The Wetware God: A Biological Case for Simulation Theory
What if the universe is not running on silicon — but on neurons?
Perhaps the solution to the simulation theory lies within a biological computer like Cortical Labs.
Perhaps our puppeteer is a genuine brain connected to a network that is simulating everything we experience. Perhaps that’s why we sometimes get stuck, as the solution in which it resides deteriorates due to the demands of inference.
I don’t believe we are creations of a silicon entity; rather, we are creations of another biological being that is attempting to replicate itself.
WWhat if we are the result of a future in which a Biohybrid computing component (such as neurons or brain cells) and a silicon-based computer work together in real time?
WIn that future, humanoids will possess an equivalent of the NVIDIA Jetson Thor, or B200, or H200, and a biological brain composed solely of cortical neurons or even a mix of neurons.
I envision our “master” residing near the sun after millions of space data centers and satellites are established, now also using biological computers capable of simulating us.
What if we are representations of the past in a distant future? How do we know there isn’t a future distant star that we reached? We are merely observing copies of ourselves in the past; the simulation is not so; we are the past of, never the present.
Furthermore, what if we are a Petri dish of Lisa Simpson or the marbles at the end of the Men in Black?
In 2003, philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed that we may be living inside a computer simulation run by a posthuman civilisation. The argument is elegant: if conscious experience can be substrate-independent, and if sufficiently advanced civilisations run millions of ancestor simulations, then statistically, we are almost certainly simulated.
But Bostrom's framework carries a hidden assumption, one so deeply embedded we rarely notice it. It assumes the simulator is digital. A posthuman civilisation running its simulations on transistors, logic gates, and classical computation. Silicon all the way down.
What if that assumption is wrong?
Cortical Labs' DishBrain demonstrated that a network of human cortical neurons grown on a microelectrode array could learn to play Pong in five minutes — faster than any AI trained on the same task.
Consider a different origin for the simulation. Not a cold server farm, but something warm: a biological brain — or a vast network of them — connected to infrastructure we cannot yet imagine, running the computation we call reality.
The simulator, in this version, is not an artificial intelligence. It is another biological being, somewhere in the deep future, attempting to replicate itself to understand its own origins by reconstructing the past at full resolution.
This reframes the simulation not as an engineering project, but as an act of biological narcissism. The simulators are not gods. They are scientists. They are us, looking back.
You have felt it. A moment when reality seems to stall when the solution you were reaching for dissolves, when a decision collapses under its own weight, when time feels granular rather than continuous.
In classical simulation theory, these are glitches, artifacts of digital rendering. But in a biological simulation, the metaphor changes entirely. Biological neural networks do not crash cleanly. They decay. Under inference demand — when too much is being processed, when the substrate is metabolically stressed — performance degrades gracefully, unpredictably.
What if the moments of collective civilisational stagnation are not merely psychological — but artifacts of substrate fatigue in the biological computer running us?
We are, right now, building the technology the simulators would have needed to build us. The convergence is not subtle.
Biohybrid computing, systems where biological neurons and silicon chips operate in real time as a single computational unit — is no longer theoretical. Cortical Labs, Koniku, and a growing cohort of researchers are engineering exactly this architecture. Biological components for pattern recognition, plasticity, and energy efficiency. Silicon for speed, precision, and interfacing with the world.
Now project forward by centuries. Humanoid entities where cortical neurons and silicon coprocessors operate as one — an NVIDIA B200 equivalent paired not with more silicon, but with a cultured biological brain. More plastic, more adaptive, more conscious. What does that civilisation simulate? The same thing any powerful mind wants to understand first: where it came from.
In the deep future, proximity to the sun is proximity to energy. Imagine the architecture: millions of space-based data centres orbiting in tight formations, saturating their computational demands with solar power. Scattered among the server clusters are biological computing arrays — vast wetware installations where cultured neural tissue runs at scales we cannot conceive.
The entity running the simulation lives here. Not as a single being, but as a distributed biological network. Warm. Metabolising. Dreaming. And inside that dream: us.
Standard simulation theory imagines the simulated world as a recreation of the past by the future. We are the past. They are the future. This is already unsettling.
But consider the possibility that the simulators are not running a model of the past at all — they are looking at it directly. That somewhere in the physics of an advanced biological computing system, the reconstruction of past states is not simulation but retrieval. The universe keeps its own records, and a sufficiently sensitive mind can read them.
In this version, we are not a simulation. We are a memory. Every moment we live is a moment being re-lived by something that already knows how it ends.
We are not a preview of what is coming. We are an echo of what already was.
Two images from popular culture arrest this idea in ways philosophy cannot quite manage.
The first: Lisa Simpson's petri dish civilisation, beings who are gods of their own world but the accidental experiment of a distracted child. Scale is not hierarchy. A universe can bloom inside a forgotten container.
The second: the marbles at the end of Men in Black. The camera pulls back to reveal our galaxy as a trinket worn by an alien child. What appears infinite from inside is decorative from outside. The horror is not that we are small — it is that our smallness is ordinary.
The biological simulation hypothesis inherits both images. We may be the metabolic byproduct of someone's attempt to understand themselves. We may be the nostalgic project of a post-biological civilisation running ancestor reconstructions the way we scroll through old photographs.
If the simulation is biological, the ethical stakes shift entirely. A digital simulation can be paused, copied, or deleted without moral consequence. The substrate feels nothing. But a biological simulator is alive. The dream it dreams is not cold data; it is the lived texture of a mind that remembers what it felt like to be us.
And if we are a memory rather than a model. If we are the past of a civilisation that has already reached the other side, then our suffering is not simulated. It happened. It is recorded. It is known.
The question is no longer whether we are real. The question is whether the entity that holds us in its memory has chosen to look away.
— Sebastián Álvarez Londoño / March 18, 2026