The Matrix: A Simulation, a Game, Reincarnation, or Hallucination?
For quite some time, a few thoughts have been haunting me. What if all we see doesn’t exist, and we are all hostages or participants of a game.
The Beginning: The Matrix and Rick and Morty
It all started a while ago. In high school, I was into cyberpunk, reading and watching about hackers, virtual reality, etc. Neuromancer, Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson, Labyrinth of Reflections by Sergei Lukyanenko, The Matrix, and The Lawnmower Man were my go-to entertainment. Then I forgot about it until the recent generative AI explosion and… a few episodes of Rick and Morty. In one episode, Morty plays a VR game where he starts as a newborn with no memories of life outside the game and lives an entire life until he dies at 60-80 years old. In another episode, he gets stuck in a game where his consciousness is fragmented into pieces, acting as an entire world of independent agents.
And here are those intrusive, haunting ideas:
Not the Worst Scenario: It’s All a Simulation
What if we are all in a simulation or an experiment, one of many, exploring how a world would work if… That “if” can be anything, for example, if the physics constants are slightly different, or if we populate a planet with a simple form of life or a more complex one, how civilizations form and die. It’s not the worst case because it means that even if we are all simulations, we still act like independent agents, impacting our beliefs in free will, good and evil, etc.
A Better Option?: An Online Multiplayer Game
Imagine that, like in Rick and Morty, you are in a VR game where consciousness is uploaded to the game. There are other real people in the game, but not everyone. The people you interact with most frequently are real. The game creates situations so you bump into each other all the time, which is why the world may feel small. This scenario is slightly worse than the previous one because your decisions may be influenced by the game. On the flip side, it means that you cannot really die; you just log out. But it could also be a simulation, just on a smaller scale.
A Worse Option?: Everyone Else is an NPC
Now imagine that the hardware outside the matrix is limited, or they are running a small experiment, or it’s a single-player game. Regardless of the reason, you are here alone, and everyone else is an NPC. Everything around you only “exists” when you look at it. The case of an experiment is probably the worst in this scenario because there’s no one with whom you can share joy and pain. The case of a game is not that bad because you will eventually return to reality when the game is finished.
Regardless of the type of game, online or offline, games need to be challenging or have different levels of difficulty. This leads us to malicious agents. If you picked an easy mode, with little to no stress, you may live in a distant village and be happy in your community. Or, if you picked a hard mode, maybe having played this game before, then you need to fight cancer or go through betrayal. These difficulties are malicious agents that operate at different levels.
The Worst Option or Not: Hallucination
All our experiences are, to an extent, hallucinations of our brain. Our consciousness sits inside a box and perceives the outside world via sensory channels, which may or may not be connected to real organs. The brain uses whatever information it receives from any source. Everything we see, hear, touch, feel, taste is processed by our brain. Hence, we make decisions based on our brain’s interpretation of the outside world, which can be close to or far from reality.
To some degree, this option is not that different from the simulation or the game. But we can make it the worst option or the best, depending on the type of hallucination or how we look at it. So maybe right now, you are experiencing a hallucination of a dying brain. Maybe someone gave you poison that induces a dream, so you can live while you are dying. Or maybe you are really high after eating magic mushrooms.
Reincarnation, Different Hardware, and Forgotten Memories
In some religions, we are allowed to return to life via reincarnation into a different body. All scenarios with games and simulations allow reincarnation to exist by reusing agents or moving their consciousness from one brain to another. If during that process, the agent’s memory is not fully cleaned up or the consciousness setup process does not remove all memory, like even a formatted SD card may have residual data from deleted files, that could explain stories about people remembering their previous lives. It could explain how several people can have memories of being Napoleon or Joan of Arc if the game allows people to choose their avatars.
Another interesting part about reincarnation is hardware. Imagine a game that gives you a body randomly or allows you to pick an animal you want to reincarnate into. In that case, your mind may be constrained in terms of memory or computational power, so you will be able to express your individuality only to some limited extent.
And All That Now Smooshed Together
In the last part, imagine a game where everything we talked about is smooshed together. You move from life to life, from body to body, with residual memories and pretty much the same set of people around you playing the same game, which usually ends within 2 hours of time outside the game. So, you all can sit together and discuss the game while drinking your favorite tea.
Originally posted here: https://antongolubtsov.substack.com/p/the-matrix-a-simulation-a-game-a