material world is a pale imitation of the spiritual world.Īnd importantly for the purposes of this post, the gods and goddesses of this world, the rulers and authorities of this plane, are not the true God. Gnostics were heavily inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the perceived reality of everyday matter is but a shadow of the true world, the spiritual world of Forms. Similarly, one of the foundational ideas in gnostic metaphysics is that our world is not what it seems. The “real” world as we perceive it is in fact a pale, simulated shadow of the true world. In The Matrix, the “material” reality of everyday experience is actually a computer simulation controlled or managed by a system of artificial intelligences. The key idea involves questioning our everyday reality and realizing that all is not what it seems. They either can't simulate at all, or have computational powers that far exceed the needed amount.The Matrix has long been considered a film with overt gnostic elements. Moreover, one can argue that due to exponential grow, it's extremely unlikely that the simulators are in the region of progress where they already can simulate an artificial reality but can't simulate it with finer detail. However, Nick Bostrom argues that it is extremely likely that a civilization will have far surpassing computational powers than the ones needed to simulate an ancient civilization in great detail. These "glitches" could be identified by scientists scrutinizing nature using unusual methods of observation.
Alternatively, the Simulators may not have a full understanding of the Laws of Nature which would mean over time the simulated environment would drift away from its stable state. John Barrow has suggested that if we are living in a computer simulation we may observe "glitches" in the our programmed environment due to the level of detail being compromised to save computing power. It shows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. The modern Simulation Argument makes the case that since a civilization will be able to simulate many more ancient civilizations than there were ancient civilizations, it is more likely that we are a been simulated than not. The important distinction between these and modern Simulation Arguments has been the addition of proposed methods of engineering Simulated Reality through the use of computers. The roots of this argument can be found throughout the history of philosophy in such works as Plato's " Allegory of the Cave " and Descartes " evil demon ". The Simulation Hypothesis proposes that conscious beings could be immersed within an artificial Universe embedded within a higher order of reality.