Borges’ circular ruins
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins” (“Las ruinas circulares”), in Ficciones · 1940
A man dreams a son into being, then learns that someone is dreaming him.
A grey, silent man comes by canoe from the south and climbs to a ruined circular temple, burned long ago. He has one purpose. He wants to dream a man, with full detail, and put him into reality. His first try fails: he dreams a whole lecture hall of students and can’t make any of them solid. So he starts again with less. He dreams a beating heart, night after night, then the organs one at a time, then the whole body.
The god of the temple is Fire. Fire agrees to bring the dreamed man to life, so that everyone except Fire and the dreamer will think he’s a real person. The man trains his son, then wipes the son’s memory of the training, so he’ll never know he was dreamed. He sends him downriver to another ruined temple. Later he hears of a man there who can walk on fire without being burned, and he’s afraid. If his son ever thinks about that, he’ll work out that he is only an image.
Then fire comes to the circular ruins. The man walks into it to die, and it doesn’t burn him. The story ends: “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was an appearance, that another was dreaming him.”
Borges published the story in 1940. It’s the simulation argument as a short story, more than sixty years before Bostrom. If minds can be made, then whoever makes one has to ask whether he was made too. The detail that gives it away is small. A made mind is fine until it meets the one thing that treats it differently, here a fire that won’t burn. In the sandbox that’s what a test from inside would look for.