Simulation is the application of time to a model. Though brought to us via Old English/French, the Latin root remains: simulo, to imitate. While prosaic simulations are created for everything from bone regrowth to sales habits, a more philosophical meaning has also existed since long before the modern boom in computer-generated simulations. Though Plato’s allegory of the cave (from The Republic) leaps first to the mind, with the shadows on the wall simulating the higher reality of reason, Parmenides’s seminal On Nature perhaps first inspired the simulation hypothesis. For him, reality is infinite in both time and space: there is no change and our perceived reality is merely a simulation of the underlying “truth.” Thus, simulation and technology can be seen as perpetually adding levels of abstraction, starting with the application of time to our perceived simulation of reality. This perhaps brings us back to the other meaning of simulo: to pretend. If we subscribe to Parmenides’s theory of reality, our perception is itself a simulation gone too far: as we annihilate space and time with our modern inventions, we are merely ridding ourselves of our own fabrication—the simulation of experience.

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