When I was 12 years old, I was in this enrichment program with five of my classmates where we were able to study anything we wanted, anything that came into our minds that interested us. It was totally free-wheeling. One day, at someone’s suggestion, we took a field trip to a computer programming facility, the details of which I can barely remember all these years later. This was around 1980, when the Apple II was just becoming popular. Computers were still a curiosity at the time because most of us had never even touched one, and it wasn’t clear to most people, including my father, what they were for and why anyone should buy one. They were also super expensive, so there was zero chance of ever getting one in my house. Shit, we couldn’t even convince my father to get cable TV, much less a $1200 computer.
So we get to this facility and someone who worked there began to explain computers and computer programming to us. Eventually, he said, everyone was going to be using one of these things. At one point, one of the younger employees–he looked college-aged–asked us if we wanted to see something cool. (Of course we did.) Then he pulled out this black, square-shaped thing called a ‘floppy disk’ (which was weird because it didn’t look floppy at all), and plugged it into a slot on the side of his Apple II. A few seconds later the word ‘Wizardry’ appeared on the screen in green and purple. The guy explained that Wizardry was a ‘role-player game’ where you created a character from a choice of five possible races–humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and hobbits–aligned your character as good, neutral, or evil, and then chose a class–fighter, priest, mage, or thief. Then you equipped them with basic armor and weapons and proceeded to walk them through a castle dungeon where you would encounter other characters and monsters on your quest.
The graphics were crude and blocky. Specific keys on the keyboard were the character’s navigation system. Most of the other characters were friendly consiglieri. On request, they dispensed advice that would help you locate weapons, find loot, and defeat monsters. Others were absolute dicks who would lead you astray or steal your shit. Then there were the monsters: skeletons, slime, gelatinous cubes, evil dwarves, dragons, etc. When you crossed paths with a monster, its image would pop up in a box on the screen. Each time a decision had to be made, whether to talk to someone or fight a monster, the game would pause and ask you what you wanted to do, and you had to choose one of the options offered to you. There was no automap like you see in today’s games — you had to draw one yourself based on your navigation through the dungeon.
After a few minutes of showing us the ropes, the guy let each of us take a turn in the chair. I played for a few minutes, and oh man, was I hooked. I absolutely loved it. It made my Atari feel like it was for two-year olds. You mean I’m not just stuck on the same screen with different advancing levels? I can make decisions beyond just shooting shit and those decisions actually matter in the game?
It seems ridiculous by today’s video game standards, but having complete freedom and independence to make my own decisions and navigate my way through a game was a watershed moment for me. It made every game different each time I played. It also meant that there was no right or wrong way to play. I almost didn’t care about the ‘goal’ or end result of the game, which apparently involved defeating an evil wizard. I never got that far. For me, the fun was making choices and choosing my own adventure (and yes, killing monsters). I also liked the learning involved as I used the experience I acquired to make better decisions and progress further into the game the next time. The whole experience was intoxicating to me. I ended up playing Wizardry again at a friend’s house, along with another early RPG gem, Castle Wolfenstein, because his father worked for (now-defunct) Digital Corporation, so unlike most of my friends, he had a personal computer early on. These games were pretty much the only reason I ever wanted to play at his house. They were totally addictive, and we played for hours on end.
It’s been decades since I thought about Wizardry, but it popped into my mind the other day when someone on Twitter posted a 20-second clip of a new simulation called “Sora” that OpenAI just created. It looked so realistic that I almost couldn’t tell that it wasn’t a video with real people in it. I’m not talking about PS5 or X-Box graphics here. Those are incredible in their own right and a far cry from Wizardy’s crudeness, but Sora was REAL real-looking. Virtually indistinguishable from what my eyes would see if I was looking out my window. It was that realistic.
Don’t believe me? Look at this shit:
It’s mind-blowing, and one can only imagine the fuckery the world’s intelligence services are going to pull with this technology. Pretty soon, my brothers and sisters, we’re not going to be able to tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. We’re totally fucked.
But it got me thinking….
In less than 50 years the human race has managed to take us from Wizardry‘s blocky graphics to the incredible, hyperrealistic virtual reality movie seen above. What will it do in the next 50 years? How about the next 100? 1000? One can only imagine what’s possible, what we’re going to be able to create, assuming we don’t obliterate ourselves first.
But this only considers what may be possible for us, the human race, to achieve. What about other life forms that may be out there? Just because we (supposedly) haven’t crossed paths with them doesn’t mean we can assume they don’t exist. Based on simple mathematics and the size of the universe, we need to factor them in as possibilities. So when we see what perpetually warring, selfish, greedy, racist, murderous ape progeny like us have managed to accomplish in only 6000 years of modern civilization, it’s not difficult to imagine that another species may have advanced far more than we have and created a virtual reality system that makes ours look like Atari’s Pong. It’s not difficult to imagine that what we perceive as ‘reality’ isn’t true reality at all; it’s just an exponentially more advanced version of Sora that we’re walking around in. It’s entirely possible that we’re living in a hyperrealistic simulation that we either created ourselves, or was created by a far more intelligent life form than our own. (Not a high bar, tbh.)
Seriously, how the fuck would we know? We WOULDN’T know. There would be no way for us to know. We wouldn’t know any more than that (admittedly jangly) Japanese woman in the video above doesn’t know that she’s just a character in a movie.
‘But we’re conscious, and she’s not.‘
So what? People walking around in those dumb-looking Apple Vision Pro headsets are conscious too. When you think about what will be technologically possible in a few thousand years, when you sprinkle a little Black Mirror on that shit, it’s absolutely possible that the real you and real me exist somewhere else in a different form while we’re playing this game called ‘Life’ with human bodies as avatars and brains as electromagnetic receivers. And since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it’s entirely possible that when these human bodies of ours die, the electromagnetic energy inside of us gets released, and we return to what we REALLY are. Then, if those NDEs are to be believed, we download a life review about everything we learned in our most recent life, take a hot metaphysical shower to wash off any lingering psychosis from the shitshow we just experienced, and either reincarnate into a new form or elevate to a higher plane.
This is my current working theory of the nature of reality, and I’ll tell you what, it makes a fuckload more sense to me as a likely possibility than a ridiculous fairytale in a book written exclusively by men hundreds of years after the purported events depicted therein, whose contents were selectively chosen by other men–powerful men, flawed men, members of councils and synods. Catholic Popes. It was powerful men with biases and agendas who got to decide which canonical texts would be included in the Bible, and which ones would be tossed into history’s garbage can. Most Christians couldn’t name a single one of those excluded canons. The idea that millions of people blindly follow a book that was written hundreds of years before the Middle Ages is insane to me.
If you think a simulation theory is far-fetched, but the Bible is definitely factual and worthy of belief, please excuse me while I laugh in your face. Macbeth had it wrong. It’s not life that’s a ‘tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.’ It’s the Bible. And the ‘idiot’ in this equation is organized religion.
Which brings me to the second half of this piece. (I’m half-thinking I should take an edible before I finish this. I’ll let you guess if I did or not.)
If we take this simulation theory to its logical conclusion, then it fundamentally changes the nature of what we perceive to be reality. Let’s speculate, shall we? We have consciousness and free will (I think), so I don’t believe we’re just a bunch of zombies being operated by a higher intelligence who’s sitting home bored because he didn’t get any hits on his 5th Dimension Tinder. Nor would a zombie avatar have the self-awareness to come up with a wackadoo post like this where it questions the nature of its own reality. Unless, of course, we’re AI-style hosts living in a form of Westworld or The Matrix.
No, even though I believe this version of reality isn’t the ‘real’ reality, I believe there’s a purpose to it, and we–our human selves–are lower-vibrating, holographic projections of our real selves. What’s the purpose of manufacturing a false reality for ourselves? Assuming there’s no psychosis involved (this could all be a bad dream or psychotic breakdown that our higher Self is having), if I had to guess, I’d say we created this reality to experience choice, change, and hardship and the muck of life that our higher selves can’t experience because they live perpetually in the Present, outside of space and time, and they exist in an unchangeable, perfect form that can never die or experience change or loss. How else could we experience those things except to change form, forget who we really are for a while, and go full-on human (or alien) for a life or three or ten or a thousand lives? Maybe the only way for the Immortal and Perfect to grow, expand, evolve, and extend Creation is to experience the imperfect and believe it can die. Maybe the only way for the Immortal and Perfect to believe it can die is to forget who and what It really is while having this human experience. Maybe that’s the real purpose of this life. Maybe life is not for us with the small ‘u,’ the little human egos we think we are. Maybe it’s really for Us with the big ‘U,’ the real and true Immortal Us.
What else? If our reality really is a simulation, then it’s possible that every choice we make alters the simulation, and we shift away from the version of reality that we were previously in (and the choices we didn’t make) to a new reality that results from our choices. In other words, every single choice we make, from the trivial ones–Should I go with Charmin or Cottonelle? 1-ply or 2-ply?–to the big ones–Should I marry this person? Should I relive my teenage years and fuck everything attractive that moves after I get divorced? Should I enlist to go to Afghanistan after 9/11? Should I quit my job, move to Italy, and live off of espressos, mountain air, and the love of a good woman?–changes our current reality.
This means there’s an infinite number of potential realities available to each of us, and an infinite number of versions of ourselves who make an infinite number of different decisions in each of those infinite realities. Every time we make a decision, we shift to a different reality, like a character making a choice in that Wizardry game: turn right, turn left, kill skeleton, run away from skeleton. We just do it in an unfathomably more complex and totally imperceptible way. But unlike in Wizardry or Demon’s Souls–which I’ve been playing forever on my PS5 because today’s games are too fucking hard for a middle-aged guy with limited time who was weaned on Asteroids and Space Invaders–we don’t hear a computer hard drive whirring or a fan blowing every time we make a decision. The reality shift happens without us knowing it happened.
Query: Would I be able to see this shift happen in real time if I could see quarks? If I could see small enough would it be perceptible to me? How much exists that we can’t see with our eyes? If we break things down to small enough pieces, will we discover that we’re all just part of the same thing? Google ‘wave-particle duality.’ Scientists did a test where they sent a light electron through a tiny slit. When the electron was being observed by scientists, it had particle-like properties. When it wasn’t being observed, it had wave properties. At bottom, this means that we change our reality simply by observing it. Human observation ALTERS reality. That chair you’re looking at isn’t REALLY comprised of solid wood or plastic. It’s really comprised of waves but you looked at it so it became the solid mass that you see. If we change what we see merely by observing something, what’s real? I’d say the wave is real, not the particle, but the bottom line is we don’t yet understand the nature of our own reality.
So….. this means that there are versions of reality where I’m still married to my ex-wife. Or to someone else entirely. There’s a version of reality where I never got engaged, stayed in Williamsburg, and kept that two-bedroom apartment that’s now worth $2 million. There’s a version of reality where I’m a billionaire with ten kids. Or no kids. There’s a version of reality where I’m homeless. Or a drug addict. There’s a version of reality where I killed someone, and I’m rotting in a jail somewhere. Or vice-versa. Each of those possible realities exists somewhere in the infinite multiverse of potential realities. I’ll never experience many of them. Many others are still possibilities until this version of me dies. It all depends on the choices I make and those that others will make in the meantime. I haven’t even talked about this–other people have choices every second too, and their choices also create an infinite number of realities for me on top of my infinite realities. Their decisions impact my choices and the trajectory of my life.
It’s fun to contemplate those possibilities, but I’m living in this version of reality, though after reading this, some may wonder if I’m sufficiently grounded in reality at all. Every day I make a million choices that dictate the version of reality that I’ll experience immediately after I make a choice. None of us know the ‘best’ choice we should make in any given situation because we don’t have access to the full scope of our potential realities, or the choices we would need to make to achieve a desired result. We don’t have a cheat code, but even if we had one, a cheat code would defeat the entire purpose of this experience. And do we even know if that result we desire with our little human brains is really the best result for us in the grand scheme of things? If we don’t even know why we’re here or the true purpose of our lives, how could we possibly know if our small-brained desire, that firing of synapses controlled by our subconscious and dopamine craving is any better for us than crack or heroin? We really don’t know at all, do we?
I take a few things from this belief system.
First, we all need to calm the fuck down about most of the stupid things we worry about. None of this is REAL real. So ride the wave in this life if you’re privileged and lucky enough to be able to do so. Most of the world isn’t. Most of the world is struggling to find food and water, living in endemic poverty, or struggling to survive daily violence, so this is a distinctly First World discussion I’m having here. If you’re privileged like me, find your joy and hold on to it. Make the best choices possible for yourself, but understand that none of this is life or death. There is no death. You’re never going to know where that other road would have taken you and that’s exactly the point. You’re not in that reality. You’re in this one. And you don’t have only one life, even though you think you do. So let go of the past. Let go of regret. Focus on the now.
Second, we have way more power to create the life we want than we think. Every decision we make has pros and cons, costs and benefits, and joys and consequences. Nothing is free, and every choice we make limits other options. To a great extent, we’re living the lives we choose to live. We got where we are based on all the choices we made to get here, from toddlerdom to adulthood. We also have the power to change our lives by changing our choices. All easier said than done of course because our thoughts, emotions, and subconscious drive nearly all of our behavior. But two of those are changeable with enough self-awareness and internal work, and eventually they have the capacity to bleed into the third. Changing our reality (if we even want to change it) starts with changing our thoughts and choices. We have free will to choose how we think and what we do. That’s real power.
Third, so many of the things we spend time on in this life are a complete waste of our time. So many things that people believe in this world are completely backwards and holding people back. If this reality is only a simulation, then organized religion is even more fictional bunk than I previously thought, and all those wars we’re fighting over land, ethnic differences, natural resources, religion, and historical grievances are even more tragic than I thought. Maybe Jesus, Mohammed, and Yahweh never intended to be worshipped by mindless zombies. Maybe they were simply messengers whose message has been completely bastardized by a few powerful people with selfish agendas who simply want to control people while enjoying the perks of their position.
Lastly, none of this answers the basic question of how we’re supposed to make choices for ourselves in this reality, whether it’s the REAL real or not. I don’t have an answer to that question. I don’t always know whether it’s best to ‘run from skeleton’ or ‘kill skeleton.’ I’m still figuring this out myself. I can only guess, and my guess is to always follow my intuition, that internal voice that speaks to me when I’m able to quiet my mind, stop the thought loops, meditate, and open myself up to ANY possibility, not just the one I want in any given moment. All of this is incredibly hard to do given all the distractions and time constraints in the modern world, and I’m no shaman. But I do feel like that internal voice is my higher self reaching out and guiding me when I’m really ready to listen. Most of the time it’s telling me to be patient, let go of what I think I want and need, and live without fear or regret because I chose my own adventure, and I’m living it. I’m where I’m supposed to be and learning what I’m supposed to learn.
And if I fuck it up–if I ran from skeleton when I should have killed skeleton–well I’ll get plenty of chances to get it right the next time, won’t I? Or maybe I won’t. Maybe there’s no ‘right’ or ‘fucking up’ at all. Maybe there’s just the experience of this reality and what we take from it. Maybe that’s all there is.
