if you notice the glitch they just edit your brain

Oxford, 2003. The Philosophical Quarterly publishes a thirteen-page paper by Nick Bostrom with a title that reads like a dare: Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? He had been circulating it since 2001. The argument fits on a napkin. If a civilization ever gets enough computing power to simulate its ancestors in detail, it can run a great many such simulations, and the simulated people would vastly outnumber the original ones. So at least one of three things has to be true. Almost no civilization survives to that stage. Almost none that do bother to run the simulations. Or you are almost certainly one of the copies.

The paper is careful about which of the three it believes, which is none of them in particular. Elon Musk was less careful. At the Code Conference in June 2016 he put the odds of our being in base reality at one in billions, and from then on the napkin belonged to everyone.

What nobody quotes is the section on cost. Bostrom works out that brains are the expensive part. Simulating all of human history, a hundred billion people over fifty years each, comes to somewhere between 10^33 and 10^36 operations, and a computer the size of a sugar cube, built with designs already on paper in 2003, could do 10^21 a second. The environment is cheap by comparison, as long as you are lazy about it. The inside of the Earth does not need to be simulated. Distant galaxies can be a compressed sketch. Microscopic detail only needs to exist when somebody is looking through a microscope.

Which raises the question of what happens when the laziness shows. Bostrom has an answer, and it takes two sentences. If an error occurs, the director can edit the states of any brains that noticed the anomaly before it spoils the run. Or the director can skip back a few seconds and rerun the scene a different way.

Read that again in the voice of someone who has had déjà vu in a hallway. The most famous argument for the simulation comes with a patch policy. Notice the seam, and the seam gets removed from your head. Or the last few seconds get rolled back and played again, and the only trace is the feeling that you have been here before.

I wrote in a note in 2024 that if you die in QA testing, you die in real life. I was joking. Bostrom was not.

Germany, 1958. The psychiatrist Klaus Conrad publishes Die beginnende Schizophrenie, a study of what the first weeks of psychosis feel like from the inside, and he needs a word for a stage he keeps seeing. Before the voices, before the full delusion, there is a period where the world starts to mean things. The license plate is about you. The way the nurse set down the cup was a message. Conrad called it Apophänie, apophenia, and defined it as the unmotivated seeing of connections, accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness. He was describing a symptom. By 2008 Michael Shermer was using the word for everyone, under the name patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise, and gamblers and people who see faces in electrical outlets got folded in.

So there are two theories of the glitch. In the first, somebody reran the scene. In the second, your brain flagged a pattern that was never there. 11:11 on the lock screen. Their song in the grocery store. A dream you have had twice. Either someone is writing to you, or you are a machine that reads everything as a letter.

I have been on both sides. In 2015 I tweeted about finding patterns in static. In 2019 I tweeted about them again, adding that I was the only one who could see why they mattered, which is Conrad's symptom in a dozen words with a hashtag. Back in 2014 I had called humans the most powerful pattern-matching machines on earth, which is the sober version, the one you say when you are not inside it. There is a track on the album I have been writing this year called everything's a sign, about how the signs showed up whenever I went looking for them. The track after it points out that treating everything as a pattern is itself one. I put them back to back on purpose. On November 1 I opened the notes app and typed one word, apophenia, and closed it.

& take note of coincidence, think they reveal the penmanship

This is where the two theories stop disagreeing. A simulation that wanted to stay hidden would want you to see signs, because a mind that reads noise as mail is a mind that will explain any seam to itself. And a brain built by evolution, which paid off every ancestor who saw a tiger in the grass and punished the ones who waited for proof, was always going to see signs whether or not anyone was sending them. Bostrom's director does not need to edit your brain. Conrad's patient does it for free.

Both versions need one thing from you. In Bostrom's, the rerun only happens if someone noticed. In Conrad's, the whole condition is noticing. The glitch is not the clock or the song or the hallway. The glitch is the part of you that sat up.

If it was a glitch, you would not remember noticing. You do. So either it was not, or you are still mid-scene and the edit has not landed yet.

The painting: Jan Saenredam after Cornelis van Haarlem, Plato's Cave (1604), engraving, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain.

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