Dark City: Is the reality a simulation?

In his attempt to discover the truth, he falls into the middle of an intense police persecution from which he flees to end up confronting the “strangers”, beings from another dimension, who have supernatural powers to manipulate matter. In his confrontation, Murdock will discover that he also possesses these powers and will use them to confront them and continue searching for the clues to his dark past.

In his effort to remember his origins, distant memories of a seaside place with a bright sun on the beach come to mind. The name Shell Beach comes to mind, and everyone in town knows the place, but inexplicably no one knows how to get there. Murdock begins to question some of the details of his town, such as the fact that the night is so long and no one has seen the sun, and most alarmingly, no one seems to notice.

^{The following video has been published for educational purposes. Copyrights by New Line Cinema, 1998}

The strangest thing happens at midnight when the clocks stop and everyone goes into a state of unconsciousness. The world literally comes to a standstill. Everyone succumbs to this paralyzing effect, except Murdock, who stunnedly watches as the “strangers” come out of nowhere to manipulate the material order of existence, changing people’s identities, injecting new memories and knowledge into their brains that will change their lives forever. “What is this?” wonders Murdock. Is reality just a fiction altered and manipulated by alien beings who manipulate life and existence at their will?

The key will be Dr. Schreber (performed by Kiefer Sutherland), a psychiatrist, collaborator of the “strangers”, who will try to persuade Murdock to let him inject the solution that will give him back his memory. However, Murdock understands that there is more than good intentions in Schreber and presses him to confess the true intentions of the “strangers” and why he does not fall into the massive sleep they induce to manipulate people’s memory.

Schreber tells him that he not only has the ability to evade the power of strangers, but also has the mental power to destroy them. Their origin, Schreiber says, is far from human because they have no individuality, they share a collective memory that is limited and is destroying them, so his intention is to explore human subjectivity to discover the soul of man that would be the only solution to their inevitable extinction as a species. And he points to Murdock as the last piece of the puzzle that could bring them back to life.

Murdock understands that he is more than an experiment and will try to do everything possible to recover his memory, his family and his world. The story ends in this confrontation against the aliens to destroy his species and free humanity from their influence.

The story is very shocking if we take into consideration the deep philosophical questions it raises: Is reality as we see it, or is it just a cloak that hides a complex structure of energies that we are unaware of? Proyas’ fantastic story goes so far as to suggest the idea that we are so naive as a species that we may simply be living in a simulation of which no one is aware, living a story that repeats itself in the same place, and of which we are unaware.

This idea is not new in science fiction, and in fact the merit of the film is to tell it in a convincing way. Other ramifications of this idea would later appear in mainstream films such as the Matrix.

So much for science fiction reaching its limits, but in reality, do we have any basis for believing that we are effectively just a simulated projection of superintelligent entities? Science thinks so, at least conjecturally.

The article by Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, “Are you living in a computer simulation?”, is very illustrative in this regard. His thesis is that we could be living in a reality simulated by powerful computers operated by a super-civilization.

Bostrom’s contribution, which is more conjectural than experimental, suggests that if the calculation computational advance does not have a specific limit for its development, in the future we could have computers so advanced that they would be able to carry out detailed simulations of their ancestors. Simulations made with such resources would make it possible to construct conscious simulated persons who would be sufficiently convincing that they would not doubt the legitimacy of their existence.

Consciousness in that sense would be a replica of its original which would have already been decoded and manipulated for a simulation purpose. This Bostrom calls “substrate independence,” whereby consciousness would be a malleable component that can be embedded in a wide variety of physical substrates. “If a system implements the right computational structures and processes it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness to be implemented in a carbon-based bio-neural network inside a skull: in principle silicon-based processors inside a computer could do the trick.”

To reproduce subjective experiences would be nothing more, then, than to program a computational system so that the universal conscious state is inserted into a physical body. It is from this ocean of subjective universal experiences, which are implanted, that the consciousness awakens and acquires its individuality.

“If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos we are observing is just a small piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated may or may not correspond to the physics of the simulation that this computer generates. Although the world we see is in some ways ‘real,’ it is not located at the fundamental level of reality,” says Bostrom.

Those who operate this simulation would be like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: “posthumans created the world we see; they have superior intelligence; they are omnipotent in the sense that they can interfere with the workings of our world even in ways that violate our physical laws; and they are omniscient in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens”.

Dark City brings these ideas to a film product that makes us question the condition of our reality: what if it were so, would we be able to assume the role of the protagonist of the film, to free ourselves from a sophisticated system of slavery where we are only replicas of a universal conscious state that is being operated by simulation? Our freedom, our desires, our individuality would only be a falsehood that we think is ours when in truth there is another who has created it and inserted it into an empty biological body. Our own life would be meaningless. Why live something that is not in our control. Perhaps the only way to discover it is to create our own simulated universe.