The Question Of Reality

And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’ [asked Tweedledee] ‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice. ‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘you’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!

While our first Model suggested that God might be a figment of the human’s imagination, in this dialog, Tweedeldee introduces the opposing view in which we and the entire world are but a figment of someone’s imagination. While for long time this was the heart of many theological discussions, development in computer science and simulation techniques may shed a new light on this concept.

Computer simulation underlies a wide range of applications like weather forecasting and finance, and it is an inseparable part of many computer games, from the simple Pacman to most advanced contemporary interactive games. For the sake of simplicity, as the reader is likely to be more familiar with computer games than any other application of simulation, I have chosen to use computer games to demonstrate the concept. It is only an analogy, and should not be taken as an attempt to draw parallels or analogies.

Many computer games provide users with the flexibility to create their own physical environment (mountains, lakes, structures, vegetation). He or she may also configure the laws of nature for their world, such as weather patterns, the length of the day, strength of gravity and the life expectancy of the living creations.

Without delving into the question of consciousness (which I may discuss in the future) let’s try to see the world from the point of view of the intelligent beings ‘living’ in the simulated world. Intuitively, they are likely to be familiar with of some of the rules governing their world. For example, they would be aware that they cannot go through walls and other solid objects, or if we defined gravity, they would know that heavy bodies fall down and that they cannot fly. Other rules may be more of a mystery to them: if – to make the simulation more interesting – we added randomness to weather patterns or life expectancy, they would find these rules harder, if not impossible, to decipher.

These intelligent beings may be programmed to strive to understand the rules of their world and develop their own science and technology (rule finding algorithms is a branch of Artificial Intelligent). But even if the rules their scientists discovered were testable, predictable and applicable, they would only be relevant to their in-simulation world. They will not be able to see the world from the programmer or user’s point of view, and could not perceive that everything in the world they live in, including themselves, is nothing but a computer-running program.

When running the simulation, the average computer-user may not be interested in waiting for the simulation world to develop ‘naturally’, but is more likely to create it at the point in time that he or she is interested in. The simulated world would start with history, and its entities would be born with their memories (they can recognize their family members, their enemies where they live, and what they like to eat.) By doing so the player has no intention to lie or deceive the entities of the world he created. But they are deceived nevertheless because the player’s objectives are entirely different from theirs, and can never be understood by them.

In this analogy, are we the programmers, the players or might we be the entities in somebody else’s simulation? Is there a way we can ever test or disprove it?

While the first model derives its truth from science and ignores any religious claims, the second alternative claims that while science is correct for the present affairs of the world, the scripts provide the ultimate truth about the creation and our past.

As neither Adam nor Eve was born of a woman’s womb, early Christian artists debated whether they should be portrayed with or without navels. A fig leaf over their lower bodies normally solved the problem for the artists, but not for theologist and naturalists.

In 1857, two years before Darwin published his theory of evolution, a British naturalist named Philip Henry Gosse, addressed this question in a book called Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. In his book, Gosse argued that both Adam and Eve had a navel, as they were created human in every detail, including the appearance of age and history of birth. In the same way, he argued, a world created by an act of creation, would have been created with the appearance of age and history.

Gosse’s argument was adopted by creationists and those with similar doctrines that propound that God created the earth relatively recently, but made it appear much older. To this day, this is one of the arguments most widely used against the scientific unequivocal claim that based on fossils and other scientific evidence, the world is extremely ancient.

Although this argument cannot be disproved scientifically, it has raised many questions. First, if the world was created with a ‘built-in’ history, why should we assume that it happened at the time described by the biblical account and not at any other time, for instance, last night or five minutes ago? After all, creation with history, which includes our own memories, could have happened at any time. Neither science nor our experience can indicate the time of such creation.

The second question is why should we assume that the creator would like to deceive us, and what might his reasons be to play such a trick? The common answer is that we, mere human, cannot expect to understand the reasons behind the deeds of a creator. The natural counter argument would be that if we can’t understand the mind or motivation of the creator, how can we be sure that it’s the ‘truth’ He told us in the scripts? Can we be so arrogant to believe that such a mighty creator owes us the truth?