Moby Dick and the Simulation of Reality

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is, for me, the great American novel, and maybe the greatest novel of all time, as I often wrote in college and in my blogs over the years.

It explained for me the nature of God and/or reality.

Melville told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne that he (Melville) had written a “wicked” book:

http://www.eclectica.org/v6n1/sloan.html

Over the years I came to understand Melville’s whale as a representation of the Gnostic god, the demi-urgos, whether he meant it that way or not I didn’t know, and still don’t.

But, like Plato’s allegory of the cave, Melville hit upon, intuitively, the real Reality, one that is now being conjectured as a (sometimes computer) simulation controlled by a mad super being, or species, one for which we can use the sobriquet God.

Moby Dick is the incarnation of evil, juxtaposed as white in an ironic statement of how God is depicted, errantly by Christians as a good, benevolent God.

Melville makes clear that tracking God (or the Whale) – praying to it, seeking its reality, worshipping it – will bring disaster upon one.

And in the simulated reality, which we are part of or the main players, the gist of the simulation is not utopian or good, overall. We, humanity, are grist for pain and suffering as noted by Kohelet [Qohelet, Qoheleth] in The Bible book Ecclesiastes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastes

And while there are palpable human glories, the adage/maxim “No good deed goes unpunished” is an inherent truth, Beethoven’s deafness a prime example.

The simulated reality, thought by many as an algorithmic game, may be, as philosophers of all stripes have contended with for millennia, a struggle of good versus evil.

Melville saw the reality as controlled by an evil nature, just as the Gnostics had it and Ecclesiastes suggests.

We humans are fodder for a ubiquitous evil it seems, one from which there is no escape key.

RR