Was the Universe Hacked?

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash. Are we living in a simulation? Was the good world a superintelligence created hacked? And does this idea provide any insight into the nature of good and evil?

I once worked with a young, brilliant computer programmer. He looked at the IBM System 34 computer that contained several years of his programming genius and commented, “There’s a cathedral in there.”

I understood what he meant although I could not write a line of code even if all the riches of the world were promised. It was a thing of beauty. It functioned as it was intended. It was an expression of his vision, creativity, passion and commitment.

I suspect most coders today and most people who create resonate with that sentiment. They may not liken it to a cathedral because of its religious overtones, but they can sense what he meant by it. Imagine then, their dismay, when they find their beautiful work destroyed by a hacker.

Hacking has several definitions. But several ideas are widely understood in our technological age. It means breaking and entering where you don’t belong. Not just for the fun of doing something you have no right to do, but to mess with whatever you are hacking. It means corrupting something that isn’t yours. It means injecting into someone else’s property, group or system an operation or operations that pervert what was intended. It is intentional destruction of the functionality of an operation. It can mean assuming control and issuing commands to suit the hackers purposes contrary to the owner or designer.

There are many different ways that humans today and from the beginning of thinking understood good and evil as is displayed in our universe and in human behavior. Some separate natural evil from moral evil with the difference being the thoughtful intent of the evil doer. Moral evil is dependent on thoughtful intent. I’m not sure the two aren’t more closely connected than that.

Some see good and evil as essentially balanced, two necessary elements of a complete whole as in yin and yang. Some, as in Buddhism, find good and evil to be illusions and that evil in humans can be overcome by conquering desire.

Reading articles in Medium and other contemporary reflections, one can see a great divergence of views of the world we live in, both the natural world and the world of human presence and interactions. Some see great beauty, jaw-dropping magnificence, worship-worthy evidence of a benevolent creator. Some see the horror and…