Oh! It looks like I'm back again, guest-hosting SNLC for Chingchongchinaman. I'm as surprised as you.
I want to thank everybody for the kind words of consolation for my SNLC diary last week, relating my personal healthcare horror story battling Pacificare. I just want you all to know I'm fine. I don't need any cash donations, although, hell, I always need cash donations; who doesn't?
But last week I promised that this week would be less healthcare horror, more armchair philosophy.
Stephen Hawking is making a media tour, including Larry King last night, where he is hawkin (ha ha) his just released co-authored book, "The Grand Design." One of the reviews describes it as approaching the line between physics and metaphysics. Now, I don't own nor have I read the book, but I certainly will. I'm curious if it intersects with any of my own armchair bullshit philosophy of the universe: The Dumboverse. Or D-theory, if you prefer.
But first, let me take you seemingly far afield, so you can remain in suspense, wondering how I'm going to tie all this together.
There's a wonderful computer game out there called The Sims, now in its third version, with so many expansion packs that you can go broke keeping up with it. The premise of the game, or toy, is simple and interesting: You have a virtual world full of little Sim people with their own personalities and appearances and genetics. They live in little virtual houses which you can build for them as you please, and relate to each other in different ways, perhaps falling in love and having little Sim babies or wanting to kick each others' asses with various insults and pranks and hostile acts up to and including a dust-ball fight, with the other Sims rushing around to cheer for one or the other as they watch. Your Sims can marry, have children, cheat on each other, turn gay, get sick, lose their jobs, be abducted by aliens, be killed by small asteroids falling on their heads, etc., etc.
Obviously you can play this game as you like. For instance, I end up most of the time trying to keep the house clean, keep the refrigerator full, pull weeds from the yard, and show up for work, all the things I am terrible at in real life. You can make little stories with the game, as well, using your Sims as the actors, and upload them to the EA mothersite. For instance, when the game first came out, I decided to make a pair of lesbians who marry wealthy townie sims and then drown them in the swimming pool (the easiest way to kill a Sim, by the way), collecting the insurance and celebrating with a romp in the vibrating bed. Unfortunately, when I went to post it, I found out everybody else had had the same idea: Lots and lots of killer lesbian stories. Damn. I guess non-great minds think alike, too, huh?
Mother and daughter Sims watching TV.
One of the interesting aspects of the game engine, though, is the option of free will. The Sims can actually do an almost decent job of maintaining themselves without any guidance from you, the player, for instance if you pass out from drinking booze with the game still running. In fact, with the latest version, Sims 3, the whole neighborhood manages itself fairly well, with Sims dying, being born, moving in and out of town, children growing up and moving, falling in love and marrying, starting their own families, moving to bigger or smaller houses as the need arises, getting their own jobs, hanging out in town at the theater or the bookstore or the park, where you can see them going about their business as if they have their own purpose.
Entertaining, huh? The only thing that could make it more fun would be a chainsaw; I've made requests for that.
When EA/Maxis was developing the first Sims game, during game-testing they made a discovery early on: players didn't like it when the Sims could manage their own lives too well. In the early beta-tests, the Sims were intelligent enough to just do everything on their own, leaving little for the players to micro-manage. So they dumbed down the Sims. That way players could have more fun intervening and playing God
So here's my first question? How do we know that we're not part of a giant simulation game? If Sims were much, much more intelligent, might they not ask that same question? Why is their virtual world less real than our own?
There is a determinist formula that produces the world that the Sims live in, and all their behavior. That formula is called the Sims game itself, $39.99 or something from EA. If, rather than The Sims, we call it function F(I), where I are whatever initial conditions are provided, and F() is the game program, then the result would be the set of possible worlds and stories that can be told with the game. In one of those worlds, let's say there is a Sim who, because of the way the game plays out, actually wonders about the nature of his world, how it works, what the formulas are that govern it, and what the logic is behind the whole thing.
Is his world real? To him, it is. Everywhere he looks, there's his Sim-world, even when he looks in the mirror. Is he real? Well, to us, he's a real Sim, but our opinion and definition of his reality would be different from his.
Let's say we assume, yes, a Sim like that, intelligent enough to ask questions like that in the context of a game, is a real person. We are alike in many ways. He's wondering about logical determinism and the rules that govern his existence. So is Stephen Hawking. Such a sim is the Stephen Hawking of The Sims.
Okay, let's ratchet up the metaphysics mindfuck of all this. Do we actually have to PLAY the Sims on a real computer in order for this self-aware Sim we described to be real? Or does the mere possibility of his existence make him real? If we have the software F() and the initial conditions (I), we can generate our little Hawking-Sim anytime we want, can't we? That is, if we want to watch him go through the whole process again of questioning his existence, looking in the mirror, wondering about where such a clumsy and cruel formula for his existence came from. We can vary the story through our own version of quantum effects, as well, by throwing in some random-number generators that tweak it a little each time it is played. But does it even HAVE to be played to be real? If we know that it is the result of F(I), then what requirement is there for the game to be played on a computer for it to be real? To us, it doesn't seem real until we watch it, maybe, but we can watch it anytime we want once we have the software!
The conclusion I come to is that our Sim-Hawking is real and exists simply because F(I) exists, whether EA ever codes and sells such a magnificently turbo-charged version of its game or not. If it can be done, then it exists.
LIKEWISE...
If there is a similar formula G(J) which produces as its result the set of all possible universes of all possible physics, and one of those universes describes our own, then our universe exists, regardless of whether some God entity plays it out on its home computer system. From our perspective, as little Sim-Hawkings in our Sims game which we call real world, there may be no distinction between our theoretical existence and our real existence.
What do you think? Too heavy? I can spin out a thousand different scenarios that challenge our ideas of what is real and not-real out of this, some of which can be quite uncomfortable and alien.
The Dumbo Sim
And, oh yes, how could I fail to self-promote at a time like this? I have a weekly series of my own, Thursday Classical Music Blogging, which analyzes famous classical music pieces at a fun and didactic Music for Dummies level. It's a mixture of history and music theory and vicious rumors and philosophy and coffee and lots and lots of musical youtubes. You're all encouraged to drop by, any Thursday, 5pm PDT. This week, we finished the last movement of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique. Next Thursday will probably be Schubert. As DallasDoc himself said, "It's probably the best series on DailyKos right now."