Everything around you could just be a video game
Could life be a simulation? Can you picture that the world around you is just a video game? What is to say that we are not just ants being watched by some greater life forms. What if life is just a giant Virtual Reality experiment conducted by other entities? Is it possible that this is just another life within a life within another one to an infinite degree? Is reality just made up of everything that we can process via our senses?
Video games have become close to being indistinguishable from reality. With some of the latest titles over the recent years, you can do just about anything you can do in real life. What is the limit to how real a video game can become, especially with the availability of hardware that allows locomotion and virtualization? How much detail do we add until you are not able to discern between life and the game? Will we eventually start building our own primitive worlds and start from the beginning in the ultimate open world video game?
There are of course rules to our observable universe that humanity has discovered or recorded over many years of experimentation. These rules are the parallel to video game parameters. Gravity is a constant. The speed of light is defined. There are mathematical equations, physical quantities, and limits that govern our speech, movement, creation, and our environment. Imagine if certain parameters could be changed. What if the speed of light were closer to 400 million meters per seconds instead of 300? What if we had no sense of smell? What if the freezing point were -150 degrees Celsius?
Could it also be possible that the system that is running our simulation is conserving resources and only rendering objects, scenery, and other people when we are around to see them. This idea is inspired by the double slit experiment. It would technically be difficult to observe the lack of rendering because the very act of observation causes everything to appear. If you are in France, is there rest of the world visible to you? Is it only visible to others who are around to see it? Could there be unanimity via telepathy on what is to appear in the world around us based on observations? Just like a video game, all your surroundings are usually not fully loaded unless you are in a certain proximity. If you do see into the distance, the level of detail Is usually very low. How much RAM could our life simulation have?
There are some interesting anomalies that evoke questions about the simulation hypothesis. Déjà vu is always an interesting one. You feel like you already experienced something, but it happens for the first time. Could this be a glitch or an autosave portion loading? What about when too many similar objects appear all in the same place. Of course this could be purely coincidental. There are infinite possibilities and combinations to life’s outcomes. Could an algorithm be to blame for this though?
Have you ever noticed that when you have a fun, time passes by quicker? On the contrary, when life is boring or difficult, the clock seems to be at a crawl. Is it another anomaly or does our brain just slow down to think through more stressful times? Ever walk down the street and notice many people just passing you by. You probably never interact with them. Would you have interacted with them at all? Are they just Non-Playable Characters? Objects are made up of mostly energy. They are not technically solid. Is this just a collection of colors for an image or the ones and zeros to the data on your hard drive? Now think about the purpose of life. We each make our own. There are endless side quests, and each person has their own main story line. This appears to be extremely dynamic, very resource intensive, and utterly complex.
[4/19/2021]
