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? Happy Hunting!

It seems to me that there are people who -- because of their personality makeup, shall we say? -- perceive the everyday physical world of sound and color and form and movement around them and take it at face value, while others instinctively question the nature of reality and feel that there is some reality beyond what their five senses present to them. The first says, “This is reality and there’s nothing more”, while the others feel, “There’s an ultimate reality behind this,” and ask “What is reality?”

(In writing this piece I’ve avoided wordiness by calling the first group “Nothing More” and the latter group “Other Realities”.)

To look at what is in front of you and accept it as all there is: Is that a gift or a limitation?

The Other Realities group might ask a question asked in VALIS, by Philip K. Dick, “How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?”, or “Do we exist simultaneously in more than one time?”, questions which would cause the Nothing More group to smirk.

The Nothing Mores see dreams as “just dreams”, while the other group senses that dreams may have a reality beyond mere imagination. In the morning experiences about which I wrote recently, the dream world definitely seemed more “real” than my everyday world. Which gives rise to the question, in passing, why would a “merely imaginary” world ever seem MORE real than the everyday world? One would think that if there is a single reality, an imagined reality would always seem inferior in quality, less convincing . . . that is, the brain could not manufacture a counterfeit reality which would seem superior to that “objective reality” which is presumably fed to the brain by our five human senses.

To the person who feels “there may be a reality behind this one” the concept of “maya” (“the sense-world of manifold phenomena held in Vedanta to conceal the unity of absolute being”) makes sense because it is seconded by his own feelings, while to the Nothing More the maya notion is a groundless way of unnecessarily complicating things.

The philosopher Bishop George Berkeley asserted that the only real existence of anything is the perception we have of that thing in our mind. When Dr. Johnson was asked how he would refute Bishop Berkeley, he kicked a heavy stone and said rather stupidly, “Thus, I refute him!”

I’ve lost the URL, but I was looking the other day at a website which discussed the concept of virtual reality: “Just what do we mean when we use the term virtual? It generally is applied to something that is not conceived of or perceived as real but yet acts like a real thing. Then what is reality?”

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? What if, as Plato says in his “Allegory of the Cave”, we accept as reality what are merely shadows cast by the true reality? What if – as many have said – life is but a dream from which we will wake to reality.

I must quote Robin Williams, who exclaimed in one of his comedy routines, “Reality! What a concept!”

I feel like writing, “Reality is whatever seems real to us at the moment,” but that sounds like cheating. How about: “Reality is whatever seems real to us unless and until a superior reality is shown to exist?”

The fact that I would ask those questions puts me squarely in the Other Realities group and brings me back to the point of this little essay – that there seems to be one type of person who feels that the everyday world of the five sense is obviously the only reality, and another type of person who feels that there is a superior reality behind the one we perceive in the everyday world, and --- who knows? -- perhaps an even more superior reality beyond that one.

Because I like FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS to be personal and spontaneous rather than researched in advance, I don’t know what studies – psychological or epistemological – may have been written on the subject of the two kinds of personalities I’ve discussed . . . but I would like to find out.