Deep dive · For Pillar I

The Simularity.

A computing metaphor for older Jewish teachings about creation, providence, prayer, and human dependence on G‑d.

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DEEP DIVEOpening

The Garden pillar makes the basic claim: reality is continuously sustained by G‑d. This page offers a way to picture that claim for engineers and people who think in systems.

The proposal is straightforward: modern computing gives us a useful set of metaphors for older Jewish teachings. The language of rendering, hypervisors, and RPC is not the teaching itself. It is an analogy, and it should be allowed to illuminate without being mistaken for literal metaphysics.

On this page

i.Simulation, revisitedWhy the external version fails→ ii.HypervisorsOne host · many lives→ iii.Prayer as RPCThe interface→ iv.Why nowThe vocabulary arrived on time→

The popular form of simulation theory — Bostrom’s version, the “we’re definitely in a sim” thread — postulates an external civilization with more advanced hardware running this universe as one of many instances. There are two problems with that picture.

First, it just moves the question up one floor. If our universe is hosted on theirs, who hosts theirs? You either get an infinite regress or you eventually have to admit that somewhere there is something the universe is hosted on, not by. The Torah's answer is: that something is what we mean by G‑d.

Second, the external version smuggles in an unnecessarily small G‑d. A civilization on more powerful silicon is still a finite system with limited compute. The Torah claim is bigger: the host is not made of anything more fundamental. Absolute Intelligence is the substrate. Compute is a property of the substrate, not the other way around.

The simulation hypothesis is half right. The wrong half is "external."
Chapter II

One host. Many virtual machines.

A human life as a VM running on the host. The metaphor goes further than it should be allowed to go, and it's the right one.

A hypervisor runs many virtual machines on one physical host. Each VM has its own memory, its own filesystem, its own network identity. From inside, each VM is convinced it is autonomous. It addresses the network, manages its processes, treats other VMs as remote entities. None of that is strictly true. Every cycle it burns is the host’s — and the host sees every one, in real time, at full fidelity.

As an analogy, this gives engineers a way to picture dependence without erasing responsibility. A person has a real will and still receives existence, capacity, and circumstance from G‑d at every moment. The VM image is useful precisely where it points back to that older claim. It fails if it turns a person into software or G‑d into a machine.

  • Free will — our choices are real even though the power to choose is continuously sustained.
  • Death — bodily life ends without reducing the soul to vanished data.
  • Hashgacha pratit — events that look independent may still be arranged by one Providence.
  • Coincidence — the metaphor invites us to look twice before calling an encounter meaningless.

A VM calling out to its host is a normal pattern in distributed systems. It is called an RPC — a remote procedure call. The VM does not have direct access to the host's memory, but it can address the host through a defined interface, ask for things, and receive responses.

Prayer can be pictured as an RPC to the host: a created being addressing the One who sustains creation and asking for a different outcome. The analogy is intentionally limited. Prayer is also relationship, praise, gratitude, confession, and self-change. The technical picture helps with one question only: how asking G‑d to act can belong inside nature rather than violate it.

You are not yelling into the sky. You are addressing a system that is on, and listening, by design.

This description works now for a simple reason: the vocabulary it needs did not exist until this generation. Aristotle could not have written this page. Maimonides could have written most of it without the names. The Vilna Gaon could have understood it from inside the tradition without any of the names. What is different in the present moment is that the entire generation has, accidentally, learned the vocabulary the description requires.

Everyone with a smartphone understands "the cloud." Everyone who has used ChatGPT has interacted with continuous generation. Everyone who works in tech knows VMs, hypervisors, RPCs, latent space, training data, alignment. None of that vocabulary was needed to make the Torah true — but this is the first generation that, by accident, speaks the dialect to receive it.

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