Last night I watched Black Mirror season 7, episodes 1 through 3, and my brain hasn’t stopped spinning since. Not just because Charlie Brooker is a savage mirror-holder to our dystopian now, but because it synced perfectly—and I mean in that creepy, wink-from-the-universe way—with an interview I saw with Donald Hoffman.
You know, that professor. Longtime cognitive scientist. One of those brilliant humans who calmly dismantles the very notion of reality like he’s assembling IKEA furniture. In that conversation—recorded two years ago, but I watched it on April 25th, 2025—Hoffman explains something wild that’s now backed by real math and Nobel Prize-level science: space-time is not fundamental.
Yeah. Read that again.
Space and time, as we know them, are just the interface. Think of it like the screen of your smartphone or the dashboard of your car—it’s what you interact with, but it’s not the deeper machinery running the whole show underneath. Not the operating system. Not the backend. Just the GUI, the pixels, the HUD on the VR headset we’ve all been unknowingly wearing since birth.
And it clicks. Not just as some abstract theory, but because of the way he explained it—with clarity, humility, and brilliant analogies. My favorite one? He compares our experience to watching pixels change on a screen, while the real action—the actual math, the simulation—is running behind that screen. Behind the headset. And that headset, as he jokes, could be a cheap local Android knockoff or could be streamed from some omnipotent mainframe. Either way, we’re in it.
It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey all over again. Remember that monolith? The apes couldn’t make sense of it, but it meant something. It was an artifact from beyond. That’s us now. Staring at geometric shapes emerging from quantum math, trying to decipher a message sent from outside the simulation.
Hoffman says we’ve found the math that might describe what’s beyond the headset, building on the Nobel Prize-winning experiments that challenged local realism and hinted at a deeper, more mysterious foundation beneath our familiar space-time. And it’s not just science fiction anymore—it’s science. Proven with Bell tests, no-go theorems for local realism, and other concepts that now basically say: space-time isn’t the ground layer. There’s something deeper. Something more real than “real.”
And that’s when Black Mirror hit me like a sync-slapped sermon.
Mirror, Mirror on the Math
To see how these ideas are already woven into our stories, let me quickly walk you through Season 7, Episodes 1 through 3:
- Episode 1: A woman wakes from an accident, only to discover her life-saving surgery came bundled with a subscription. Like, actual contextual ads start coming out of her mouth. For $500/month extra you can remove ads and “upgrade coverage.” Satire? Sure. But also a brutal reflection of our microtransaction lives.
- Episode 2: A young genius builds her own quantum computer and essentially unlocks interdimensional travel. She jumps to a timeline where her wishes come true—classic quantum multiverse hack. But she loses her grip on what’s real, because in an infinite simulation, what is base reality?
- Episode 3: An actress gets stuck in a rebooted black-and-white film via a re-dream machine. Total eXistenZ vibes. It echoes that same question: when does a dream, or sim, or stage become indistinguishable from life?
You see what’s happening, right?
Black Mirror isn’t just fiction anymore. It’s simulation theory, quantum math, and consciousness research dressed up as entertainment. It’s warning us and enlightening us at the same time. It’s telling us that the real real might be behind the headset. And scientists like Hoffman are backing that up with hard math.
Glitches and Breadcrumbs
And here’s where it gets even weirder—at least for me.
I’ve had experiences. Not Mandela Effect stuff—those curious collective memories where large groups of people misremember the same thing—but strange blips. Like getting a new credit card from the same bank, same name, same data—and yet my last name was spelled differently. I never entered it. I never changed it. It just… came like that. Auto-glitched.
Little things. Many of them. They don’t prove anything, but they nudge. They whisper: “You’re in something.” And if space-time is not the substrate but a side effect—then yeah, maybe those glitches are artifacts from the rendering engine.
So what is fundamental then?
Math. That’s the recurring answer from thinkers like Hoffman—and also from the God Series books by Mike Hockney. The true reality, they argue, is pure math. Frequency, geometry, structure. All else is illusion. The headset is just a way for limited minds to interface with infinite logic.
And that, weirdly enough, makes me feel hopeful.
Because if reality is math, and we’re part of it, then maybe consciousness is the equation trying to solve itself—searching for its own solution across every moment, every glitch, every world. A mystery solving itself, from the inside out.
Final Reflection: The Game of Life
I’ve said before that I see this life as a game. A kind of spiritual simulation where you pick your role, your mission, and you play until you “finish.” If you fail, you replay. Rebirth. Reboot.
So what if the game’s code is finally being revealed?
What if Black Mirror and Donald Hoffman are both right?
And what if we’re waking up not to a dystopia, but to the first glimpse of what’s behind the headset?
I hope I live long enough to see more of it. I hope we all do.
Because the more I ponder it, the more I wonder—not what’s real, but what’s more real.
What's on your mind?