Bion of Borysthenes.

Bion of Borysthenes. I was unaware of the existence of this philosopher; I didn't even remember ever hearing or reading about him. And now that I am reading Montaigne's Essays, I felt like searching for something related to him. And why Montaigne? Because this author mentions the philosopher Bion on a few occasions. A particularity of Montaigne is that in his work he mentions many characters and events; there, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Pyrrhonists, and humanists coexist—that is, a plurality of voices even though he was, or at least is recognized as, a skeptic. That mix is no coincidence, but a mosaic that reinforces his skepticism: if so many philosophies contradict each other, none can claim absolute truth.

Biography. Who was Bion of Borysthenes?

Entry with the biography in J. Ferrater Mora's Dictionary of Philosophy.
BION OF BORYSTHENES (fl. 230 BC), a student in Athens of the Academic Crates (whose doctrines he harshly criticized), of the Cyrenaic Theodorus, and of the Peripatetic Theophrastus, adhered to Cynicism, which he popularized, especially through the introduction of the literary form known as the diatribe. According to Diogenes Laërtius (IV, 53), Bion of Borysthenes—who had been the slave of a rhetoric master—was distinguished by his literary skill and especially by his brilliant parodies. Now, Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one. Consequently, Bion—like his imitator, Teles, and like Menippus of Gadara—almost completely abandoned the old Cynic idea of effort and the hardening of the wise man to give Cynic life that rhetorical, skeptical, and realistic tone that prevailed during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Horace followed and imitated some of the literary forms developed by Bion.
J. P. Rossignol, Fragmenta Bionis Borysthenitae philosophi, Lutetiae, 1830 and F. W. A. Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, II, 423 et seq. — On Bion: J. M. Hoogvliet, De vita, doctrina et scriptis Bionis, 1821. — Art. by H. von Arnim on Bion (Bion, 10) in Pauly-Wissowa.

The bronze head of a philosopher was recovered in 1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck. It was part of a life-size statue of the man. Date of creation: between the 3rd century BC and 1st century BC. It is not certain that it represents the figure of the philosopher Bion, although it is the main hypothesis most cited by art historiography. The sculpture—formally known in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens as the Philosopher of Antikythera (3rd century BC)—does not retain any inscription confirming who it is. Therefore, the attribution to Bion of Borysthenes is a probable attribution, but not a definitive one.

•    The Bion of Borysthenes hypothesis: It is the most accepted identification by various archaeologists due to the features of the portrait: an expressive face of maturity, a thick combed beard, and unkempt hair that fit the stylistic profile of Cynic philosophers (the movement to which Bion belonged).
•    Other possible attributions: Over the decades, other specialists have proposed that the portrait could represent the Cynic Antisthenes or contemporary orators/philosophers of the Hellenistic period.

Links.
•    https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Antikythera_philosopher.JPG
•    The Bronze Head of Antikythera – A Late Classical or Very Early Hellenistic Masterpiece? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349657262_The_Bronze_Head_of_Antikythera_-_A_Late_Classical_or_Very_Early_Hellenistic_Masterpiece
•    http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/4/eh430.jsp?obj_id=5564

Bion in Montaigne's Text. He mentions Bion. "And the philosopher Bion, speaking of that king who pulled out his hair in grief, was he not witty when he said: 'Does this man think that baldness relieves grief?' Who has not seen people chew and swallow playing cards, or gorge themselves on a bag of dice, to have something on which to avenge the loss of money?" Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter IV. How the soul discharges its passions upon false objects when true ones fail it.
This passage belongs to Chapter IV of Book I of the Essays, and he quotes it just as he is building a broader argument: that the soul, when overwhelmed by passion, needs to discharge itself onto something, and if it does not find the true object (the real cause of grief or anger), it invents a false one just so as not to be left with an unreleased passion. The king pulling his hair out, the gambler biting cards: they are not reasoning; they are acting out emotion on whatever surface is available.
Why Montaigne quotes him. The entire chapter is an accumulation of examples—Caligula wanting to destroy the world over his sister's death, Xerxes lashing the sea, Cyrus taking revenge on a river—that all point to the same thing: passion does not obey reason; it seeks an object even if that object is absurd or non-existent as a real cause. Montaigne is not assembling a systematic thesis (that would be the Stoic approach); he is stacking concrete cases to undermine, through empirical accumulation, the claim that human beings govern their affections with reason.
The connection with skepticism. That is the Pyrrhonian nerve of the essay. The Stoics maintained that reason could—and should—master passion. Montaigne uses these examples as evidence to the contrary: if even kings and philosophers end up biting dice or tearing out their hair, reason does not have the control attributed to it. It is not a frontal attack with a deductive argument; it is the typical technique of the essai: testing the idea with cases, not syllogisms, and letting the accumulation of anecdotes generate doubt. Montaignian skepticism does not say "this is false"; it says "look how much evidence there is that we do not know what we think we know about ourselves." It is failed self-knowledge put on display, not refuted by logic, but by observation.
Bion's specific Cynicism. Bion of Borysthenes was an itinerant philosopher with Cynic training (and also touched by Academic skepticism), famous for his biting diatribes. The phrase about baldness is Cynicism in its purest state: it takes a conventional and "noble" gesture—mourning, tearing out hair as a sign of genuine grief—and reduces it to its absurd literalness. That is the Cynic method: deflating pretension through sharp irony, showing the gap between what the gesture claims to mean and what it actually does.
Why Montaigne turns to Bion and not another. Because Cynicism and skepticism, although starting from different places, function as rhetorical allies: neither builds a positive system; both are corrosive to self-complacency—the Cynic through direct mockery of convention, the skeptic through methodical suspension of judgment. Montaigne, who distrusts any discourse that claims to own the truth about the human soul, finds in Bion's joke a perfect tool: there is no need to refute the Stoic with another treatise; a single phrase exposing the ridiculousness of the gesture is enough. It is exactly his own method on a minimal scale—the Cynic aphorism as a miniature of the skeptical essay. The skeptical essay operates by dismantling absolute certainties through exploration, systematic doubt, and argumentative detours. When that same impulse toward suspicion undergoes maximum condensation, the result is the Cynic aphorism: not a dogmatic maxim seeking to establish a truth, but a quick thrust aimed at dismantling an illusion.

He mentions Bion: "My spirit was always on that side. All things considered, it takes more effort to guard money than to earn it. If I did not do quite as much as I say, at least it cost me an effort to avoid doing it. I derived little or no profit from it. Having more spending capacity did not make it weigh any less heavily on me. For, as Bion used to say, the hairy man gets just as angry as the bald man if his hair is pulled; and once you have accustomed yourself and fixed your fantasy upon a certain pile, it ceases to be at your service. You would not dare diminish it. It is a building that, so it seems to you, will completely collapse if you touch anything. Necessity will have to grab you by the throat for you to reduce it. And previously, I used to pawn my rags and sell a horse far less forcibly and reluctantly than what then made a dent in this favorite purse, which I kept aside. But the danger lay in the fact that one can hardly establish safe limits to this desire—they are hard to find in things believed to be good—and fix a boundary to saving. One continues to enlarge the pile, increasing it from one number to another, until vilely depriving oneself of the enjoyment of one's own goods, basing everything on custody, and not using them. According to this form of use, the richest people in the world are those in charge of guarding the gates and walls of a fine city. Every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious. Plato thus ranks bodily or human goods: health, beauty, strength, wealth. And wealth, he says, is not blind, but very clear-sighted when illuminated by prudence." Essays. Montaigne. Book I. Chapter XL. That the taste of goods and evils depends in large part on our opinion.
This passage is central to Chapter XL because Montaigne is not talking about money in general, but illustrating his thesis: that pleasure and pain do not reside in things themselves, but in the opinion and habit we project onto them. Bion's anecdote is the argumentative hinge of the whole fragment.
Who Bion is and why he quotes him. Bion of Borysthenes is a curious figure: he passed through the Academy, through hedonistic Cyrenaicism, and ended up fixed in the Cynic orbit through Crates (a pupil of Diogenes). He left no system of his own; he left a style—the diatribe, the sharp aphorism, the maxim that strikes without constructing doctrine. Montaigne almost certainly takes him via Plutarch (who collects the same image in On the Love of Wealth), and it serves him perfectly because Montaigne himself proceeds in this way: he does not cite authorities to ground a system, but to "essay" a personal intuition using borrowed material.
The logic of the aphorism (bald/hairy). Bion's point is of almost behavioral precision: the pain of loss is not proportional to the amount one possesses, but to the mental fixation (the "fantasy," as Montaigne says) placed upon it. It hurts the bald man just as much to have his only lock of hair pulled as it does the hairy man to lose one out of a thousand. This is what Montaigne finds in himself: he loses a horse with less anguish or pawns clothes—things he never "accumulated" with attachment—than touching his "favorite purse," precisely because that purse became a symbolic building, not an objective sum.
The skeptical link. There lies the Pyrrhonian heart of the chapter. The title itself—that the taste of goods and evils depends on our opinion—is a classic skeptical thesis: nothing is by nature (physei) good or bad, pleasant or painful; it becomes so by custom and judgment (nomos, doxa). The Pyrrhonists (Sextus Empiricus being the underlying source) held that opposing appearances have equal force (isosthenia) and that suffering arises from dogmatically adhering to the belief that a certain thing "is" valuable. Bion's example is almost a skeptical thought experiment in miniature: it shows that pain does not follow the real magnitude of the loss, but the fixed belief about the object. Montaigne does not say "saving is bad"; he suspends judgment on the objective value of money and demonstrates that suffering is an artifact of the mind, not a property of the thing.
The Cynic link. But the passage does not remain solely within epistemic relativity: it has a moral edge that is purely Cynic. The final paradox—that the richest people in the world are, strictly in terms of use, the guards who watch over the gates and walls of a city—is an inversion in the style of Diogenes: the person who "possesses" actually serves what is possessed; ownership does not liberate, it enslaves in perpetual vigilance. It is the same gesture Diogenes makes by living in a tub and mocking Alexander: real wealth is the reduction of need (autarkeia), not accumulation. When Montaigne says "every wealthy man is, in my judgment, avaricious," he is applying that Cynic diagnosis of pleonexia (the desire that has no natural limit, "safe limits are hard to find… in things believed to be good").
How they connect. Skepticism provides the epistemology (why pain/pleasure has no objective foundation, only opinion); Cynicism provides the ethics (what to do about it: do not fix your fantasy on the pile, because to possess is to begin serving). Montaigne merges them without declaring allegiance to any school—which is exactly his method: he uses Bion as one uses another's tool to carve out an observation about oneself, not to prove a system. Cynic ethics answers the question of what to do after discovering that nothing has intrinsic value. Cynic ethics is active and provocative; skeptical ethics is passive and adaptive. An echo that might resonate: the quote from Plato at the end (wealth as blind except when illuminated by prudence) is almost an anti-Cynic closure within the same paragraph—it tempers the radicalism of Bion and Diogenes with the idea that wealth is not bad in itself, but in the blind relationship one maintains with it. Here Montaigne returns to his usual tone: he does not advocate for asceticism, but for clarity regarding one's own attachment.

He mentions Bion. "They affirm, he says, by virtue of the reason of their judgment, that whatever is told about hell and future punishments is fiction. But when the opportunity to experience it arises, when old age or illness brings them close to death, the terror of it infuses them with a new belief out of horror for their future condition. And since such impressions make minds fearful, he forbids in his laws any instruction regarding such threats, as well as the belief that any evil can come to man from the gods except with a view to a greater good, when appropriate and with a medicinal effect. They tell of Bion that, infected by the atheisms of Theodorus, he had long mocked religious men; but that, when death caught him by surprise, he surrendered to the most extreme superstitions, as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need." Essays. Montaigne. Book II. Chapter XII. An Apology for Raymond Sebond.
This passage belongs to one of the sharpest moments of the Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and most radical chapter of the Essays, where Montaigne develops his Pyrrhonian skepticism against the presumption of human reason.
The argument Montaigne is building. Just before mentioning Bion, Montaigne is discussing an idea he takes from Plato (The Laws): that although hell and future punishments may be "fictions"—useful constructs, not rationally proven truths—those same fictions re-emerge with full force the moment death approaches. Old age or illness causes terror to reactivate a belief that reason had discarded. For this reason, he says, the prudent lawmaker forbids teaching that the gods can do harm to man except for a "medicinal" purpose (a kind of therapeutic, non-dogmatic theology).
Bion as concrete proof of that thesis. Bion of Borysthenes is the historical example Montaigne uses so as not to remain in abstraction. Bion was a curious figure: he passed through several schools (including the Cyrenaic, hence the "contagion" with the atheism of Theodorus, a follower of that movement) and ended up adopting the Cynic style—a wandering life, biting satire, provocative contempt for conventions, including religious ones. He became famous for openly mocking pious people.
But according to the anecdote (which comes from Diogenes Laërtius, and which Montaigne probably knew through Plutarch), when death came upon him, Bion abandoned that posture and fell into the most extreme superstition. Montaigne concludes with a devastating phrase: "as if the gods vanished and re-emerged according to Bion's need"—that is, Bion's gods were not the object of a stable conviction (neither in atheism nor in faith), but a reflection of his own mood and fear.
How it connects to Montaigne's skepticism. Here is the core: Montaigne does not use this example to mock Bion or to defend official religion. He uses it to demonstrate the radical inconstancy of human reason in the face of passions, which is the engine of the entire Apology. His point is: Bion's religious "Cynicism" or skepticism was not a solid rational conclusion, but an intellectual posture, almost a rhetorical fashion (Bion was famous precisely for his biting wit, for dressing philosophy "in courtezan robes," according to Eratosthenes' famous phrase about him). It was surface skepticism, maintained as long as there was nothing at stake. When a real existential threat appears (death), that position collapses instantly, revealing that underneath there was no deep rational conviction, but pure fear disguised as philosophical certainty.
This is exactly the type of argument Montaigne repeats time and again in the Apology: reason does not govern man; it is governed by him—by his humors, his fear, his vanity. Neither the defiant atheism of Bion alive nor his desperate superstition dying were the result of a stable judgment; they are two sides of the same weakness. That is why Montaigne, later in the same chapter, will extend this distrust to all human claims of knowing ultimate truths through reason alone, which forms the basis of his fideism: if not even the sharpest philosopher can maintain a firm stance in the face of death, what authority does reason have to rule on the divine?
In summary: Bion is mentioned neither as a villain nor as a buffoon, but as a mirror of man in general—living proof that "rational" convictions regarding gods and death are, for Montaigne, more an effect of circumstances and passions than a stable achievement of the understanding.
Connection with modern skepticism. I will take a phrase to relate it to a more modern and current reading of skepticism. The phrase "maintained as long as there was nothing at stake" is the perfect gateway to connect Montaigne with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's contemporary concept of "skin in the game," as well as his critique of superficial and bookish skepticism. Fake skepticism vs. flesh-and-blood skepticism. For Taleb (and for Montaigne), there is a vast difference between opining from the comfort of an ivory tower and suffering the real consequences of your actions or beliefs.

•    Bion (the case Montaigne refers to): Played at being a skeptic or a Cynic when everything was going well. He had an elegant "opinion" about death and the gods, but it was a theoretical stance.
•    The acid test: When the Grim Reaper arrives (the real threat), that intellectual conviction evaporates because it was never anchored in the reality of "skin in the game." It was merely rhetoric to impress at banquets. Skin in the Game. In Taleb's philosophy, no one can consider themselves the owner of a true belief or knowledge if they have nothing to lose by it. If you say you do not fear death or that you despise religion, but you enter into absolute panic and recant everything at the first symptom of a serious illness, it proves that your stance lacked skin in the game. Montaigne, being a great precursor of this existential empiricism (bringing philosophy down from its metaphysical pedestal and placing it directly on the terrain of everyday experience), detested armchair philosophy. For him, ideas are worth as much as a man's behavior when life gets difficult. Montaigne's true skepticism is not an abstract mental game; it is a humble acceptance of our bodily weakness and our passions. Superficial skepticism vs. deep skepticism. Taleb frequently distinguishes between intellectuals who theorize about the world ("intellectual yet idiots" or IYI) and those who operate in the real world under risk.
•    Bion's superficial skepticism survives only in the absence of risk.
•    Montaigne's radical skepticism, by contrast, is profoundly honest: it recognizes that reason is weak before passions and fear because both share the same mortal flesh.

Why do some authors label Bion as a "hedonistic philosopher"?
A biography defines him as: "Bion of Borysthenes (c. 325–250 BC) was a Cynic philosopher known for his provocative style and his hedonistic approach within Cynicism."
They call him a hedonistic philosopher (or, more precisely, a hedonistic Cynic) due to his blend of Cynicism with Cyrenaic influences.
Diogenes Laërtius places him among the Academics due to his initial training, but modern scholars consider him an atypical Cynic.
He studied under several schools: the Academy (Xenocrates and Crates of Athens), Cynics, Theodorus the Atheist (a Cyrenaic philosopher), and Theophrastus (Peripatetic). The influence of Theodorus and the Cyrenaics is key: they advocated pleasure (especially physical and immediate pleasure) as the supreme good.
His Cynicism was not the ascetic and rigorous style of Diogenes of Sinope. According to sources like Ferrater Mora's dictionary, "Bion's Cynicism was much more of a hedonistic type (perhaps influenced by the Cyrenaics) than an ascetic one." He largely abandoned the idea of the extreme hardening of the wise man and adopted a more rhetorical, skeptical, realistic, and accommodating tone.
He accepted, in the Cyrenaic style, making use of present circumstances (wealth or poverty) and diverse social roles, including relationships with kings (such as his connection with Antigonus Gonatas). Diogenes Laërtius describes him as someone who sometimes lived in a degree of luxury, moved from city to city, adopted young men, and was a "lover of himself," though these accounts stem partly from hostile sources.
In summary: he was not a pure hedonist in the style of Aristippus of Cyrene, but an eclectic Cynic who softened classic Cynic rigor with hedonistic/Cyrenaic elements. That is why Spanish Wikipedia presents him directly as a "hedonistic Cynic and skeptical philosopher," and he is known for popularizing a more flexible and satirical version of Cynicism that influenced the diatribe and Latin authors such as Horace.
The label reflects that philosophical hybridization rather than a systematic defense of pleasure as the sole end. He is difficult to fit into a single neat box, which is why labels often appear together or with nuances: atypical Cynic, hedonistic Cynic, eclectic, etc. He is difficult to fit because he did not allow himself to be boxed in. That very difficulty is what makes him interesting. That combination makes him a hybrid figure of the early Hellenistic period: Cynicism was transforming, moving away from harsher rigorism and drawing closer to more rhetorical, skeptical, and "realistic" forms. Bion precisely represents that transitional moment. That is why modern scholars usually say "Cynic with strong hedonistic/Cyrenaic inclinations" or "atypical Cynic" instead of forcing him into a single label.

Links:
•    https://www.ferratermora.org/ency_filosofo_ad_bion.html
•    https://symploke.trujaman.org/Bion_de_Bor%EDstenes
•    https://www.informacion.es/sociedad/2026/05/13/bion-boristenes-filosofo-cinico-hedonista-130091097.html
•    https://concepto.de/hedonismo/
•    https://e-torredebabel.com/compendio-de-las-vidas-de-los-filosofos-antiguos-bion/
 

Something interesting to me, given my interest in chance, randomness, luck, and fortune, are these two fragments: "Far from considering her a deity properly speaking, the early Cynics despised Fortune, refused to take her seriously, and interpreted her blows as a stimulus for moral effort. However, starting with Bion of Borysthenes (c. 335–245 BC), their attitude changed significantly. They sought to accept whatever she sent them, regarding her as the khorēgos of the great human comedy, the director who assigns each person their role on the stage of life, and whom, therefore, we must obey." "Only one of his ideas cannot be attributed to the first generation of Cynic thought. It arises when Bion expresses himself regarding the idea of Tychē, Fortune. In fragment 16 Kindstrand, preserved in Teles' diatribe On Self-Sufficiency, Bion compares Fortune to a poet. The poet distributes roles to actors, and good actors know how to perform well in their roles. Similarly, Fortune distributes roles to men, and good men know how to accept the roles assigned to them: one is a king and another a beggar; one commands and the other is commanded. Consequently, Bion advises every man to accept the role assigned to him. This attitude is markedly different from that maintained by earlier Cynics, who criticized Fortune and laughed at her attacks. But this is the only aspect, I believe, that does not agree with Diogenes. Thus Bion could very well have found the content of his critiques in Cynicism, even if he expressed them in his own particular style." The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

The fragment highlights one of the most interesting philosophical evolutions of Cynicism: the transition from frontal combat to strategic acceptance of life. Early Cynicism (Diogenes, Crates): Provocation and combat. Initially, Tychē (Fortune/Chance) was not seen as a sacred destiny, but as a rival to be challenged. For the early Cynics, setbacks of luck were not misfortunes, but a "moral gymnastics" (askēsis). Poverty or exile were not suffered: they were actively used to demonstrate the wise man's autarky (self-sufficiency) and apathy (imperturbability). The shift with Bion of Borysthenes: The theater metaphor. Bion introduces a crucial nuance that would enormously influence later Stoicism (especially Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius): life as a theatrical play.
Fortune is no longer an enemy to fight against, but the khorēgos (the producer/director of the play). You do not choose whether you play the role of king, beggar, or servant; your sole moral duty is to flawlessly act the role assigned to you by the director, without wishing for another.

The diatribe. *"Quite simply, the map of Greek literature was never the same after the Cynics. Nor were their innovations limited to prose: the Cynics wrote in iambics, elegiacs, and hexameters, and Cercidas invented a new meter, the meliamb, for a political poem from a Cynic perspective.
The diatribe, frequently associated with Bion of Borysthenes, constitutes another fine example of a form that was certainly extra-literary or oral in the Classical period, and which the Cynics established as a characteristic part of their own literary repertoire."* The Cynics. R. Bracht Branham; M.-O. Goulet-Cazé (Eds). Seix Barral Manuales de la Cultura. 2000.

 The concept of the diatribe as a written work arose in the 3rd century BC, attributed to Bion of Borysthenes, the Greek Cynic philosopher. Just as some authors credit him with inventing it as a genre, others argue that he brought it from the oral world into the written world, and others hold that he was the one who popularized it.
A diatribe (from Classical Greek: διατριβή, diatribē, "spoken discourse," "lecture") is a violent, sometimes abusive text directed against individuals or social groups. As a written work, its purpose was to reach a broader audience, although at that time it did not carry the somewhat offensive connotation the word has today; rather, it consisted of Bion's humorous yet sharp attacks against human flaws and weaknesses.
In its original meaning, this term named brief ethical speeches delivered by Cynic and Stoic philosophers. However, due to the polemical tone that typically characterized these popular moral lectures, the concept quickly shifted toward its modern sense of invective.
 

Core sources:
•    The Essays. Michel de Montaigne. (According to the 1595 edition by Marie de Gournay). Prologue by Antoine Compagnon. Edited and translated by J. Bayod Brau. Digital edition. Epublibre 2014. https://archive.org/details/montaigne-michel-de.-los-ensayos-epl-fs-1580-2014/mode/2up
•    https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/ensayos-de-montaigne--0/html/
•    Montaigne. Essays (I)(II)(III). Complete edition. Ediciones Orbis. 1984. Translation by Juan G. de Luaces.

Transparency note: This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude, Gemini, and Grok for text analysis and structuring. The illustrations, informative graphics, and visual infographics were generated with the support of Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT.

I suspect I am the photocopy of a larger fold (or Spinoza against Bohm's Implicate Order)

Topics I like to read about and understand nothing about.

The Pilot Wave Interpretation and the Implicate Order (David Bohm)

David Bohm, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and a collaborator of Einstein, developed a radical alternative to standard quantum physics:

•    The premise: There is an "Implicate Order" in the universe where the entire cosmos is fundamentally interconnected in a non-local and instantaneous way. The matter we see is merely the "Explicate Order" (the foam on the surface). In this model, free will and the separation between individual objects are illusions created by our macroscopic perception.

The de Broglie–Bohm interpretation (pilot wave) and David Bohm's Implicate Order are related but not identical ideas. Bohm developed them at different stages of his work.

Pilot Wave Interpretation (de Broglie–Bohm)
It is a realistic, deterministic, and non-local interpretation of quantum mechanics.

•    Particles have definite trajectories at all times (they have real position and momentum).
•    They are guided by a “pilot wave” (the wave function $\Psi$), which evolves according to the Schrödinger equation.
•    The velocity of each particle is given by Bohm's guidance equation (proportional to the gradient of the phase of $\Psi$).
•    Non-locality appears explicitly: the quantum potential acting on a particle depends instantaneously on the configuration of the entire system. This allows it to reproduce the results of Bell's experiments and quantum non-locality without the collapse of the wave function.

It is a hidden-variables theory (the particle's position is the hidden variable) that is empirically equivalent to standard quantum mechanics in ordinary regimes, but ontologically very different: there is no fundamental indeterminism and no “collapse.”

Implicate Order and Explicate Order
Later, Bohm elaborated a broader and more philosophical vision (especially in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980):

•    The Implicate Order is a deeper level of reality in which everything is “folded” or entangled in a holistic way. Each region contains, in an enfolded manner, information about the whole (a frequent analogy: the hologram).
•    The Explicate Order is the world we perceive: the unfolding of that deeper order into separate, localized, and seemingly independent forms (particles, objects, ordinary space-time).
•    The matter and space-time we see are, in this picture, like the “foam” or the surface of a more fundamental process of continuous enfolding and unfolding.
•    Quantum non-locality and entanglement are understood as manifestations of this deeper interconnection, not as mysterious “actions at a distance” against a backdrop of separate objects.

In this framework, the separation between individual objects and the sensation of free will as something radically independent from the rest of the cosmos are presented as illusions or valid approximations only at the level of the Explicate Order (our macroscopic perception and Cartesian analysis of separate parts). Bohm does not deny the subjective experience of choice, but places it within a broader process of wholeness in motion (holomovement).

Relationship Between Both Ideas
The pilot wave theory already contains non-locality and a real guiding field that connects the entire system. The Implicate Order is a conceptual and philosophical generalization that Bohm elaborated from those ideas (and from conversations with other thinkers) to contemplate the totality of the universe, not just laboratory experiments. It is not strictly necessary for the de Broglie–Bohm interpretation, but Bohm used it to provide a broader framework for quantum physics and his vision of reality.

In summary: the pilot wave offers a concrete, mathematical ontology for quantum mechanics; the Implicate Order is the broader cosmological and philosophical vision in which Bohm situated that ontology (and reality in general).

Spinoza, the Determinist Who Had Already Ruined Your Illusion of Choice

While Bohm needed guidance equations, quantum potentials, and all the mathematics of wave mechanics to arrive at the conclusion that the separation between things is an appearance, there was a lens grinder in Amsterdam who reached the exact same place three centuries earlier—without a collider, without a wave function, armed solely with Euclidean geometry and a stubbornness that cost him excommunication from his own community.
Baruch Spinoza, in his Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, proposes something that today sounds directly copied from the Implicate Order: separate things—you, your neighbor, the milanesa you "chose" to order, the table where you eat it—do not exist as independent substances interacting with each other from the outside. There is a single, infinite substance, which Spinoza calls interchangeably God or Nature, and everything else—every object, every thought, every person who believes themselves to be the protagonist of their own decision—is merely a "mode" of that substance, a partial and limited way in which totality manifests itself at a particular point and time.
It is not a pious metaphor: for Spinoza, as for Bohm, what we perceive as separate parts of the world is literally an incomplete way of looking at something that, at its deepest level, is a single continuous process. Bohm's Explicate Order—the surface foam of discrete particles, objects, and people—is, in Spinozan terms, the way we perceive "modes" without seeing the single substance that supports them all underneath. And right there, exactly there, is where Spinoza delivers the blow that hurts most to anyone who thinks they are "deciding" anything: if everything is a single substance unfolding according to its own internal necessity, there is no room for freedom as we imagine it. What we call "choosing" is nothing more than being ignorant of the causes that pushed us to do exactly what we did. Spinoza doesn't say the milanesa doesn't exist. He says you didn't choose to order it: the entire chain of causes that you are—your history, your appetite, your body, the weather that night—had already ordered it for you, long before the waiter arrived.
The difference, once again, is not foundational but instrumental. Bohm needed to mathematically describe a "quantum potential" that instantaneously connects every particle with the complete configuration of the system to argue that separation is illusory. Spinoza, with one definition and one axiom, had already concluded that no finite thing can truly be understood by itself, isolated from the whole of which it is merely a passing mode. One used guidance equations; the other, a geometric method of propositions chained like theorems. Both arrived at the same uncomfortable spot: the freedom you think you have when choosing your own dinner is, at best, the freedom of not knowing why, in reality, you had already chosen it.

The Family Exorcism Committee (or Why Nobody Believes You That "Everything Is Connected")

The first reaction this idea received, back in the 1950s, was the kind that ruins a New Year’s Eve dinner: it was called silly, a story for children, a youthful deviation of someone who had strayed from the serious path. It’s the equivalent of coming home thrilled to tell your family you’ve discovered everyone is connected at a deeper level of reality, only for your older uncle, without looking up from the asado, to reply that it's "very clever, but basically useless." No matter how right you are: if the family's first reaction is laughter, you spend the next three decades trying to get anyone to take you seriously again.
Then came the most awkward problem of all, the speed of gossip: if something happens to a particle here, another particle on the other side of the universe knows about it instantly, without any messenger, mail carrier, or signal traveling at the speed of light. It's the ultimate family WhatsApp group: no one needs to type a thing, everyone already knows what happened as soon as it happened, in any corner of the planet, with no "I didn't get the notification" excuse. The problem is that for that instantaneous gossip to work, you have to assume a single, universal clock exists, valid for the whole family at the same time—something that relativity, with its relative time zones and its "depends on where you're looking from," flatly refuses to grant. It's like trying to host a family video call across different time zones and expecting it to be "right now" for everyone at once: nice goal, but the logistics don't add up.
Even more uncomfortable was the issue of "empty waves": according to this view, there are possible paths, entire branches of what could have happened, that were never traveled but still hover around, exerting a subtle influence, like ghosts of unmade decisions. It’s the relative who keeps dropping hints about the career you "could have studied" or the partner you "could have chosen"—paths you never took, yet somehow still weigh heavy at the family table without ever having been real. Someone put it bluntly: it’s like living in permanent denial that entire universes of unfulfilled possibilities exist, while those very possibilities keep throwing shade at you from the other room.
To top it all off, when someone tried to neatly draw "where each particle actually went" in certain experiments involving mirrors and lenses, the resulting trajectories were so weird, so counterintuitive, that not even the theory’s defenders could explain them without saying, "Well, classical intuition doesn't apply here." It’s the perfect excuse for any chaotic family gathering: "Don't ask why it happened like that, it just did—stop trying to make it make sense with everyday logic." Not to mention the reproach of Occam's Razor, that relative obsessed with simplicity who asks the same question every Christmas: "Why add particles AND pilot waves AND a thousand-dimensional configuration space, if in the end the math yields the exact same results without all that apparatus?" Telling your family you are part of an Implicate, holographic Order where every fragment contains the whole makes for beautiful after-dinner talk. The hard part is explaining to the committee of physicists why all that conceptual bluster was needed just to end up, in practice, predicting the exact same thing traditional physics already predicted.

Plotinus's Defense

 The family exorcism committee was already closing its folders, satisfied with having pointed out that all that conceptual bluster ended up predicting, in practice, the exact same thing as plain old physics. Spinoza, with the infinite patience of someone who has spent three centuries explaining the same thing without anyone fully understanding it, was polishing a lens while waiting for the right moment to slip away. And Bohm, in some corner, was still trying to sketch on a napkin how a quantum potential could instantaneously connect every corner of the universe, without anyone quite believing him that it wasn't, once again, "a physical bedtime story for children."
It was then that the light in the room—dim as it already was—seemed to fold back in on itself, as if something had decided to reveal itself without taking up space at all. Plotinus, his gaze fixed on a point that wasn't strictly in the room but a little beyond it, took the floor without raising his voice, because he never needed to:
—"You seek predictions. Numbers that can be measured, confirmed, refuted. And I ask you: with what instrument do you intend to measure the One?"
The committee, still holding Occam's Razor, tried to object:
—"If there is no new prediction, there is no science. It is ontological excess—too many particles, too many waves, too many dimensions."
—"Too many, you say," Plotinus offered what, on another face, might have been a smile. "As if the One could have 'too much' or 'too little.' Everything that exists emanates from a single, indivisible source that is never depleted by unfolding: first the Intellect, then the Soul, then this foam you call matter, world, separate particles. Each level is an ever-fainter reflection of the previous one, not because the source weakens, but because what is reflected can never fully contain that which reflects it. Bohm," he said, turning toward him with an almost fraternal gesture, "didn't invent the Implicate Order. He remembered it. Eighteen hundred years ago, I described how the sensible world you measure so zealously is merely the unfolding, the final deployment of something that was originally folded in perfect unity."
Spinoza, without pausing his lens polishing, chimed in, drier than Plotinus but pointing in the same direction:
—"I called it Substance. He calls it the One. The names change, the intuition remains: nothing that exists holds up in isolation. You," he said, looking at the committee, "want to fragment what was never fragmented, and then you demand that totality give you a fragmented accounting."
—"Precisely," Plotinus resumed, with a calm that was beginning to feel more unsettling than any shout. "You demand a number, a falsifiable prediction, an experiment to distinguish this vision from standard physics. But the One is not for that. It is not a hypothesis competing with other hypotheses within the Explicate Order. It is the very condition for there being, in the first place, something to measure, something to fragment, something to argue about this very afternoon. You demand that totality prove itself using the tools of a single one of its parts. It is like asking the ocean to prove itself using only the glass of water you just raised to your lips."
The committee, uneasy, found nothing to counter with. Because there was no way to refute someone who never intended to play the same game: Plotinus didn't come to offer a better prediction. He came to say that the demand for a prediction, in itself, already assumed the very fragmentation that totality comes precisely to disprove. And perhaps there, at that exact point where physics demands a number and contemplation asks only for silence, is where neither Bohr, nor Oppenheimer, nor Einstein—with his "too cheap"—ever quite managed to touch what Bohm, without even fully knowing it himself, was trying to remember.

And so the cosmos—between the patient polishing of an excommunicated heretic, the quantum potential of a physicist nobody quite wanted to believe, and the luminous silence of one who no longer needed to prove a thing—continues folding and unfolding, with you, without you quite knowing it, right inside that very same movement.

Transparency note: Original idea with AI-generated text, revised by me. Used Gemini, Claude, and Grok.

I Suspect the Universe Has Grandmother's Eyes (or Empedocles vs. Fecund Universes)

Topics I like to read about and know nothing about.

The Cosmology of Natural Selection or "Fecund Universes" (Lee Smolin)
Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin proposed that the laws of physics are neither eternal nor fixed, but rather evolve biologically.

The Premise: Every time a black hole forms in our universe, a new "Big Bang" occurs in its interior, giving birth to a baby universe. The physical laws of the child universe undergo small "mutations" relative to the parent. Those universes whose laws favor the creation of more black holes have more "offspring," creating a process of Darwinian natural selection on a cosmic scale.

This is known as cosmological natural selection or the theory of fecund universes. Smolin proposed it in the early 1990s and developed it extensively in his book The Life of the Cosmos (1997).

Core Ideas

•    The "laws"—or, more precisely, the fundamental parameters of physics (coupling constants, particle masses, cosmological constant, etc.)—are neither fixed nor eternal; they can vary.
•    Every time a black hole forms, quantum gravity effects in its interior (where general relativity predicts a singularity) cause a "bounce" or a new Big Bang. Thus, a child universe is born, causally disconnected from our own.
•    In the transition from parent to child, the parameters undergo small random mutations (the idea of "reprocessing" laws had already been suggested by John Wheeler).
•    Universes whose laws produce more black holes have more "offspring." Over time, the population of universes becomes concentrated around parameter values that maximize black hole production (a local maximum in the "fitness landscape").

This offers a non-anthropic explanation for the apparent "fine-tuning" of physical constants: our universe is not fine-tuned for life, but rather to produce many black holes; life would be a byproduct of the conditions that also favor massive stars, supernovas, and gravitational collapse.
In short, it is one of the few proposals that attempts to apply a genuinely evolutionary mechanism (reproduction + variation + selection) to cosmology, rather than relying solely on the anthropic principle or a static multiverse generated by eternal inflation.
 

Empedocles, the Evolutionary Biologist Nobody Hired

While Lee Smolin needed general relativity, quantum gravity, and an entire book published in 1997 to suggest that the cosmos reproduces and mutates, a Sicilian reached a twin intuition twenty-four centuries earlier—without telescopes, without field equations, armed only with a wild imagination and the Greek habit of explaining everything by staring intently at the world until it confessed its secrets. Empedocles of Agrigento, in his poem On Nature, describes an origin of the animal world that seems ripped from a laboratory nightmare: in the early days, he says, the earth produced neckless heads, wandering arms lacking shoulders to support them, and solitary eyes roaming without a forehead in which to settle. All those loose parts, governed by the opposing forces of Love and Strife—which join and separate the elements again and again—combined at random, attempting impossible assemblies: creatures with double faces, beings with cattle heads and human torsos, monsters that the earth spat out without any master plan.
The majority of those combinations, Empedocles says, failed to survive: they couldn't feed, couldn't move, couldn't reproduce, and simply went extinct as quickly as they had appeared. Only those combinations remained that, by pure assembly accident, turned out to be viable. There was no designer, no master plan, no cosmic architect drawing sketches of a cow before releasing it into the world: there was trial, error, and the ruthless accounting of what works well enough to keep existing for a little while longer.
The parallel with Smolin takes very little translation effort. Where Empedocles has animal parts combining at random and only the viable ones surviving, Smolin has entire universes—with their own "parts," which are the physical constants—combining at random at every black hole bounce, and only those whose configuration produces more black holes surviving (that is, reproducing). Swap "neckless heads" for "cosmological constant," swap "wandering arms" for "quark mass," and you have the exact same mechanism: blind variation plus selection by viability, with no external tuner calibrating anything in advance. The only difference is that the court of history remembers Empedocles as a semi-legendary poet-philosopher who threw himself into a volcano to prove he was a god, while Smolin gets invited to theoretical physics conferences. At its core, the mechanism they propose is identical: the universe wasn't designed to work. Quite simply, what didn't work was no longer around to tell the tale.
 

The Committee of Paternity Test Experts (or Why the Universe Will Never Be on "Life Swap")

The first objection raised against Smolin was, deep down, the most devastating of all, and it sounds like the title of an afternoon talk show: there is no DNA test to prove the parentage. The entire theory hinges on the child universe inheriting, with slight variations, the parent universe's information through the black hole. The problem is that, according to what is known about these beasts today, information is neither lost nor transmitted to the other side: it stays behind, entangled and encoded on the event horizon itself, like those relatives who swear they'll WhatsApp you your inheritance, but nothing ever shows up in the chat. If there is no transfer, there is no inheritance; and without inheritance, there is no "taking after the grandmother"—there is, at best, an utterly unrelated baby someone left on the doorstep with no explanation whatsoever.
Then came the awkward relative's comment at the family dinner—the one who always ruins the toast with an ill-timed fact: if what really matters is manufacturing the greatest possible number of black holes, it would have been enough to bump up the cosmological constant just a bit, and boom, production would skyrocket. That is to say, our universe—the one supposed to be a successful specimen, selected over generations of cosmic trial and error—could, with a minimal tweak, have had vastly more "children" than it actually did. Like the student who graduates with passing marks and then realizes they would have scored far better by studying just a bit more: they didn't fail, but they aren't exactly the model student the theory required to work.
And as if that weren't enough, someone ran the numbers properly: our universe doesn't even come close to the theoretical maximum of black holes it could produce under a different combination of parameters. It is like entering a marathon, finishing in a discretely mediocre spot, and demanding the gold medal because "in theory, you ran well enough to have won in another universe." Evolutionary genetics doesn't operate on intentions or potential; it operates on results, and the results here look more like a local daycare league than the Olympic championship.
Nor did it help when someone asked, with the worst of intentions, whether there is even real sibling competition in this cosmic family. In classic natural selection, organisms compete for food, territory, and mates—limited resources in the same place at the same time. Here, by contrast, each universe is born, grows, and mutates completely isolated from its siblings, never crossing paths, never fighting over anything—like cousins living in different countries who never speak, yet someone still tries to place them on the same competitive family tree. And to top it off, no one has yet managed to explain the exact physical mechanism by which the mass of a black hole—so tiny, comparatively speaking—ends up generating an entire Big Bang on the other side. It is the cosmic equivalent of promising that the loose change in the jar will buy you a house: a nice gesture, but when anyone sits down to do the math seriously, it simply doesn't add up.
In the end, even the most concrete prediction the theory dared to make—a mass limit for neutron stars, akin to putting in writing the maximum weight allowed for a family member—ended up bumping into real-world relatives who weigh considerably more than permitted. Like that family bet where someone confidently claims "the baby won't grow past five foot seven," only for the relative in question to blow past it by several inches without asking anyone's permission.

Giordano Bruno's Closing Argument

The committee of experts was already packing up its folders, satisfied with having caught the cosmic genealogy offside. Empedocles, who had presented his theory with the calm of someone long accustomed to being called mad, adjusted his cloak to leave without much drama—after all, he had already jumped into a volcano once; an academic critique wasn't going to shake his ground. And Smolin, off in some corner, calculator still in hand, kept arguing that the neutron star limit "depended on the nuclear equation of state, which still holds uncertainty," carrying the exact expression of someone insisting the scale is poorly calibrated.
That was when he entered, walking at the hurried pace of someone who has spent all eternity trying to finish a sentence before being interrupted again: Giordano Bruno, still smelling of firewood, eyes burning with the glare of one who paid with his entire body for refusing to dial down his convictions.
"Family, family, family!" he exclaimed, skipping any greeting, like someone resuming an argument that started four hundred years ago and has no intention of letting it cool off. "You argue over whether there's DNA, whether there's information transfer, whether the black hole passes down the inheritance to the child or not. I told you back in 1584, in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds: there is no single world; there are infinitely many, and each engenders others in its image, with their own stars, their own suns, their own fury. And you ask me for a notarized certificate to believe they resemble one another?"
A physicist on the committee, folder still tucked under his arm, attempted to object: "With all due respect, without a proven transfer mechanism, there is no way to maintain the kinship."
"Mechanism?" Bruno let out a laugh that sounded more like a crackling bonfire than a chuckle. "I had no telescope, no field equation, nothing of what you possess, yet I saw with absolute clarity that the universe could not be a solitary exception, a child without siblings, an unrepeatable experiment of a bored God. I saw worlds born from other worlds like sparks flying from a fire, without any need for someone to sign a birth certificate. Nature doesn't ask permission from genetics to resemble itself. It repeats because it is fertile, because it cannot help itself, because fecundity is its very mode of being—with or without a DNA chain of custody."
Empedocles, who until then had been listening with the smile of a grandfather watching a grandson defend the very idea he had centuries ago, added his part: "I didn't need a mechanism either. I saw arms without shoulders, heads without necks, failed attempts everywhere, and right up until—" he cut himself off, smiling: "Sorry, I got distracted. What I meant to say is: you don't need to explain to me how a black hole passes the torch to its child. It is enough for me to see that the pattern repeats: trial, error, what doesn't work disappears, what works remains. That doesn't require a notary."
The committee, uncomfortable, wasn't quite sure what to write in its report. Because there was no way to refute someone who never claimed to offer empirical proof: Bruno hadn't come to win the argument with data; he came to insist that the intuition of infinite fecundity does not need to await the verdict of a laboratory to feel true. And perhaps right there, in that exact spot, lies the point none of the critics managed to touch: the universe doesn't need its DNA paperwork in order for someone, looking at it with enough patience, to swear they recognize in it—if only a little—its grandmother's eyes.

And so the cosmos—among the scattered parts of a Sicilian, the calculator of a stubborn physicist, and the fiery faith of a heretic who burned for believing in infinite worlds—continues to have children that resemble it, with or without a birth certificate to prove it.
 

Transparency note: Original idea with text generated by AI and revised by me. Used Gemini, Claude, and Grok.

I suspect the universe has a bad Wi-Fi signal (or Descartes vs. the Simulation Hypothesis)

Topics I like to read about and know nothing about.

The digital simulation hypothesis (Seth Lloyd and Frank Tipler)

Posed from quantum information physics and thermodynamics by scientists like Seth Lloyd (MIT):

The premise: The universe is not made of "matter," but of processed information. The entire cosmos is, literally, a giant quantum computer. Subatomic particles are nothing more than qubits changing states.
The radical version: In its cosmological variant, it is suggested that our entire physical reality could be a simulation running on the computing infrastructure of a higher civilization or entity.
Seth Lloyd proposes that the universe can be modeled as (and in a sense is) a giant quantum computer; Frank Tipler contributes related cosmological ideas about infinite computing capacity in the far future.

Seth Lloyd's view (MIT)
Lloyd argues, from the physics of information and quantum computing, that:
Every physical entity registers information (bits/qubits). Atoms, elementary particles, and fields act as registers.
Physical interactions (collisions, unitary evolutions, etc.) process that information: they change the state of those qubits.
Therefore, the universe performs a continuous quantum computation of itself. This is not a metaphor: the laws of physics are the "machine code" and the dynamics of the universe are the running program.
In works like "The Universe as Quantum Computer" (arXiv:1312.4455) and his book Programming the Universe, Lloyd shows that this model naturally explains the emergence of complexity from simple rules + quantum randomness, and calculates physical limits to the computational capacity of the observable universe (on the order of 10^120 operations on 10^90 bits since the Big Bang, figures that depend on fundamental constants and the age of the universe).
Important: Lloyd does not necessarily claim that we live inside a simulation created by someone else. He claims that the universe is quantum computation. It is compatible with known physics and does not require an "external infrastructure."

Frank Tipler and the cosmological context. The radical version (simulation by a higher entity)
Tipler is best known for the Omega Point cosmology: in a closed, collapsing universe, computational capacity can diverge to infinity near the final singularity. Within that speculative framework, a future civilization could emulate (simulate with arbitrary fidelity) past histories, including "resurrections" of minds. His work connects general relativity, quantum mechanics, and computing. This is the idea that our complete physical reality is a simulation running on hardware belonging to a higher-level civilization or entity.
In layman's terms: Lloyd contends that the universe processes information like a quantum computer—every particle is a bit (or qubit) that changes state according to rules—and Tipler takes that to an afterlife version: in his "Omega Point," a future civilization with infinite computational power ends up simulating (literally resurrecting) every being that ever existed.
 

Descartes, the first user to suspect the system

While Seth Lloyd needed five centuries of physics, an MIT doctorate, and a calculator capable of handling numbers on the order of 10^120, there was a Frenchman who arrived at a similar suspicion sitting next to a stove, in 1641, with no technology other than his own distrust. René Descartes, in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy, proposes an exercise that today would be the perfect script for a science fiction movie: doubt absolutely everything he thinks he knows, to see what survives the doubt.
And there, before reaching his famous "I think, therefore I am," Descartes pauses at a hypothesis that feels uncomfortably familiar: what if there is an evil demon—a deus deceptor, an all-powerful deceiver—whose sole occupation is making me believe that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are nothing more than illusions he uses to set traps for my credulity? There is no structural difference between that evil demon and the "higher civilization" Tipler imagines simulating entire universes with post-cosmic hardware: in both cases, someone (or something) with enough power generates a complete, coherent, and deceptive experience of the world, and the subject trapped inside has, in principle, no way of knowing it from within the system.
The difference—and here is what makes it more interesting than a simple "someone else already thought of this"—is that Descartes didn't need to postulate qubits or future civilizations to get to the same place. It was enough for him to notice that none of his senses could, on their own, guarantee him that what he perceived corresponded to something real. Lloyd calculates how many operations the universe may have executed since the Big Bang; Descartes, with far less computing power, had already calculated that this number, whatever it was, was useless to him if he couldn't first trust his own senses to count it.
It is, once again, the same pattern as with Schopenhauer: the contemporary scientist arrives armed with cutting-edge physics at a conclusion the philosopher had already reached with a stove, a chair, and a free afternoon. Only this time, Descartes' evil demon doesn't deceive with indeterminate space and time, but with something closer to an infrastructure problem: if someone—or something—is generating this experience in real-time, the question is no longer just "is what I see real?", but "what bandwidth am I being served with?".

The support tech committee (or why no one is going to reset the universe's router)

The scientific community took little time to line up and point out the problem: calling the universe a "computer" sounds spectacular in a TED Talk, but it looks suspiciously like what generation after generation did with every trendy metaphor. To the Greeks, the cosmos seemed like a clockwork mechanism; to the Victorians, a great steam engine; to us, with our phones glued to our hands, it feels natural to imagine it as a computer. The problem is that a real computer has well-defined input, processing, and output, and here the output—the concrete result we observe when we measure something—remains as big a mystery as it was before calling it a "qubit." It's like calling the refrigerator an "app" because it cools things down: you're using a trendy word for a phenomenon you don't actually understand any better than before, only now it sounds sleeker in an interview.
And then there's the resource problem, which is where the satire practically serves itself. Calculating how much energy it would take to simulate, even in low resolution, an entire universe yields numbers so absurd that not even the most advanced civilization in the cosmos—with access to entire galaxies as a power source—could stomach the electricity bill. It's the cosmic equivalent of trying to run a next-gen video game on a laptop that was already struggling to open Paint: technically, in some alternate universe, maybe. Here, not a chance. So the next time your thermos gets stuck, it's not a Matrix glitch: it's your thermos, which is genuinely broken, with no higher civilization involved in the matter.
The most ambitious version, the Omega Point, received an even less generous treatment: it was directly labeled a masterpiece of pseudoscience, largely because it depends on the universe collapsing in on itself in the future—something that, according to everything we observe today, isn't going to happen, because the universe is expanding faster and faster, not slowing down to turn around and shrink. It's like planning your retirement assuming that at some point you'll inherit an empire, without having any rich uncle or any sign that such an empire exists. And let's not even mention the identity problem: even if someone, someday, managed to "recreate" every atom of your grandmother with perfect precision, that doesn't bring your grandmother back to you; it gives you an extremely expensive, high-resolution photocopy. Déjà vu, in this framework, stops being a dramatic glitch in the simulation and becomes what it probably always was: that you slept poorly.
Finally, not even Occam's Razor—that old rule about not multiplying entities unnecessarily—escaped the party unscathed: if this is a simulation, someone had to simulate the simulator, who in turn was simulated by another, in an infinite line of servers where, inevitably, someone eventually runs out of battery. So no, there's no need to complain to tech support about the universe's bad signal. Nobody on the other end is picking up the ticket. And if they are picking it up, they're taking so long that, for all practical purposes, it's exactly the same as if the universe were, simply, real.

The butterfly's plea

The silence that followed the technical demolition didn't last very long. Descartes, satisfied with having planted the seed of doubt a couple of centuries before anyone paid him royalties for it, was already adjusting his wig to take his leave. The support techs were closing their energy calculation folders with the gesture of someone who just cut off a complaint before it reached higher management. And in some corner, Lloyd and Tipler were arguing between themselves over whether the problem had been bandwidth or mismanaged expectations.
It was then that something crossed the room—not with a roar, not with an aura of cosmic energy, but merely brushing the air—and settled softly on nobody's shoulder in particular. A butterfly. Or perhaps not. Because the first thing it said, in a voice that seemed to arrive from 2,300 years ago and from nowhere in particular, was:
—Excuse me. Before you keep arguing about whether this is a simulation or not, I have a preliminary question: how do you know you are the ones arguing?
Nobody quite understood, so the butterfly—or whatever was speaking through it—continued, with the patience of someone who has already explained this many times to no avail:
—A long time ago I dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering about at ease, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. And when I woke up, I didn't know if I was Zhuangzi who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or if I was now a butterfly dreaming I was Zhuangzi. You have been arguing for a while now about whether the universe is matter or code, whether the substrate is carbon or silicon, whether someone on some cosmic server is charging you the electric bill. And I ask you: why do you take for granted that there is a difference worth fighting over?
Descartes, who couldn't stand having a doubt that had cost him six full meditations simplified like that, tried to protest:
—With all due respect, the question is not trivial. If this is an illusion orchestrated by a deceiver, or a simulation running on someone else's hardware, there is a radical difference compared to it being real.
—Is there? —the butterfly fluttered, unhurriedly—. You need an "outside" to exist so you can sleep peacefully at night: a real world behind the dream, an original behind the copy, a programmer behind the program. I don't. To me, it's all the same whether I flutter knowing I am a butterfly or flutter knowing I am a man dreaming he is a butterfly. The fluttering is the same. The transformation of things—what we call wu hua—doesn't need you to decide which version is the true one. It simply happens, whether you are arguing around it or not.
The support techs, who had spent the previous block calculating how many entire galaxies it would take to simulate a universe, tried one last argument:
—But the numbers don't add up. The required energy is...
—The numbers don't add up for you —interrupted the butterfly, with an exasperating calm—, because you need them to add up so you can sleep tonight knowing which side of the screen you're on. I couldn't care less about the energy balance of the cosmos. If tomorrow you discover that yes, all of this runs on someone else's server, I'm going to keep fluttering in the exact same way. And if you discover that no, this is the realest thing there is, I will too. Your question is legitimate. My indifference is, too.
And having said this, without waiting for a reply—because it never expects them, and that is perhaps its most elegant way of being right—the butterfly rose, crossed the window, and vanished into an outside that, real or simulated, still had, that afternoon, very good light.
And so the universe—between the methodical doubt of a Frenchman with a stove, the disenchantment of a committee that ran the numbers, and the luminous indifference of a butterfly that never wanted to know which side of the dream it was on—continues to function, with good or bad signal, without needing anyone, entirely, to agree.

Transparency note: My own idea with AI-generated text revised by me. I used Gemini, Claude, and Grok.

The universe didn't exist until I stubbed my toe on the nightstand (or Schopenhauer vs. Biocentrism)

Topics I like reading about and understand absolutely nothing about.

The Self-Aware Universe Hypothesis or Biocentrism (Robert Lanza)

Formulated by biologist and medical scientist Robert Lanza alongside theoretical physicists, it contends that life and consciousness are not secondary byproducts of the universe, but rather the creators of physical reality.

The premise:
Taking the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to the extreme, it argues that space and time do not exist as independent physical objects, but as forms of animal perception. Without a conscious observer to collapse the wave function, the universe remains in an indeterminate state of probabilities.

Key principles (summarized):

1.    What we perceive as reality is a process involving our consciousness.
2.    Space and time are not absolute entities, but forms of animal perception.
3.    The behavior of particles (and of every object) is tied to the presence of an observer.
4.    Without consciousness, matter only exists as waves of probability.
5.    The universe is "fine-tuned" for life precisely because life is what generates it.

This also allows him to tackle the "fine-tuning" problem of the cosmos (why physical constants have the exact values that allow for life). According to him, it is neither a coincidence nor is there any need to invoke an infinite multiverse: the universe has those properties because we (consciousness) created it that way.
Lanza's leap is to interpret "measurement" as "conscious observation"—meaning that a perceiving mind is required for the collapse to occur. From this, he concludes that space and time are not properties of the universe, but "mental tools" of the observing animal, and that without consciousness, the universe remains in an unresolved limbo of probabilities.
It is a beautiful theory, internally coherent, which suffers from only one minor flaw: nobody explained to the 13.8-billion-year-old universe that it was supposed to wait around.

Schopenhauer as the theory's "grumpy godfather"

Schopenhauer didn't need quantum physics to reach a similar conclusion; he drew it from Kant a century earlier.
Before Lanza needed a particle collider, there was already someone who had reached a similar conclusion sitting at his desk in Frankfurt, with no instruments other than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and a remarkable capacity for introspection.
Arthur Schopenhauer opens The World as Will and Representation with a line that today sounds almost prophetic: "The world is my representation." He does not say that the world contains a representation, nor that perception is an imperfect filter of an already-made reality out there. He says that the world, as it is given to us—extended, ordered in time, causally chained—is, in its very form, a product of the knowing subject.
For Schopenhauer, following Kant but pushing him to a more radical domain, space, time, and causality are not properties of things-in-themselves, but the a priori forms with which the intellect organizes any possible experience. We do not invent them on a whim nor do we choose them: they are the very structure by which an animal brain—his, ours—renders the world intelligible. Outside that structure, what remains is the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich), inaccessible as an object of knowledge, which Schopenhauer, in his most famous twist, names Will.
The difference with Lanza is not one of substance, but of method, and that is where it gets interesting.

The party-pooper physics committee (or how the universe manages on its own without anyone looking)

Predictably, the academic world didn't take too kindly to a biologist explaining to quantum physics what its true purpose was. The physics community—that guild that normally bickers internally for decades without agreeing on a single thing—surprisingly found swift consensus on one point: the universe does not need anyone looking at it to function. According to them, the phenomenon Lanza attributes to observing consciousness goes by a far less poetic name: decoherence, the simple friction between a particle and its environment. That is, reality doesn't collapse because a conscious being deigns to gaze upon it; it collapses because the universe, rude as it is, interacts with itself all the time without asking anyone's permission. Your living room wall doesn't need you to look at it to go on being a wall: rubbing against the air, the light, and the dust already "observing" it 24/7 is quite enough, requiring no overtime pay nor philosophical recognition.
The second charge against Lanza is even more devastating, if less entertaining: the theory predicts nothing testable. No possible experiment can confirm or refute it—which, in the scientific world, is the equivalent of pulling up to a police checkpoint without an ID: they won't arrest you, but they won't let you pass either. It is a theory that explains itself perfectly within its own walls, like those relatives who devise a family theory about why they always lose their keys, and it never fails... because the theory conveniently adjusts itself whenever needed.
And then there's the question no biocentrist wants to answer over dinner: who qualifies as an observer? If a human being collapses the wave function just by looking, does a dog do it too? An insomniac cockroach? A smart thermostat? If the answer is "anything with a shred of consciousness," then the universe has spent 13.8 billion years being continuously observed by billions of bacteria, and the "grand mystery" of quantum collapse dissolves with the same level of drama as a party where people were actually present all along—it's just that nobody bothered to announce it.
And just as Schopenhauer was about to turn off the lights of the universe to leave us all in empirical nothingness, a spectral voice echoed from the corner of out-of-print books. It was the spirit of Henri Bergson, waving his élan vital like a battle flag...
Hovering over this entire debate, like an uninvited ghost nobody dares kick out, looms the shadow of Henri Bergson and his élan vital: that vital impulse which, according to him, runs through all living matter and drives it forward without classical physics being able to fully explain it.
How do you expect the universe to exist without life, if matter is nothing more than the sediment left behind by the Élan Vital in its wake?
 

Bergson's defense

An awkward silence settled over the room. Schopenhauer, pleased with his demolition, was already packing his philosophical walking sticks into his bag. The physicists were checking their decoherence notes with the expression of someone who has just won a dinner debate without raising their voice. And Lanza, poor guy, was holding his double-slit slide like someone holding a broken umbrella in the middle of a rainstorm.
That was when the room's temperature dropped three degrees—not due to physics, but for theatrical effect—and from the corner of out-of-print books emerged, wrapped in an aura of pure energy and with his mustache still intact despite eternity, the spirit of Henri Bergson.
"One moment," he said, and his mere presence made even Schopenhauer look up, curious to see another German... pardon, Frenchman, as devoted to solemnity as himself. "You debate matter as if it were primary, given, solid, and life and consciousness as a late accident that learned to float on top of it. I've been telling you the opposite for over a century, and nobody made an essay with memes about me: matter is the trace left behind by life as it passes through. Not the other way around."
I told you so! Matter is just the trace left behind by life as it passes, not the other way around.
The physicists exchanged a glance. One of them, with the patience of someone who had already argued this with Einstein and lost their standing in the process, muttered something about "vital impulse" and "a lack of mathematical rigor." Bergson was unfazed.
"Ah, rigor. Always rigor. You measure time as if it were a train car, one point after another, each identical to the previous one, countable, divisible, dead. But lived time—la durée—that isn't measured: it is experienced. And in that experience, there is a force, a thrust, something that cannot be explained by adding electrons or subtracting probabilities. Robert," he said, turning toward Lanza with almost paternal tenderness, "you sensed something true, even if you dressed it in the wrong costume. You didn't need quantum physics. You needed to trust intuition over intellect—which is the only thing I came to ask of you my entire career, and nobody paid attention until a biologist looking for a fight showed up."
Schopenhauer, who couldn't stand having his spotlight of pessimism stolen, chimed in reluctantly:
"All of this is lovely, Henri, but the life you so celebrate is pure suffering, unfulfilled desire, a wheel turning without purpose."
"And yet it turns!" Bergson exclaimed, arms open as if embracing the entire universe. "That is what escapes you: the impulse doesn't need to make sense to be real. Life doesn't ask for permission; it doesn't wait for a lab verdict to be validated. It moves forward, creates, makes mistakes, persists. That is the élan vital: not a force to be measured, but a force to be felt. And if you need an electron to collapse to believe that life matters, the problem isn't with life. It's with the faith you place in your instruments."
A different kind of silence, this time born not of defeat but of genuine bewilderment, draped over the room. No one could refute Bergson with an equation, because Bergson had never offered one. And there, right there, is where Lanza's biocentrism—so thoroughly ridiculed just a paragraph earlier—found, through the back door, its finest advocate: someone willing to defend it not because it was true, but because he felt it ought to be. Which is, after all, the most honest defense any fringe theory could ever hope to receive.
And so the universe, caught between the pessimism of a German, the enthusiasm of a Frenchman, and the slides of an optimistic biologist, continues to not require our opinion to exist—though, evidently, we still require its opinion to understand our own.

Transparency note: Original idea with AI-generated text revised by me. I used Gemini, Claude, Mistral, and Grok.