What if I told you that everything you see as red is green? And all the red things in the world you’re seeing as green. Would contemplating this possibility blow your mind? It did mine when my high school physics teacher, Mr. C, told me that this is how the world looked to him—as if all the stoplights in our small town were upside-down. What a wild way to go through life. It took me years to realize he was full of sh! . Worse, he most certainly knew it. Now, I forgive him. Sometimes teachers have to lie to you to get you to realize things you wouldn't otherwise see.

But what if he was hoping we had believed it forever? And what if he wanted us to believe we were like this, too, all of us were? And what if he wanted this because he was selling something that could fix it? Wouldn't you want to be fixed? I would have. I don't know what I would have paid.

Thankfully, Mr. C wasn’t that guy. But the idea is in the air lately. Several well-known technology gurus have famously pushed the idea that we are currently living in a computer simulation, going so far as to say there's barely a one-in-a-billion chance that we aren't. It’s not just that the red things are green and the green things are red. But all the things—all the tables and chairs and dogs and cats and atoms and quarks and all the rest of it—are just ones and zeros in a........

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