It's All a Game

Ordinarily I avoid posting what is already being widely publicized, but how could I not write about the interview with an Oxford professor whose opinion is that we may very well be a computer simulation – that we are, in effect, creations within a computer game?

SCENE FROM 'SECOND LIFE' by KRISTY FLANAGAN

I wanted to say, ‘I told you so!’, but I didn’t realize until I had almost finished this post that Dr. NICK BOSTROM, Department of Philosophy, Oxford University, had published his article, ‘ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?’ in Philosophical Quarterly in 2003. The current publicity which grabbed my attention comes from a New York Times article about Dr. Bostrom that appeared just two days ago. I am too lazy to rewrite my post from the viewpoint of Dr. Bostrom’s article, but after publishing this I’m going to read his paper carefully.

Unaware of Dr. Bostrom’s ideas, I have written at least twice in FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS on closely related themes:

‘Creation as Play’
(Jan. 2, 2007).
[A reader comment reminded me of] ‘a favorite notion that I want to mention right away.

‘It is the theory that the universe was created by the Divine, the Source, in the spirit of play, in the spirit of a game.

‘When I first read that idea from the ancient Hindu tradition (I wish I knew where), it immediately rang true and has stayed with me ever since.

‘I just did a little research online, with few results. “Lila” is said to mean “Cosmic Play” (play in the sense of an activity for fun rather than a stage play), an attitude that regards the universe as arising from the joyous play and creative adventures of the Divine. Lila explains the universe as a cosmic playground for the gods. A Wikipedia article says that Lila literally means "play," but that in religious texts refers to "purposeless play" - life as a spontaneous game. . . . What a welcome contrast to the idea that the universe was created as an educational or judicial system.’

Then, in “Reality? Happy Hunting!” (Feb. 17, 2007), I wrote,

‘I’ve written in this blog that we might compare our state to a person who becomes so immersed in a virtual reality computer game that she forgets there is anything else. Her 3-D perceptions of the game, and herself as the seeing participant in the game, become reality to her. Without memory of sitting down and hooking up the game apparatus, without memory of herself as a person who is playing a game, she has no means of finding her game reality secondary to a “higher reality”. If someone in the game asks her about “other realities” she might say scornfully, pleased with her down-to-earth common sense, “This is obviously reality, and it’s all there is.” She’s going to be quite surprised when the game ends and the goggles come off.

What if we’re in a similar situation?’

Here are some excerpts from the NYT article on Dr. Bostrom’s ideas:

‘It is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.’ Unlike the situation in the movie, The Matrix, ‘you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.’

‘Future humans, by means of what we today would call supercomputers, would create ‘virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
‘There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. ‘

The author of the NYT article, John Tierney, says, ‘ it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history. . .’

This one comment in Mr. Tierney’s article particularly tickled me: ‘Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation.’

All of these ideas raise a multitude of interesting questions – perhaps foremost, ‘How do computer sims become conscious?” My personal intuition is that consciousness cannot be created, not by the brain or anything else, and therefore is inherent in everything. Dr. Bostrom states, ‘Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct)’, but does not identify the philosophy of mind he is talking about. Can anyone tell me?

Reality and I

A few mornings ago I had the strong feeling of how strange it felt to be in this body, this fuel-absorbing tube held up by a rigid frame which was capable of motion, how strange to look out through something we call “air” at incredibly complex arrangements called “trees”, and beyond that, lights moving slowly above in periods of darkness and daylight, lights which I’m told are balls moving in nothingness.

Imagine that you raised your hands right now and saw large lobster claws instead of hands. To me it felt about the same to see ten fingers as you would feel seeing lobster claws.

I know from blog comments as well as from published accounts that some people share my sense that there is something strange or unreal about “reality”, while others are convinced that the body and what we call the material world is all there is. That such differences can exist among humans who are presumably experiencing the same universe is in itself interesting. How can it be that our perceptions tell us to disagree on such profound questions as whether we are spiritual beings inhabiting bodies, or simply physical bodies and nothing more? Or whether there is more to the universe than insentient building blocks tossed about by something called “chance”?

Which brings me back to a conclusion I’ve expressed here before – that we understand absolutely nothing, and that one person’s reality is another person’s illusion, maya.

Which brings me to the subject of computer games. I was a game addict for months before blogging captured my attention and enthusiasm. I played some Nintendo games with console and TV screen -- "Tetris", various Super Marios, “Harvest Moon”, “Animal Crossing”, “Legend of Zelda”, etc. – but many of the games resided on my computer – the “Age of Empires” series, “Pirates”, “Roller Coaster Tycoon”, “The Sims”, “Flight Simulator”, etc.


Maybe my circuit breaker flipped from overload, but at the time I began this blog I was nervous and uncomfortable about computer games. After I had been away from them awhile I felt real unease about returning to them.

Then a few days ago a friend persuaded me to try a free download (which like many “games” isn’t’ a game at all) called “Fish Tycoon”. At about the same time a repairman told me how he and his wife had become addicted to the online games “Everquest” and “World of Warcraft” and had made a meaningful amount of money through them, even thought it meant spending so much time online that they had to give up their children (almost).

Thus the gaming world’s gravity drew me subtly back into orbit. “Fish Tycoon” is a beautiful virtual aquarium. Harmless, relaxing. Nothing to worry about there. Right.


Evidence of the fragile nature of “reality” as I know it is shown in my experience at a pet shop a couple of days ago, where I found myself looking at a display of aquarium plants and thinking, “I’ll buy one of those for my fish tank.” It took maybe one second to recall that my fish are make-believe, but the proof that the brain (or at least my brain) has trouble distinguishing between imagination and “reality” had been established.

With the repairman’s stories in mind, I urged my perennially over-budget friend who had lured me into the aquarium to try making money with online games like “Everquest”. She is, I should add, a computer game expert to the degree that she writes published guides, but she had not played “massively multiplayer” games before. She quickly found something called “Second Life”, and once more I heard the Siren sweetly call: “Try it, Fleming, it’s free and there’s no stress.”

I slipped as easily into “Second Life” as a lobster into a baited trap, and for three days I’ve had trouble concentrating on blogging. I’ve neglected my friends’ blogs and done little with my own. After all, there’s a whole new world out there to be explored, a new body to learn to move and use, new ways of seeing to be perfected. . .

SCENE FROM "SECOND LIFE"