Children of...

The Simulation Hypothesis

If you want help in stretching your imagination regarding the assimilation hypothesis, I heartily recommend the “Children of” series by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I've just read the latest installment in the series, the 5th book called Children of Strait. No, children of strife. The strait of Hormuz is something entirely different.

But it's easy to lose track when devouring so much information, from so many sources, as we modern people do with the internet, AI, and our mobile phones. Lack of sleep and constant bombardment of data.

Children of Strife explores what can happen to a mind when living through layers upon layers of simulated worlds. The other books in the series of Children of explore terraforming, human expansion through the galaxy, as well as artificial life forms and artificial worlds and world-building.

The main character in the fifth book, Alice, has been exploring an artificial multi-layered universe, presumably built by a completely alien civilization. In another of the books there is a completely alien life-form, a kind of fungus or bacterial colony whose entire existence consists of devouring other life forces, other lives, and recording all its information, all its past, all its experiences. In effect making them live forever inside the bacterial colonies' infinite memory.

Another of the books toys with the idea of finding a megabrain, kilometer-wide box of computronium, simulating worlds. In this case it is capturing the visitors and putting them into a simulated world, which starts with them arriving and landing on the planet. This means they have no way of knowing they are inside a simulation until they finally do and they start trying to go deeper and deeper inside that simulation. That was the previous book, I think.

The fifth book starts with a very fast recapitulation of the four previous books and their scenario. So, if you want inspiration for your own thinking regarding the nature of existence and the possibility of us living in a simulation—somewhere on perhaps an infinitely layered simulated existence—this one provides a very highly interesting variation on the theme.

It includes the theme of communication between highly different types of intelligence, including species of corvid, octopi, mänskligt, fungerande, bakteri, AI, och children of Strife, by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Look it up.