ASIDE 1: I wasn't sure whether this topic should be posted here in General Discussion or in Gaming Discussion. If I got it wrong, can somebody move it to the right place?

ASIDE 2: The following, among other things, contains thoughts on religion that fall outside the mainstream. I just wanted to warn anyone who may be sensitive to those sorts of things. Disrespect is not intended on my part, but I fear that some offense may be inevitable just given the nature of my thoughts, so I apologize for that in advance to anyone who is sensitive about these things. Anyway, here we go:

So I was playing the new game Everything yesterday and its focus on changing your perspective on the universe based on degrees of magnification got me thinking about perspectives on life itself. I was reminded in particular of a recent study that unearthed the first hard evidence that the universe we live in is a hologram.

Think about this for a minute: long before video games existed, people tended to "play" life like it were one. Like a VR game. You know, religious people see all kinds of characters that I can't, they have systems for scoring points, losing points, getting good and bad endings of various sorts and degrees, etc. Life to them has win states and lose states, perhaps looping narrative structures in some cases, all that sort of thing. But just as video games are simplifications of life, I think perhaps "playing" life like it's a game is likewise perhaps to over-simplify reality.

And yet, does the hologram theory that's now emerging as credible not suggest some kind of intelligent design? Perhaps the mistake of the religious is simply that of arrogantly assuming that we are the player characters in this game. Maybe we're not actually "plugged in", Matrix-like. Maybe whatever it is we call god or goddess, gods or goddesses, or whatever it is that applies, is/are actually the people who are playing this game and we are just A.I. characters there to fill up their world. Maybe that explains why we have things like instincts pulling our behaviors in certain directions instead of possessing total self-control, for instance. And/or why we sometimes have "glitches" like deja vu. Maybe this whole game has been played before many times and that's why we seem to inexplicably remember various scenes at times. Maybe all our memories are false and were just programmed into us when we woke up this morning. Maybe this is the first day of our "lives". And maybe it's the last too.

Well these are just my free-floating thoughts on the subject. Personally, with this emerging evidence that the universe is a hologram, I think it's more likely than not that some kind of intelligent design exists. I also think though that we're just supposed to be pawns in this game; that we're not supposed to know its point because its point isn't relevant to us, which is why no one knows what the purpose of life is even though we all search for it. It does seem kind of silly that our prevailing academic assumption (humanism) is that we are the center around which everything revolves. And it certainly makes more sense to me that intelligent design would exist rather than just the Big Bang somehow by itself explaining everything. There HAD to be some cause for the Big Bang.

Then again, if the Big Bang might ultimately be explained by intelligent design, then how do we explain the origins of that intelligence? Maybe, like ancient philosophers used to contend, there was no beginning. Something has just always been. *shrugs* I couldn't tell you, and I think that gets back to the point that I don't think we're actually supposed to know how this whole thing works.

What do you (anyone) think? Do you think the universe that we know is actually someone else's video game? Or is it instead our game (Matrix-like perhaps)? Or is it not a game at all?

2deep4me

Is videogame life?

Yes, yes it is.

I have no idea.

If life is a video game, do we still need to uphold to our moral values?

I've thought about it before, and in doing so came across my own strange discovery. In video games, its not hard to notice when a game glitches, at least from our perspective. But to a video game, or by extension, a computer, nothing ever goes wrong. A computer will always do exactly what you tell it to do, and if it doesnt do what you want it to do, you just didnt tell it to do the right things.

So any counter-theorist could make the claim "Well if reality were a simulation then why don't we ever see any glitches" but if we are all part of the simulation then we wouldnt be able to recognize what a glitch is, and there is no AI that could evolve to recognize one because the computer is always sure that its doing the right thing.

So really anything could potentially be a glitch. What if we were never supposed to have dreams? What if leaves were never meant to fall off of trees? At that point it just becomes complicated to even think about.

I knew you'd be talking about the hologram theory. Tagging for when I have a bit more time to read your post. Short answer. No.

Life!?.....what console is that on?

It would explain why there are so many idiots in the world as AI is always an afterthought in games.

Basically the MIB ending. Is there something else that's running the universe, that has thought. I say no. Everything is just random events. Now, if someone created the universe. Why would they stop modifying it, for our billions of years. Second: these beings would most likely want to rule their universe. Even if it was some sort of experiment. No interaction? Third: if they created everything. Matter, energy etc. Why would they do a guinea pig test? There would be no reason, to see what would happen. Since they create the elements, themselves. They could will anything, for any reason. They should have an understanding, of everything. Like the Q, from Star Trek. And that brings me back to my second point. Forth: If it is an experiment. How do they monitor the amount of planets, stars, people, etc. Without failure. Catching everything. To the subatomic level. It be a massive waste. If they missed chunks of data.