I Ching and Simulation Theory

In Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, there is a book within the book that describes an alternate history within an alternate history. That book is called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. But if that alternate history is real, then the upward implication from book within a book to the reader is that we ourselves live in a fictional construct — one which might betray its fictionality through consulting the I-Ching for a window on the next level up. We must awaken from this dream through alchemy of the I Ching. 

Philip K. Dick used his consultations with the I Ching to determine the paths of characters within his simulated reality of the alternative history. The novel not only features the I-Ching, Dick claims that it was actually in part written by the I-Ching. He says he used the book of changes as a creative guide, ceding decision making about many aspects of the narrative to the text of the hexagrams.

According to Philip K. Dick, the I Ching gives advice beyond the particular, advice that transcends the immediate situation. The answers have an universal quality. For instance: “The mighty are humbled and the humbled are raised.” If you use the I Ching long enough and continually enough, it will begin to change and shape you as a person. It will make you into a Taoist, whether or not you have ever heard the word, whether or not you want to be.

In the late 17th century, mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz wanted to devise a simpler mathematical system to replace the decimal system. Leibniz found his answer in the pages of the I Ching. The either or probabilities of the I Ching were the equivalent of using a 1 and a 0 to describe anything. The I Ching also purported to help the user demystify the complexities of the universe and make the information contained within usable to the practitioner.

Leibniz was a philosopher and mathematician in search of a model. In the late 1600s Leibniz decided there was a need for a new, purer arithmetic than our common decimal system. Leibniz discovered the model for this new arithmetic in the five-millennia-old book that is at the heart of Chinese philosophy: the I-Ching, or Book of Changes. Liebniz's insight was that even the most complex aspect of reality could potentially be represented in the binary form as 1s and 0s.

The parallels between the 1 and 0 and Yin and Yang are readily apparent. They are polar opposites, light and dark, on and off, positive and negative. The ancient purveyors of the I Ching believed the hexagrams described all of reality, while modern binary code is used to describe all of reality in the virtual world of computers. 

If the ancient Chinese philosophers were correct and the hexagrams literally contain within them the entire universe and binary code is born from those hexagrams, does that mean that the hexagrams represent a kind code from which the universe is literally built?

The I-Ching represents the binary poles of reality as Yin and Yang. Like 1 and 0, these are abstract concepts that can represent the poles of any binary set, but in the text of the I-Ching are often discussed as female and male. They are notated with a broken line for Yin, and an unbroken line for Yang. These lines are combined in sets of three to produce the eight basic trigrams, which are in turn combined to give the 64 hexagrams, which are at the heart of the I-Ching's system of divination. 

In the philosophy of the I-Ching, reality is not entirely real. It is something more like a dream or an illusion. This dream of reality arises from the binaries of Yin and Yang, as they play out their infinite combinations. It's not surprising then, from the I-Clhing's perspective, that anything in the dream of reality can be represented as a model of its binary constituents, in a string of 1s and 0s, processed by a computer.

In an interview Dick gave while at the high profile Metz science fiction conference in France in 1977, he said that like David Hume’s description of the “intuitive type of person,” he lived “in terms of possibilities rather than in terms of actualities.” However, at that same conference, he delivered a talk titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” that settles on one particular theory—that the universe is a highly-advanced computer simulation.

Finally, Dick makes his point about simulation theory, and makes it very clearly: “we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” These alterations feel just like déjà vu, says Dick, a sensation that proves that "a variable has been changed" (by whom—note the passive voice—he does not say) and “an alternative world branched off.”

So when scientific thinkers – including many of our favorite science fiction writers – ask whether computers can create "virtual realities" or "artificial intelligence", they are missing the point. Of course we can create ever deeper and more complex layers of the dream of reality to get lost in. The real question is, can we wake up from the dream we're in already?

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