It’s an interesting question, I have no idea whether I’d want to be best friends with my double or not. Would we want to share my job? What if my husband wasn’t doubled as well? And then the fact that there are three months of experiences that aren’t shared…
Regarding the Chinese plane. I kind of assumed that the Chinese destroyed it and everyone on it. But will they have to do that over and over again? Or (assuming we are a simulation) is that solution considered a good one?
It’s hard to know how I’d deal with a twin. Maybe I could peacefully co-exist but one more me could constrain my budget, especially if there was another spouse as well because I don’t see our income magically doubling. Lots of issues and then if our triplet was arriving, I don’t know what we’d do. I wouldn’t be able to kill in any case.
So my double would enjoy the same cuisine, the same movies and books.Hold the same political views ( that could be a deal breaker) and basically remind me of all the things I seem to be forgetting these days.
We had six sets of twins in my elementary class of 60 students, and so always thought having a twin would be nice!
I get it, this isn’t just a twin it’s cloned version me! I think we’d have fun.
I must admit, I didn’t find shooting the next planes problematic. I thought it was a practical solution to the situation.
So, I’m not sure I get why humanity failed some test ? Because it’s inhumane to shoot down an airplane ? In the scope of history and humans capacity for brutality, this just doesn’t seem so horrendous.
Having random multiples being created at will by someone or some entity is disconcerting and would definitely complicate and increasingly crowd our already crowded world.
Just finished the book this morning. Agreeing with others – I probably need to re-read it. I know I missed a lot of references/symbols/etc. I liked the beginning of the book but got a bit lost somewhere in the middle. I enjoy time travel stories, but this whole “plane appearing out of nowhere” plot is harder for me to wrap my head around. Are any of the characters “real?” Where have the Junes been for 3 months? I also got a bit bored with Meredith’s diatribe of questions when the group first gathers in the hangar trying to figure out what happened.
On another, though related note, our son joined Air Force ROTC in college. After he was commissioned at graduation his first assignment, which lasted 2 years, was at McGuire AFB. (I also caught the “mistake” of referencing the Hindenburg explosion as happening at Ft. Dix instead of at Lakehurst.)
Assuming my doppelganger has retained my snark, I suspect we wouldn’t get on well at all. But wouldn’t it be interesting if the second me made other life choices (kids/no kids, career paths, life partners) – if it’s truly a simulation, why not parallel universes as well? 
Me neither. Le Tellier spends about three pages (via the character of Wesley) explaining the simulation hypothesis – essentially:
“…imagine superior beings whose intelligence is to ours what ours is to an earthworm’s…Our descendants perhaps. Let’s also imagine that they have computers so powerful that they can re-create a virtual world in which they can bring back to life very precise replicas of their ‘ancestors’ and watch how they evolve in different scenarios. With a computer the size of a very small moon, the history of the human race from the birth of Homo sapiens could be simulated a billion times. This is the digital simulation hypothesis…We believe we are humans when we’re actually just programs” (p. 195)
My thought is, Why does it matter? Even if we are programs, to borrow from Shakespeare’s Shylock, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?”
It would neither enhance nor detract from my life to learn I was living in a simulation. Besides, isn’t a superior being that creates a universe and all its inhabitants just another form of God? It struck me as ironic that fundamentalist Jacob Evans, the man who murdered the Adrianas, no doubt had a literal interpretation of the Bible, and found it perfectly plausible that God created Adam from nothing, and Eve from Adam’s rib.
The epigraph to The Anomaly is:
And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too.
-Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi was a Chinese philosopher whose writings formed the basis of the Dream Argument: Zhuangzi dreamed that he was a butterfly. After he woke up, he wondered how he could determine whether he was Zhuangzi who had just finished dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who had just started dreaming he was Zhuangzi.
Per the Wikipedia article on the Dream Argument, Zhuangzi’s Paradox “provides a springboard for those who question whether our own reality may be an illusion. The ability of the mind to be tricked into believing a mentally generated world is the ‘real world’ means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common, even nightly event.”
So the notion what we are living in a simulation goes back to the 4th century BC, probably even earlier.
I’m with you, @Mary13, what does it matter, simulation or not.
I highlighted this section when Victor Meisel is on a talk show with popular podcaster philomedius .……(I read about Philodemus of Gadara was a Greek Epicurean philosopher and poet. He studied under Zeno of Sidon in Athens, before moving to Rome)……(very heavy philosophy, astounding mind)
“ “I’d prefer not to give my opinion about this simulation idea,” Philomedius says. “But I don’t think it changes anything. I’m a materialist: there’s no difference between thinking and believing we think, and therefore between existing and believing we exist.”
“But surely, Philomedius,” the presenter says, “really existing isn’t exactly the same as being virtual.”
“Forgive me, but it is, it’s the same: I think, therefore, even if I’m simply a thinking program, I am. I feel love and pain in the same way, and I’ll die just as surely, thank you. And the things I do have the same consequences, whether my world is virtual or real.”
“ “Victor Miesel, what would you say will happen now?” “Nothing.” “Excuse me?” “Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational
.” “What Victor Miesel is saying is rather like what you, Philomedius, mentioned in your article in this morning’s Le Figaro. You described it as our need to reduce ‘cognitive dissonance’?”
“Yes. We’re prepared to warp reality if the stake is not losing altogether. We want answers for even our tiniest anxieties and a way of conceiving the world without reexamining
our values, our emotions, and our actions.
Take climate change. We never listen to the scientists. We spew out virtual carbon unchecked from fossil fuels that may or may not be virtual, heating up our atmosphere, that may or may not be virtual. And our species, which again may or may not be virtual, will be wiped out. Nothing’s changed.
The rich fly in the face of common sense and reckon they can save themselves, and themselves alone, and everyone else is reduced to living in hope.”
“Would you agree with Philomedius, Victor Miesel?” “Of course I do. Do you remember Pandora and her box?”
The worldview of Victor Meisel and Philomedius is disheartening; their perspective on humanity dark. But it’s hard to disagree. We want a way of conceiving the world without reexamining our values, our emotions, and our actions applies well to current events in the U.S.
I think their conversation on the talk show can be summed up in the quote from Victor March’s The Anomaly, which is the epigraph to Chapter One, As Black as the Sky:
“A true pessimist knows that it is already too late to be one.”
I just finished reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. (CC Book Club previously read and discussed her Station Eleven.)
I’m actually not as much off on a tangent as the above statement seems (though maybe a little). Anyway, I had no idea when I started Sea of Tranquility that it also explores the idea that we’re nothing more than a simulation. In fact, one chapter is even titled Anomaly.
Mary’s quote reminds me of this from Sea of Tranquility: “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”
I just found it odd that I accidentally moved from one book with what I thought is an unusual premise straight into another.
Sea of Tranquility has time travel and a pandemic thrown in also. And Mandel writes beautifully. However, I ended totally confused. Le Tellier’s The Anomaly was much easier to understand which doesn’t make sense as I already knew about simulation hypothesis by the time it came up in Sea of Tranquility.
Wow, that’s a rather amazing overlap of themes between two books that I would never have linked!
(Is Sea of Tranquility worth reading? I felt rather ho-hum about The Glass Hotel.)
I agree with all of you that it doesn’t matter at all to me whether I’m a piece of code or a living being fashioned out of the clay by someone else or if I’m part of life that started spontaneously when our world was made. In the end, we are all part of the same tapestry.
No knowledge will change what I am now, unless it rips apart this life as I know it. We still go on living or existing, until we don’t.
It may rankle a little to know that as a simulation, we don’t exist outside our simulated world so our impact on a real world is zero.
@ignatius the similarity between the two books is uncanny. I’ve hesitated about reading any of Mandel’s books. Maybe I should add one of her books to my reading wish list for the year.
I found one of Victor June’s beliefs–while fascinating–to be contrary to the lived (or simulated, lol) experiences of the characters. It’s the concept of Elpis–hope–as an evil.
“That evil was Elpis, the expectation of good–hope. It’s the most destructive of all evils. It is hope that stops us being proactive and hope that prolongs people’s suffering because, as they always say and in spite of the evidence, ‘it will come right in the end.’ What is not meant to be cannot be.”
Yet that’s not the case with André and Lucie (the March pair splits, the June stays together), nor is it the case with Victor himself (March commits suicide, June lives on). Who can say what is meant to be?
Philomedius also mentions Nietzsche, and although, he doesn’t use this quote in that interview, it’s worth noting that Nietzsche said, “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of men.”
When I first read Victor’s description of Elpis / Hope as the evil that remained in Pandora’s box, I was confused. I found someone on the internet asking exactly the same question I had:
One thing has always confused me about the story of Pandora. When she opened her box (or jar, whatever), all sorts of evil things escaped outside the box, and this is why we have evil in the world now. Then, she closed the box before hope could escape, so that hope remained within the box.
Does this mean that the world doesn’t have hope, though (since it’s still stuck in the box)? I thought that the “moral” of the story, so to speak, was that even though there’s all this evil out in the world, there’s still hope, so not all is lost. But that doesn’t make sense if hope is still stuck inside the box.
The various (and often contradictory) answers from the online world of arm chair philosophers could fill a giant tome, but I liked this one the best (probably because I’m Team Hope):
The prevalent interpretation of the myth as told in Hesiod’s Works and Days is optimistic: all those evils flew out of the jar (not a box) to plague humanity forever more — but at least we have hope! Without hope, life would be unbearable. A number of heavy hitters in the field of Classics (M.L. West, for one) endorse this reading.
I’ve always thought hope is a good thing. It helps me get through tough times, feeling that things will and do improve.
We only have whatever life or part of the simulation we have. Fretting over it won’t improve things so I will continue living my best life now because I’m unaware of any way to do it over and improve it.
The March / June identities are based on when they land. The first plane lands in March, and the second lands in June. Only one plane ever takes off (in March), but two return (three months apart).
One question under debate is which is the original plane and which is the copy? That is, was the copy created immediately, then did it zoom out of the storm and land, while the original folks were stuck in a sort of limbo (wormhole) for three months? Or did the originals land and then it took three months for the cosmic copy machine to make exact replicas of everyone on board?
Whatever the answer, three months seems to be consistent. That was the time frame for the Chinese plane as well. Xi Jinping says, “They’re in the same sh*t that we were in last April with the Beijing-Shenzhen flight from January” (p. 241).
Of course, none of that explains why a third flight emerged at the end. There ought to be a biometric class action suit against those programmers. 
Ok, so the Marches lived three months more than the Junes—— right ?
Right. Which allowed enough time for substantial changes to occur in the lives of the March passengers. Joanna got pregnant, Lucie left André, Victor committed suicide, David Markle went from flying the plane to being at death’s door from cancer, etc.
In that respect, the three months is a necessary plot device. If the second plane had landed immediately after the first, the storylines would have been less complex.
Little tangent ——— Thanks @mary13, even though the planes may have taken off on the same day, which they didn’t, I thought time warps as you travel gazillion miles per hour, remember the example of humans, passing normal time on earth, while the people in a space craft traveling Uber fast would experience slower time, so the returning space traveler wouldn’t have aged but the earthlings would be old ?
Ok, moving on……
Regarding Pandora’s box and hope being a. Bad thing? I just didn’t get that, as others are mentioning, too.
From the book
“ “And, Philomedius, would you say that this is what’s happening now, that each of us finds our own way of accommodating the reality we’re being offered, is that it?” “Yes. Absolutely. I’d like to remind you of something Nietzsche said: ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’ Right now, the whole planet has been confronted with a new reality, and it’s challenging all our illusions. We’re being sent a sign, that’s beyond doubt. Sadly, thinking takes time. The irony is that the very fact of being virtual may give us even more of a duty toward our fellow human beings and our planet.”
“ And most significantly, it’s a collective duty.” “Why’s that?” “Because—and a mathematician has already made this point—this test hasn’t been set for us as individuals. This simulation is thinking on the level of an ocean, it couldn’t care less about what each water molecule does. The simulation is waiting for a reaction from the entire human race. There won’t be a supreme savior. We need to save ourselves.”
So, did each of Herve’s characters, on an individual level save themselves, find meaning, or happiness in some way?
Is the danger of “ hope” , ie Pandora’s “hope”, that people hope a higher power, a government agency, the second coming, will save the planet?
Using climate change as his example, Herve has a right to be mad that the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement, French Accord. Is this a subtext about end of the world???
“ The Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015 by 196 parties that pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, a result of 25 years of difficult negotiations. Although the U.S. originally signed on to the agreement, the Trump administration pulled out in 2017 .