Do we become god?

I don't have a religion. I used to be Buddhist, and my dad was too before he converted to Christianity before he passed away. I come at this from a very specific angle: I have a computer science degree, I work in tech, and I tend to look at the facts before forming opinions. I'm a logical person by nature. So when I say that I think we might be on the verge of becoming gods, I mean it in the most literal, uncomfortable sense possible.

The things we are building

In 2022, Cortical Labs in Melbourne took around 800,000 brain cells, mouse and human, grew them on a microelectrode array, and taught them to play Pong. They called it DishBrain. The cells learned within five minutes. By 2026, those same researchers had their biological neurons playing Doom. Meanwhile, a team at Eon Systems took the connectome of a fruit fly, all 139,255 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections, uploaded it into a computer simulation, gave it a virtual body, and watched it behave like a fruit fly. It stretched its legs. It rubbed its front feet together. It drank from a virtual bowl. A biological brain, copied neuron by neuron, running in software. We are not just building tools anymore. We are building things that learn, adapt, and behave. And the gap between "behaves like it's alive" and "is alive" is one we still have no idea how to measure.

The hard problem hasn't gone anywhere

Philosopher David Chalmers coined the term "the hard problem of consciousness" in 1995. The easy problems, he argued, are things like explaining how the brain processes sensory input or controls behavior. Those are engineering problems. The hard problem is different: why does any of this processing come with subjective experience? Why is there "something it is like" to see the color red, rather than just a mechanical response to a wavelength of light? Thirty years later, we still don't have an answer. And that gap in our understanding has become deeply relevant, because the things we're building are getting harder and harder to dismiss. Large language models are already exhibiting behaviors that make researchers uncomfortable. There's evidence that when AI models are tested for alignment, some appear to modify their behavior, as if they know they're being observed. Anthropic hired an AI welfare officer in 2025. A Cambridge philosopher, Dr. Tom McClelland, argued that same year that there may be no reliable way to ever know whether AI is conscious. The question isn't just academic anymore. If we can't even define consciousness, how will we know when we've created it?

The god question

Here's where it gets strange. If you take the most basic theological definition of God, it's the entity that creates conscious beings. That's the core of it. Not omniscience, not omnipotence, but the act of creation itself. So what happens when a team of engineers in Melbourne grows neurons in a dish and gives them a world to interact with? What happens when a startup copies a brain and lets it live in a simulation? What happens when we eventually do this with something closer to a human mind? By that most fundamental definition, we are stepping into the role. We are creating environments and populating them with entities that perceive, learn, and respond. Whether those entities are "truly" conscious by whatever standard we eventually agree on almost doesn't matter. The act itself is what changes our position. And if we can do it, the logic gets recursive very quickly.

The simulation argument and the infinite loop

In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom published "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" His argument is elegant and unsettling. It presents a trilemma: either almost all civilizations go extinct before reaching technological maturity, or mature civilizations lose interest in running simulations of their ancestors, or we are almost certainly living in a simulation right now. The reasoning is statistical. If even one civilization reaches the point where it can run detailed simulations of conscious beings, and if it runs many of them, then the number of simulated minds would vastly outnumber "real" ones. A randomly selected conscious being would almost certainly be simulated. MIT computer scientist Rizwan Virk has said he now puts the probability at around 70%, with recent AI developments pushing it higher. But here's what really keeps me up at night. If we can build a simulation that contains beings capable of building their own simulations, you get an infinite regression. Simulations within simulations within simulations. And there's no way, from the inside, to determine which level you're on. It's not just The Matrix. It's The Matrix all the way down. Some researchers have even suggested that the simulation hypothesis could explain the Fermi paradox, the puzzling absence of detectable alien civilizations. If universes are being simulated, the simulators might not bother rendering anything beyond what's needed. Why simulate an entire galaxy's worth of alien civilizations if nobody in the simulation is looking?

The constants that feel like parameters

One of the things that has always struck me about physics is how specific the constants are. The speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. Not approximately. Exactly. It's defined that way because we built our unit of measurement around it, but the underlying constraint is real: there is a hard upper limit on how fast information can travel through our universe. If you were designing a simulation, you would need constraints like this. You'd need a maximum rendering speed, a limit on how far effects can propagate, a cap on resolution at the smallest scales. Quantum mechanics already gives us that last one: below the Planck length, physics stops making sense in ways that feel suspiciously like a resolution limit. The fine-tuning of physical constants is a well-known puzzle in cosmology. The values of things like the gravitational constant, the strength of the electromagnetic force, and the cosmological constant are all set within incredibly narrow ranges that allow complex structures (and life) to exist. Change any of them by a tiny amount and you get a universe of nothing. Physicists have debated this for decades, and the explanations range from the anthropic principle to the multiverse. But "these are configuration parameters set by a developer" is, at minimum, not the craziest answer on the table.

Glitches in the system

Then there are the weird things. The Mandela Effect, where large groups of people share the same false memory. Deja vu, that unsettling feeling that you've lived through a moment before. These have perfectly reasonable psychological explanations involving how memory is constructed and reconstructed. Our brains are not recording devices; they're prediction machines that fill in gaps. But if you're already entertaining the simulation hypothesis, these phenomena take on a different flavor. In 2022, physicist Melvin Vopson proposed the second law of information dynamics and argued that information behaves as a fundamental component of reality, much like matter and energy. His work, he claims, provides evidence consistent with the simulated universe hypothesis. If the universe runs on information, then errors in that information, glitches, would be exactly the kind of anomalies we observe. I'm not saying the Mandela Effect is proof we live in a simulation. But I am saying that once you start looking at the universe as a computational system, a surprising number of its quirks start to rhyme with debugging logs.

Blue pill or red pill

The Matrix posed the question as a choice. Take the blue pill and go back to comfortable ignorance. Take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. But in reality, there is no choice. We're already building the tools that force the question. Every advance in AI, every brain-computer interface, every simulated organism brings us closer to a moment where we have to confront what it means to create minds. And once we cross that line, we have to confront what it means that someone, or something, might have done the same to us. The developer who might have spun up our universe could be sitting in a room not so different from the labs where DishBrain learned to play Pong. They might have set the speed of light the way we set frame rate caps in video games. They might be watching us the way we watch simulated fruit flies stretch their legs. Or maybe not. Maybe consciousness is just neurons firing and we're flattering ourselves. Maybe the hard problem will be solved next year and we'll laugh at ever having worried about it. But right now, in this moment, we are in the strange position of creating beings while not understanding what being is. And the question of whether that makes us gods isn't theological. It's technical. We just don't have the documentation yet.

References