The great game
“Sometimes life is like a video game. When things get harder, and the obstacles get tougher, it just means you leveled up.”
— Lilah Pace
The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance.
— Joseph Campbell
Many religions and basically the entirety of perennial philosophy see the world as an illusion. The Hindu Maya, which is so popular these days, can be among other things translated as a game. A play. The simulation argument also points out in this very direction. And, as I have already said, rather than the simulation being an ancestor simulation, it is more likely a game, not unlike modern computer games. I mean – there are far more computer games than computer historical studies.
And what better illusion is there than a game or a play?
I would say that even if it is not a game, it is very useful to think about it in these terms. There is a great overlap between games and life as both include:
Making choices and decisions that have consequences. In life, our choices and decisions can affect our relationships, careers, and overall well-being, just as in a computer game, our choices can affect the outcome and our success within it.
Navigating challenges and obstacles. In life, we face challenges and obstacles that can test our skills, resilience, and adaptability, just as in computer games. We must overcome them in order to progress and succeed. We are all just completing quests.
Learning, growth, developing skills and abilities. In life, we are constantly learning and growing through our experiences and interactions with the world, just as in a computer game, we must learn and grow in order to master it and become more skilled and proficient. You only gain experience and skill points by playing. Or, as they call it in real life – doing the thing. Just as we develop our character in an RPG.
Feedback and rewards. In life, we receive feedback and rewards for our actions and achievements, such as recognition, praise, or success, just as in a computer game, where we gain, levels, skill points, power-ups, or items.
If we really are in a simulated reality, what can we expect of it? What would be the hints showing us that something might actually not be as it seems? What is giving up the illusion? Are there any indicators that this is not just madness?
Given what we know about computer games and how they are made, we can find a list of some interesting parallels between them and the universe we observe – or rather how it is rendered for us. These are the limits imposed on our reality by the computer game and the engine running it.
Rendering
Noun
Or image synthesis is the automatic process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model (or models in what collectively could be called a scene file) by means of computer programs. Also, the results of displaying such a model can be called a render.
Universal clock rate – Reality is based on a mathematical computational program we call “Laws of physics”. Every Planck time – the smallest possible time measure - a one step of the code is computed and a new view is rendered. As in your PC processor clock rate, the Planck time dictates the frequency at which the clock circuit of a processor can generate pulses or how many cycles per second it can execute.
Rendered reality – The world you perceive is rendered only when you look at it – the unobserved rests in a superposition state – as a probability wave. Or you might think of it as unrendered code. This was verified experimentally and proven to be true. The wave function only collapses when observed. Incidentally, it is also one of the optimization techniques used in a lot of computer games – a way to save processing power. The graphics are not rendered when no player is looking at them.
Planck’s pixel – The universe is fundamentally digital. Once you accept that quantum mechanics is right, then you can’t have anything continuous anymore. Energy, momentum, angular momentum, and many other quantities and qualities are restricted to discreet values. Even the waves of wave-particle duality are bound by Planck units: mass, time, length, and derived Planck area – those are the minimal units applicable to our physical world – they are the bits and pixels of our game if you will.
Universal speed limit – based on the famous E = mc², it would take infinite energy to accelerate an object with any mass to the speed of light. Hence nothing in space-time can move faster. This imposes a limit on, among many other things, how fast our own supercomputers can operate. In other words, the processors in our universe can’t be faster than the processor running it in the reality “one-reality-above” ours. Which is what we would expect from a simulation. It also works as our draw distance or render distance - the maximum distance of objects in a three-dimensional scene that is drawn by the rendering engine. Objects that lie beyond the draw distance will not be displayed on the screen. Ever. This is also how games render their graphics.
Observable universe – There is a spatial limit on our universe as well. It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself. Because no signals can travel faster than light, any object farther away from us than light could travel in the age of the universe (estimated as of 2015 to be around 13.799±0.021 billion years) simply cannot be detected. The game map is finite.
How much disk space universe takes – There is a limit on the computational capacity of the universe – its maximal amount of operations and available bits. Following our computer game analogy, this will be equivalent to the processing power and disc space allocated to our simulation. There is a paper that uses the holographic principle to quantify the amount of information that the universe can register and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed over its history. The universe can have performed no more than 10¹²⁰ operations on 10⁹⁰ bits. It is basically one bit per one Planck’s area on the surface of observable space. Strangely, that is almost precisely how game engines do it.
The holographic principle is a tenet… that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region.
— Leonard Susskind
The holographic principle basically states that all the information of a 3d object can be encoded on its surface.
Fractal nature - A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are extremely complex, sometimes infinitely complex - meaning you can be zooming in and find similar and yet different shapes forever. Amazingly, fractals are extremely simple to make – the code to generate those fits on a few lines of code. It is another technique that helps the simulation save resources. Fractals are found all over nature, spanning a huge range of scales. We find the same patterns again and again, from the tiny branching of our blood vessels, neurons, and lungs to the branching of trees, lightning bolts, river networks, galaxies, and galactic super-clusters.
Biological algorithms - Computer science and biology have shared a long history together. For many years, computer scientists have designed algorithms to process and analyze biological data (e.g. microarrays), and likewise, biologists have discovered several operating principles that have inspired new optimization methods (e.g. neural networks). Recently, these two directions have been converging based on the view that biological processes are inherently algorithms and that nature has designed them to solve computational problems (3). Biology can be translated into algorithms which are basically computer codes.
If you are interested in more in-depth and actually scientific information on this topic, I would recommend you the paper “Why we live in the Computational Universe” by Giorgio Fontana.
The fundamental units and laws of our universe appear to be eerily similar to how you would expect them to be if the whole thing was simulated. Physical laws are set as they are in order to save computing power – a set of compression functions for the simulation. Still, it would require enormous effort to render the reality for all of us. But then again – all we really need is to just simulate the perceptions of our first-person perspective.
If we combine these factors with Bostrom’s statistical argument, we can assign a solid probability, that our universe is in fact a big RPG game.
We are here to play the game, level up our character, increase our skills, do some serious questing, and gain mastery. And mostly have fun.
This is a kind of technical explanation. For a more philosophical/religious take on the topic, check part 2.
A bit of woo for those who believe in an afterlife in any form:
We can even go as far as to call it a rogue-lite game. When you die, you lose a lot of your progress, but some of your skills, habits, and achievements are carried over. When you die, you just respawn. You develop your character – level up, improve, and evolve - over multitudes of runs. With ever greater mastery of the game.
Wouldn’t the heavenly realms be pretty boring if you couldn’t play a game or two, right?