Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Not your dream, you understand.  This isn't your personal universe, where situations are extensions of your own id, superego, and whatever other Freudian concepts lie between your ears.  Nope, you're just a minor player here.  A walk-on role.

Odds are, you are living -- if you can call it that -- in a computer.

Professor Sir Martin Rees is to suggest that "life, the universe and everything" may be no more than a giant computer simulation with humans reduced to bits of software.

Rees, Royal Society professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, will say that it is now possible to conceive of computers so powerful that they could build an entire virtual universe.

It's not a new idea, of course.  It's raw existentialism.  In many ways, what we're discussing is only a high-tech version of Plato and his shadows on the cave wall.  The difference is that where's Plato's speculation was only that -- the thoughts of a man who, like many of us, feels a level of disassociation from the events that went on around him -- these days we have an growing body of evidence that supports the idea.  Evidence that says everything around us, including you, are less than shadows.  You're barely the idea of a shadow.

Start by looking at one of the extensive online environments that now exist.  Look at World of Warcraft, where seven million people spend some of their time being elves, or orcs, or some other fantasy race as they struggle against random events, twisting plotlines, and each other to advance in a place that half game, half social experience.  World of Warcraft is so popular that there are many web sites offering exchange rates between the gold used in the game, and the dollars folded up in your wallet.  There are people who make a living by acquiring the virtual goods that exist only in the game and selling these goods for cash money in the "real world."  There are warehouses in China where lines of people sit in shifts "mining" the game for valuable items. The economy of World of Warcraft is larger than that of many countries, so large that congress is already fretting how to properly tax virtual resources.  

If World of Warcraft still seems a little too Tolkienesque for your tastes, check out the "life simulator" SecondLife.  Second Life isn't a game in any traditional sense of the word.  Instead, it's a place where you can spend time in an alternate, virtual world that's highly customizable.  You can create your own clothes, your own house, your own furniture -- not to mention your own face -- and live in a world where about one million other inhabitants are going about their own business.  People not only make their living trading Second Life's "Linden dollars" for the US variety, people make their living in Second Life as designers of virtual clothing, or creators of virtual artwork.  It's become such a phenomenon that Mark Warner made two campaign appearances within Second Life and Reuters just opened a virtual bureau with a  reporter assigned full time to report on events in this alternate world.

Mark Warner in Second Life

So what does a game like World of Warcraft or an amusing social experiment like Second Life have to do with my shivering over The Thirteenth Floor?  

In the film, the protagonist was part of a company that had created a much more elaborate version of a virtual world, one where you could slip in and live out your fantasies while surrounded by objects and people more or less indistinguishable from those you faced every day.  Only by the end of the film, the protagonist discovers that what he's always thought of as the "real world" is only the creation of yet another reality.  He himself is only a character in someone else's fantasyland.  The rabbit hole is not only deeper than he imagined, it may be bottomless.  A true existentialist nightmare.

Players in World of Warcraft, or participants in Second Life, may certainly lose hours (and money, and possibly real world relationships) to their virtual obsessions, but none of them is likely to mistake the animated images on their screen for an alternate plane of existence.  But then, we're still very close to the start of the computer age.  Twenty years ago, Pac Man was "good graphics," and now Flight Simulator X is so realistic, you can quite literally get motion sickness while playing.  Give it another dozen years, or maybe a dozen after that, and will the graphics we project on our screens -- or in our heads -- be so realistic that they're indistinguishable from the physical world?  What happens when the objects, people, and events of these created worlds reach levels of complexity and reality as far beyond where they are today as World of Warcraft is beyond Pac Man?

"Over a few decades, computers have evolved from being able to simulate only very simple patterns to being able to create virtual worlds with a lot of detail. [said Rees]  "If that trend were to continue, then we can imagine computers which will be able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one we think we're living in.

"This raises the philosophical question: could we ourselves be in such a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of vault of heaven rather than the real thing. In a sense we could be ourselves the creations within this simulation."

To make the idea even more compelling, consider this.  It may take ten years, it may take fifty, but odds are that within this century we will have the computer technology needed to simulate a compelling universe.  And once we have the ability to create one such alternate space, we'll be able to create dozens, hundreds, or millions.  At the same time, creating an actual universe seems rather a daunting task (even if it now seems something on the order of a tablespoon of matter may have been all that was required to start our own).  So...

• Virtual universes are much easier to create than real universes.


• A single real universe may spawn a near infinite number of virtual universes.


• Even a virtual universe can create other virtual universes, but can not create a real universe.

Got your head around that?  Then here's the result: any universe you find yourself in is much more likely, almost infinitely more likely, to be a virtual universe than it is to be a true physical universe.

Oh, and someone let the intelligent design folks know, they may be right.  Of course, if they are, then odds are very good that the God who created this universe is himself no more than a simulation in someone else's creation.