The simulation hypothesi.., p.19
The Simulation Hypothesis, page 19
Dreams as Mini-Simulations
Not only does the metaphor of the dream work well with the concept of simulations, it seems tailor-made for the simulation hypothesis.
Like a dream, which lasts for only a set period of time, each simulation, each multiplayer game that we are part of runs for a certain period of time and then comes to completion, and then each simulation runs again. Moreover, if you are in the rendered world of a video game, it seems real and permanent to the characters in the game, but we know it is ephemeral, and the rendering lasts only as long as the rendering process is actually going on—while we are playing.
When scientists and technologists have needed inspiration, they’ve looked to natural processes for clues on how to build more sophisticated technologies. Most AI and machine learning today has some roots in neural networks, which were inspired by neurons in the brain. Even heavier-than-air flying machines borrowed the idea of wings from birds and bats.
In Part I, I outlined the stages of technology needed to build realistic games and reach the simulation point. Stages 1 to 5 and even Stage 6 (physical broadcast and 3D printing) on the road to the simulation point can be easily understood based on our existing technologies. But when looking for inspiration for how the advanced stages (Stages 7 and beyond) might be achieved technologically, it’s only reasonable to turn to natural processes that we might use for inspiration or to copy.
It turns out that dreaming, which is such a powerful metaphor in the Eastern spiritual traditions, is a natural process that shows we have already developed most of the stages that a technological civilization must achieve to reach the simulation point!
While dreaming, consider the following naturally occurring characteristics:
The “player” lays down physically, and their body goes to “sleep” (Stage 10—downloading of consciousness into a simulated body).
Pictures and sounds are projected directly into the player’s mind’s eye (Stage 7—mind interfaces).
The player is immersed to such an extent that they forget the world they are seeing is not real (Stage 11—the simulation point).
The player is conscious at some level, even though unaware of their normal consciousness outside of the dream (full immersion).
The dream reads the player’s intentions directly from the mind (Stage 7—mind interfaces).
There are non-player characters who may or may not be real (Stage 9—artificial intelligence).
In the dream state, sometimes it seems that there are memories associated with the dream that are not part of the person’s physical life (Stage 8).
It may just be that when a civilization reaches the simulation point it is a matter of being able to reproduce, with computation and video game technology, a process that every single human being already does naturally: dreaming!
In Buddhist terms, enlightenment is waking up from the dream while it is still going on and recognizing that what we thought was real is actually not real. Perhaps something similar is going on in a simulation: part of the goal is to become aware of the world beyond the game—that we are only “playing” our current characters, while other players in the game keep on playing, blissfully unaware that they are in a transitory, temporary video game. In science fiction terms, it is kind of like when, in The Matrix, Neo takes one of the pills and wakes up in an entirely different world outside the simulation.
Looking at dreams from the perspective of the simulation hypothesis:
Dreams Are Like Little Simulations. They are created for each of our minds to go into each evening, to serve some purpose. We are like players in the game.
Dream Elements Incorporate Familiar and Unfamiliar Elements. Sometimes we clearly see an element from a TV show or book that has made an impression on us show up in a dream that evening; other elements may be familiar to us (loved ones) and unfamiliar to us (generic characters), or both (familiar to our dream self but not to our waking self). This is similar to how we may create things or see things in our simulations that come from our previous non-simulated reality. We’ll talk more about this in the next chapter.
Waking Up Produces Confusion. When we wake from dreaming, we are a little disoriented but have the realization that the dream was a “only a dream”—or, in our terms, “only a game” or “only a simulation” and not the real world.
Dream Within a Dream. Sometimes we can have a dream within a dream. This is when we wake up and think we are in physical reality but are really in another dream. This is a peculiar type of dream, one that shows us that we can have multiple nested realities that our minds are not capable of distinguishing, at least while we are in them. We’ll discuss the idea of simulation within simulations in Part IV: Putting it All Together.
Downloadable Consciousness and the Secret Seventh Yoga
Tibetan Buddhists have also written about a seventh yoga, one that has been systematically taken out of the Six Yogas—or kept secret because it is considered dangerous. It is a variation of phowa (the transference of consciousness) and is called forceful projection. Two of the Six Yogas are directly related to transferring the consciousness of a person who is dying out of his physical body to “somewhere else.”
According to the literature, adepts at this seventh yoga are able, at exactly the time of their death, do not just leave their body. Rather they are able to consciously “transfer” their consciousness out of their body from a point in the forehead. The reason it is secret is that adepts can then “forcefully project” it into another living host nearby. Usually this was practiced with various creatures (birds, chickens, foxes, etc.) in the beginning.
As they became more adept, in scenes that are reminiscent of modern horror films, yogis would practice forcefully projecting their consciousness into fresh corpses, which were deposited at the edges of towns. They would re-animate the recently dead bodies, and, assuming that the body wasn’t too deteriorated, the yogi could then choose to go on living in that body, or forcefully project their consciousness back into their original body. Meanwhile, the “original bodies” would be sitting in a state of suspended animation nearby, until they “returned.”
According to Six Yogas of Naropa, written by famous Tibetan teacher Tsongkhapa (and translated by Glenn Mullin), the Indian and Tibetan texts were filled with such anecdotes, and the tradition continued in Tibet for some time, with gurus repeatedly demonstrating it for their pupils, though usually only under the strictest terms of secrecy.
This harkens back to the idea of downloadable consciousness. If we are able to project our consciousness into another physical body, then what constitutes our “consciousness” must be something more than physical. It becomes more like digital information that exists outside the physical but can be put into physical machines.
As we saw in Stage 9, Artificial Intelligence and Downloadable Consciousness, Kurzweil and others in the modern tech world are waiting for the singularity as the point at which we can transfer consciousness to artificial machines. Perhaps they are looking at the wrong kinds of machines. Naropa’s Six Yogas would suggest that downloadable consciousness already exists—we just need to develop (or grow) biological machines (or entities) into which the consciousness can be transferred.
One of the most famous stories of transfer of consciousness involves the son of a famous Tibetan teacher, Marpa the translator. He was called that because Marpa actually travelled from the Land of Snows (Tibet) over the Himalayas to study with Naropa in India and translated his teachings from Sanskrit into Tibetan. In fact, without Marpa, the Six Yogas of Naropa would be lost.
In this story, Marpa’s son learned this secret seventh yoga from his father. One day, while riding, he had an accident on his horse and broke his neck. He supposedly used the yogas of consciousness transference and forceful projection to leave his body and transfer his consciousness into a pigeon that was flying nearby. He then had the pigeon fly to the outskirts of a town in India (where there were many dead bodies, since only the rich cremated their bodies at that time) and found a young man who was recently deceased. Using forceful projection again, he transferred his consciousness from the pigeon to the recently deceased younger body.
In this new, youthful body, he then took on the name Tipupa (the pigeon saint) and began to teach the Six Yogas in India. In an interesting twist of events, years later Tibetan adept Milarepa, perhaps Tibet’s most famous yogi, who had also been a direct student of Marpa, sent one of his students to study this particular yoga with Tipupa, the pigeon saint, who was, understandably, the only living expert!
From this story, we see that downloading of consciousness is not a new idea—it has been a part of the Eastern traditions for a long time. In fact, while some kind of download happens during dreaming, perhaps the most significant downloading in religious traditions happens at birth (when a soul or consciousness is downloaded) and death (when it is uploaded from the body back to the “real” world). This brings us to the next part of our argument about the simulation hypothesis and the mystical traditions—karma and reincarnation.
Chapter 9
Multiple Lives & Karma as Quests in Video Games
Someone is born on Earth in France as a powerful king, rules for a time, then dies. He may be reborn in India, and travel in a bullock cart into the forest to meditate. He may next find rebirth in America as a successful businessman; and when he dreams death again, reincarnates perhaps in Tibet as a devotee of Buddha and spend his entire life in a lamasery.… What is the difference? Each existence is a dream within a dream, is it not?
—Paramahansa Yogananda
The metaphor of multiple lives entered the video game world well after the Eastern doctrines of reincarnation and its concept of multiple lives. It’s not clear whether the original moniker of “multiple lives” in video games had any connection with multiple lives in Eastern spiritual traditions.
However, the metaphor of a player that is outside of the rendered game world and who enters the game world to play a “character” fits very well with the ancient traditions. In this metaphor, each character we play is like a life that we are living “in world”—i.e., in a simulated virtual world, and we go through the “virtual life,” which, from the characters’ point of view, is real and their only life. Of course, the reason the metaphor works in the simulation hypothesis and in the Eastern traditions is because there is a part of each character that is outside the game world: the player.
We’ll see in this chapter that the simulation hypothesis does a very good job of explaining how the doctrine of reincarnation and its underlying mechanism, karma, might actually work.
Multiple Lives and the Doctrines of Reincarnation
Let’s take a closer look at the Eastern traditions first. Reincarnation is a doctrine that is shared by many of the Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, in addition to having adherents in the West (Plato in ancient Greek times and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among many others, in more modern times).
Although a more literal translation of the ancient Sanskrit texts would be rebirth or transmigration, the idea is the same: each soul (or consciousness, to use a less religiously pregnant term) goes through multiple lives, learning lessons and fulfilling its karma during each.
Not all the Indian religions agree on exactly how this process works, though they all seem to have an agreement on the cycle of death and rebirth. In Buddhist traditions, the representation of reincarnation is that of an endless wheel—the Wheel of Life, or Samsara. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for “wandering,” which represents the soul’s wandering across many lifetimes (a representation is shown in Figure 28).
Figure 28: A depiction of the traditional Buddhist wheel of reincarnation.46
Closely related to the idea of reincarnation is the concept of karma, which centers around the consequences of one’s thoughts and actions in the world. Karma literally translates from Sanskrit as action or deeds. It is the result of our deeds, according to the Eastern religions that we build up our karma. Every karmic action is like a seed that is planted and will then grow and be resolved—thus karma is the source of our future experience. As long as we have karma, we will be moving round and round the wheel of Samsara, creating future lives and situations to resolve this karma.
Karma is expressed in more modern terms as the law of cause and effect: “Karma refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect where intent and actions of an individual (cause) influence the future of that individual (effect).”47
Although the definitions of the types of karma may vary, their purpose is the same: karma is a storage of the results of our actions in the past, whether in this life or in previous lives, and that “vault” or “information bank” is drawn upon to help us create experiences in the present moment and in the future. Metaphorically the “Lords of Karma” are spiritual beings responsible for the creation of these future situations to help us resolve the karma. In this chapter, we’ll examine whether any metaphysical beings are needed for karma to work, or if, using our model of a simulation, the same process could be accomplished with algorithms and artificial intelligence.
The reason someone has to be reborn, according to Buddhism, is because of their karma. If there was no karma, then there would be no reason for one to be reborn, unless as a higher, more evolved being who wishes to come into the world in order to help others evolve (referred to as a tulku in Tibetan traditions).
The Purpose of Karma and Reincarnation
What is the purpose of reincarnating and traveling on this wheel? The goal in both traditional Hinduism and Buddhism is what’s called moksha, or liberation from the endless cycle of rebirth, to break the spell of maya. In essence, the purpose of life is to transcend our karma.
In Buddhism, which sprang out of Hinduism based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama at some time between the 4th and 6th centuries BCE, this process is called enlightenment, or nirvana. It also involves “waking up” and realizing the interdependence of all things, of karma, and finally transcending it. Fritjof Capra, in the Tao of Physics, says:
It is possible to transcend the vicious circle of samsara, to free oneself from the bondage of karma, and to reach the state of total liberation called nirvana.… Nirvana is the equivalent of moksha in Hindu philosophy and, being a state of consciousness beyond all intellectual concepts, it defies further description. To reach nirvana is to attain awakening, or Buddhahood. 48
It’s clear that the purpose of the wheel is to transcend it, to get off of the endless wheel, which can be done only by finding ways to overcome our karma, which is what keeps the wheel turning.
Paul Twitchell, the modern-day founder of Eckankar, which he says was based on ancient Indian and Tibetan practices, espouses a similar philosophy and expresses it perhaps in a way that is easier for the contemporary mind to digest: “We are like children who attend school to get simulated experiences to prepare ourselves for places in society.”49
The metaphor of a “school” or “classroom” as a simulation to help us learn lessons is powerful and fits with the simulation hypothesis quite closely.
How Karma is Stored and Used to Create Situations in Life
According to the Bhagavad Gita, karma is literally the force of creation, it is the force which brings all things to life.
Despite agreement that karma is the cause of most rebirths across most of the Eastern traditions, the actual mechanism of karma and how it is used to create and resolve situations in the new life is a little less fully explained in the ancient texts. Where is karma stored and how does it bring things to life?
In his book, Healing Mantras, author Thomas Ashley-Farrand gives us an overview: “As we go through life, the people we encounter or circumstances we are met with will trigger individual bits of karma, releasing them and bringing them into play. When this happens, we are presented with an opportunity to work off that particular portion of our karma.”50
The idea that we may encounter the same souls or the same consciousness in different bodies is part and parcel of the mechanism of reincarnation and karma. We in the West think of karma at a very gross level: If person X kills person Y in one life, then Y will get revenge in a future life. The law of karma would mean that information is stored somewhere and then a situation would have to be created in a future life where person Y could resolve the karma.
What does it mean for a situation to be created to resolve karma? It would be a situation or interaction between those two people in a future life that is bound by a specific goal. We’ll look at this from the point of view of video games and quests later in this chapter.
A Theoretical Model for Reincarnation
There are, as I said, differences between reincarnation in the standard doctrines of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions. However, despite these differences, the overall structure, purpose and mechanism of rebirth is remarkably consistent across these religions.
Taking standard parts of the model from these philosophies, Figure 29 shows a common theoretical model of how reincarnation or transmigration works.
If you look at this closely, you’ll see parallels with how video games work. Just like in a video game, when one life ends, you have the option to learn from it and then go back into the world to play again. In the Eastern model, you enter the ongoing simulation with a different character, a different personality, but you carry with you traces from previous lives—namely, your karma. This information follows you around and becomes the basis for your experience in the new life.
