TADC
I knew nothing about Jax from The Amazing Digitial Circus other than a pop culture reference. Not until today did I spend time going through the animated series, and found it pretty good, featuring several interesting if not questionable characters. I am not going to bother you with the details, not to mention spoilers. If you have time though, I would recommend you giving it a shot.
Throughout my engagement in the animated web series, I have been pondering the reason of my feelings, or let’s say, the lack of such, towards the situation where Pomni realizes she’s stuck in a simulated world and cannot escape. That moment, I did feel no rage, and to Jax’s claim that it’s all fake thus nothing matters I kinda wanted to nod, which presumably is contrary to popular discourse. Not that I agree to the “jerk” side of him, nor am I a negative nihilist. So dear reader, I hope you would find my opinions a little bit interesting.
Differentiating Reality From Simulation
Aside from TADC, many pop cultures involve the idea of simulated worlds, some very biased examples include vivid/stasis (v/s), Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC), The Truman Show (TTS), Inception, and the thought experiment of brain in a vet (BIAV). There are common aspects, like the involvement of highly sophisticated computing technology and artificial intelligence, but that’s beyond the point. Let’s focus on where these media differ, and I would put them into two buckets:
- ones where the protagonists are born in the simulation (DDLC, BIAV, TTS), and
- where they come into the simulation from “the real world” (TADC, v/s, Inception).
*the BIAV case is debatable but here I put it in 1
According to these media representations, characters from both buckets share the emotion of existential crisis when they realize the simulation situation. Monika from DDLC does not hesitate to manipulate data files of her friends because nothing is real except her ego. Jax from TADC doesn’t care about anything but fun, even at the expense of making his friends’ life miserable, which is a classic negative nihilistic worldview. Saturday from vivid/stasis literally had a mental breakdown in the underground facility, and it took her weeks if not months to recover from the shock.
By instinct, characters originating from virtual reality are unable to go back, but that’s merely a constraint by the plot. Take brain in a vet as example, it’s totally plausible that the brain formerly has a human owner. But I would argue it’s morally incorrect to bring these characters to life.
Their Reality
Let me review for you: there’s a being, perfectly conscious, rational, with agency, just as good as a human, except their entirity of experience, the people they talked to, their family they grew up in, the food they ate, are all made up. Our world to them is as foreign as their world to ours. Doesn’t that make bringing them to reality as evil as sending them to a simulation? By bringing them to the “real” world they are forced to give up their entire life. What kind of real is that?
And I want to push it further. If the only difference is the subjective experience, and the past experience is irrelevant, then there’s no difference in realities regardless of it’s simulated or not. To the present me, living in a simulation is as good as in the world that runs it, because that’s all I could care about.
I can see why this can be a hard pill to swallow. I understand why Truman chose to quit the show: he wants control over who to love, and his love is a real person. That does not invalidate my point, because that is a category error. In the contrary, in Truman I see the courage to put down the past and seek fully forward, the faith in that things are dynamic and there’s no point being obsessed with one’s own comfort zone, the spirit to experiment with who one can possibly be and live the current live to the fullest.
Our Reality
It’s really interesting that we are statistically almost impossible to live in a real universe rather than a simulated one, if some specific presumptions which I am not going to bother you about are true, of course. Some people doubt this proposition because the presumptions are questionable. I honestly do not know, meanwhile finding the questioning itself irrelevant. After all, it’s not a hot take that this world contains our entire experience. Even if that’s not the case, or some day we find the truth and there’s more to live, I really wouldn’t care. I mean, still I would get excited, but the motivation would be the secrets we could unravel, rather than the feeling of being inferior thus the ego to impress the outside world and prove my existence.
So back to the start, I guess that explains why I felt no rage towards Pomni’s situation. If I were Pomni, certainly there was bad guys putting me into the circus (do not take my words because I haven’t watched the last act yet), but that is more confusion than anger. Guess I am a jester now, and let me find a way out. Worst-case scenario, I make friends with the other humans, finding out what it means to be an anime jester and life goes on.