Remember the earlier games of Super Mario where we made Mario jump & run all over the screen avoiding enemies or getting points & lives, saving the princess?
Or other simulation games that attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game.
In the game ‘Sims’ originally released in the year 2000 with multiple game releases thereafter,; players created virtual people called “Sims” and placed them in houses and helped direct their life & moods and satisfy their desires.
Subsequent Sim games also had incorporated character ages through six life stages from infancy to old age and subsequent death. The game also featured clear days of the week, with weekends when children can stay home from school, vacation days when adults can take time off work. All these and many more as human players decided the life of their simulated characters.
Life simulation games (or artificial life games) are simulation video games in which the player lives or controls one or more artificial life forms. A life simulation game can revolve around “individuals and relationships, or it could be a simulation of an ecosystem or humanity.
Many of us have played Real Life games where we create a character, dress them up, give them names and a lifestyle, and live by the game rules playing the game and making our character play their part in that game. We play till we get bored after which we abandon the game and let the character die.
Years back I played the game Human Age once where we created our own character, gave them a name, a character profile, guided them through the rules of the games and made them live, eat, sleep, farm, socialize, wage wars, go on adventures, play games, gamble, rear pets, rear animals, grow crops/veggies/fruits and sell in the open market, take part in politics, work & earn money, gather & hunt, make friends, Marry & have kids, take part in battles & wars, make furniture’s, travel seas and so on.
We have always been the master and puppeteer to these game characters or ours. We decided what we did with our character / player and these characters never had any choice of their own. For us these characters were just some random computer codes made to simulate real life without having any recognition behind their game handlers.
What if, just what if you, me and every person and things in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game without realizing that we are just a profile / character in a simulatiion? What if our lives are not real and just make belief as shown in the movie ‘The Matrix’? If we can have simulation games where we control the character and their lives in the game then what are the possibilities of us being in a simulation game played by higher beings? We may laugh at the idea but can never rule out the possibility.
The argument is based on two premises, both of which can be disputed but neither of which are unreasonable. The first is that consciousness can be simulated in a computer (Artificial consciousness or Artificial Intelligence). The second is that advanced civilizations will have access to truly astounding amounts of computing power.
There’s no reason to think they’re all-powerful just because they control everything we do. A simulated universe introduces another disturbing possibility. What happens if there’s a bug that crashes the entire program?
Is that what happened in all mass extinctions Earth faced in the past that annihilated the dinosaurs and other early Earth creatures and sent earth into a winter freeze only to create life from scratch again and again? Again all this is just theory with absolutely no way of proving it except to imagine such a possibility and speculate on the odds of it actually being true.
If someone somewhere created our simulation would that make this entity God? For believers it may be ‘GOD’ in whose hands we are simulations living our lives. So what exactly are we; Simulation or Something Unique?
