I saw a biker on the road in front of my house pedaling backwards today. I mused, for the millionth time, that we are living in a simulation. I paid hyper close attention to the bikers that passed after that, and of course, in good simulation architecture practice, the bikes were all perfectly unique, perfectly functioning, perfectly normal. They met my priors exactly, and I was foiled by the intelligent beings that control the simulation into a conviction that this was just a fluke, just a momentary quirk in the reasonable and predictable world we live in.

We have arms and legs and various appendages that obey our control (at least, we have the impression they do), so this simulation is a pretty darn good one. It’s a relief to have the amount of freedom we do and so much motility when it could easily have been otherwise. But then again, it’s necessary that we be contented with the state of our bodies and our cognition and our control over the world. I’m about a standard deviation below the intelligence level I’d rather be at, and even that is almost unbearable for me to cope with– I can’t imagine being a simulated entity that pines for an escape from the body I was given by evolution. It sounds really horrible.

But there was one man that did experience this, or at least very well may have experienced it. He was a god, some higher being whose state of consciousness we can’t even begin to imagine, and he plunked down on Earth for some God-forsaken reason into one of our bodies. Luckily for him it seems like he thought ahead and decided to give himself some amnesia from the fact that he had been, you know, God, but at some point he must have caught onto this. I wonder if it could have been what I described earlier that first clued him in– this overwhelming disatisfaction with the powerlessness that being a brain in a head that interfaces with reality through relatively crude sensory organs and weak, flimsy, breakable appendages. He could do some neat things, even in spite of the handicaps humans have compared to his previous form, and I wonder what that must have felt like. That’s something we can’t understand, as people who aren’t God– being able to bend reality simply because we will it. It must have felt so real, so amazing. Like finding a pocket of air to breathe under some rock when your scuba tank ran out and you’re about to drown far beneath the surface of the water.

Or maybe this isn’t right? Tradition tells us we are made in God’s image. Assuming this is correct, what does this mean about Jesus the man? About us? If there is some intrinsically human-like quality in higher entities, maybe the experiences Jesus had are closer to our own than one would think. Maybe the fact that we’re made in God’s image is a clue that we are more at home in our simulation-housing bodies, that is, in our human forms, than any other possible permutation of physical existence. And by “at home” I don’t mean in a simply existential sense (what makes us happiest) but I mean in the sense of, out of all of the ways things very well could be, the way it is now is optimal in some sense.