The simulation hypothesi.., p.20
The Simulation Hypothesis, page 20
Figure 29: A theoretical model for reincarnation and karma
Two questions that we ask in computer science are worth asking in this theoretical model:
What information is stored and where?
How is the information used or processed, and when?
In the context of the Eastern traditions, there are many different ways of expressing the answers to these questions. Where the information is stored and how it is used during the “current life” is hinted at but not spelled out in too much detail.
In Healing Mantras, Ashely-Farrand stipulates that karma is actually stored in the physical body (or its nonvisible analog, the subtle body). This would be akin to a distributed architecture and might make sense when we think about billions of souls—each responsible for keeping track of its own karma.
On the other hand, some sources say that there is a repository of information, which exists outside of the individual; in fact, this repository exists outside the rendered world. It is referred to as the Akashic records, and it stores not just our karma but the actual events of every single past life. According to Twitchell, “these soul records consist of the past incarnations on the physical, astral, causal planes.”51
It’s clear that there is a concept of downloading of consciousness—without a clear definition of consciousness. Just as Kurzweil and others in modern times believe that we can download consciousness from our brains into a silicon device, so the Eastern mystics who pioneered the reincarnation philosophy also believed in a downloading of consciousness from the “other side” (the bardo) to a physical, biological entity (namely, our bodies).
Just what is actually transmigrated from one body to another? This is a point of some debate as well.
Mattheiu Ricard, a well-known Buddhist monk who served as translator for the Dalai Lama, gives some color commentary in defining this “consciousness” from a Buddhist perspective:
The succession of states into which a consciousness passes … are comparable, to a certain degree, to something like a radio wave, which transmits information but without itself being concrete. An individual’s future lies in the transformations of this wave … The wave of our consciousness continuum contains all of our experiences in this life and in our past lives in an infinitely complex web…”52
What could this wave be? It is clear that the wave of our consciousness contains information—our experiences to date—that serves as the seeds of our future experience. In computer science, we store information and transmit it as electromagnetic waves—and this sounds remarkably similar to what the Buddhists are describing: consciousness is a type of information.
One major difference between the Hindu and the Buddhist doctrines is the existence of an indivisible soul. In Buddhism, the “thing that reincarnates” is not defined as a soul but rather as a “bundle of cause and effect”—a “bag of karma,” if you will. This would be akin to the information of the consciousness that is reincarnated.
In the Hindu tradition, there is the idea of a soul, which is not unfamiliar in the West, which goes through multiple lives in a quest for learning and for eventual liberation. While this is a fundamental difference, since the definition of “soul” is something that is up for debate, for our purposes, when I use the term “soul,” I am referring to both scenarios—an actual, indestructible soul and a temporary entity that is associated with a “bag of karma.”
Some Features of Modern Video Games
Before we get into the model in more detail to look at karma and reincarnation within the context of the simulation hypothesis, let’s review some of the basic features of modern MMORPGs that are relevant to our discussion.
Multiple Lives, Role Playing of Characters
One of the first concepts introduced in modern video games was multiple lives. This was done initially for economic reasons—a quarter in an arcade would buy you only so many “lives” of Pac Man or Space Invaders.
Eventually, starting over after each gameplay session was seen as too cumbersome, particularly with role-playing games (RPGs). The whole point of RPGs, as originally envisioned by Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop games, was that you would have a character that was defined by a set of attributes (class, hit points, strength, etc.) and race (elf, dwarf, human) with a profession (thief, wizard, warrior, etc.). These attributes were recorded using a “character sheet” initially, and then they were updated as your character “leveled up.” In fact, the whole point of an RPG was that you would play the role of the character, and the character persisted across gameplay sessions.
The definition of a character might include a particular backstory and personality, but typically the recorded character information would include clothing, weapons, artifacts, and, most importantly, skills. A wizard, for example, might learn more sophisticated spells as he or she leveled up, just as a warrior might learn to use new weapons—a crossbow, for example.
As RPGs moved online into MMORPGs, this idea of a character across gameplay sessions became more persistent and more important, and so did the visual representation of the avatar (a term that was invented by the creators of Habitat, one of the first MMORPGs from LucasArts, for a visual representation of your player’s character). As games like Second Life and World of Warcraft came along, players developed long lists of possessions for their character, along with accomplishments and backstories. Characters in games started to have virtual lives, with information about them stored outside of the rendered world, complete with lists of friends and possessions.
States of Play: “In-world” vs. “IRL” and “AFK”
What happens to the character when you’re not logged in to the game?
In most games, your character is not rendered in the world, but the character still exists … somewhere. What does this mean exactly? It means that there is a place outside the rendered world, typically a cloud server, where information about the character and the game state is stored.
This is an important point in the analogy of Eastern traditions and video games that we will revisit: What information represents a PC (or player character) in a video game, and where does it get stored and accessed? This includes information about the player/account, the character they are playing (or their avatar), information about the character’s attributes and possessions, and how far along they are in achieving certain quests and accomplishments—these are all separate sets of data about the PC.
When you are logged in but away from your keyboard, the player is considered “afk” – and the avatar typically appears in a special state so that other characters know not to try to talk to you or engage with your character. When messaging one another, gamers developed many useful acronyms. One of these is “irl” which means “in real life” and is meant to ask or convey information about the player, rather than the character.
When not logged in to an MMORPG, other player characters can still communicate with your character, for example, sending you private messages, and these messages are queued up, so that you can read them when you are back “in world.” Where do these messages live? They also live outside the rendered world but are still part of the video game because they are handled by the video game’s servers.
Quests and Achievements in Video Games
In most sophisticated video games today, a standard feature is a set of “quests” or “achievements” that guide the player toward what to do next. These are usually concrete actions such as “fight an orc and win” or “build a house” or “find the treasure map.”
In some video games, quests can be simple. In others, they may involve complex missions. One of the main issues that virtual worlds like Second Life had was that they were almost too flexible; new players, who could do anything, didn’t know what to do next. In World of Warcraft, when you first set up your character, there is an NPC with an exclamation point over its head that is meant to give you something to work on next.
Some games have achievements that can be done every day. Inevitably, the list of quests and achievements, which starts off as a simple list, becomes complex enough to evolve into a tree-like structure. Now quests may have prerequisites—you can’t go kill the Goblin King until you have completed “find the goblin map,” for example. Certain quests feed into other quests.
Still, these trees are usually very generic, and at some point, every game stores a quest/achievement manifest for the current player/character that lists what quests the player has accomplished, and which ones they have “signed up” for. This quest manifest is like a running total and is a subset of all possible quests; it is run by a quest engine.
We’ll see that the concepts of quests and achievements, which are really tasks that the player needs to accomplish and master in some gameplay session, ties very well into the metaphor of the simulation hypothesis when looking at reincarnation and karma in the Eastern traditions.
The Simulation Hypothesis: A Video Game Model Based on Karma?
The information model described earlier for karma and reincarnation shows not only that a video game–like simulated physical world is a good metaphor for what the Eastern mystics describe. In fact, the simulation hypothesis may provide a scientific basis for the worldview expressed in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Just as a player sits down to role play a character in a game, so too does consciousness transmit from some “base reality” outside the simulation and is downloaded into a somewhat artificially generated body. The nature of this character—the avatar in video games, the body in our physical reality—is chosen, as are its family relations, ethnicity, etc., and encoded in its DNA. The character and the player are associated for the length of the character’s life in this simulation.
What is the purpose of playing the game?
It could be to learn lessons or to win the game. In video games, quests or accomplishments are the cornerstone of designing a role-playing game. The player character accepts a certain quest and, in so doing, agrees to go on a series of experiences that may involve some difficulty. During this quest, the player may pick up artifacts, friends and enemies, but most importantly players build up experience and “level up” their character. In much the same way, the purpose of playing another life is to finish up the quests (or karmic traces) that we have built up over time. This builds up experience and levels up our character based on some map or tree of quests and achievements that have been selected for us by our particular karma.
In the video games we know today, the number of quests or accomplishments that a player can achieve are usually limited. However, we can envision a more sophisticated game in which there are as many different quests or accomplishments as there are players.
This theoretical game would need to keep track, in a cloud server, outside of the rendered world, of which quests a player has already achieved, which quests the player has yet to engage in, and most importantly, what future quests a player has already been committed to with other players.
What would this centralized or decentralized ledger contain? It would basically be the computer science equivalent of the karma of a given player (and/or the PC, the player’s character). The karma of the player would be lessons or achievements the player may need to accept and “finish” over many lifetimes, while the karma of a given character may need to be resolved during the life of this character.
The storage and processing requirements of a simulation this complex, with seven billion humans on Earth at the present time and potentially numerous other worlds and souls out there, goes well beyond any video game we have built to date, but it is not out of our grasp.
Figure 30 shows how this model might work. You’ll notice that it looks remarkably similar to Figure 29, our theoretical model for reincarnation.
Figure 30: A model for consciousness and karma in the simulation hypothesis
Quests and the Simulation Hypothesis
Every video game has a game loop, a physics engine, and a rendering engine—as I explained in previous chapters. Sophisticated MMORPGs also have a quest engine, which defines the player’s path through the game world, even if it’s not explicitly called out. While virtual worlds like Second Life may have the illusion of endless possibilities, really the only possibilities are those that are encoded into the game and allowed by its underlying quest engine.
In our theoretical video game, the process of choosing the next quest for a given character would be more complex than it is in today’s video games. However, this “quest generation engine” provides the elusive link between the Eastern traditions’ ideas of how reality is created for each us to fulfill our karma and how video games work even today.
In modern video games, quests and accomplishments are defined before the game is made.
Once a player has accepted a quest, it appears on that player’s (or to be more precise, that character’s) quest manifest. In multiplayer games, these quests might involve working with a group of other players to accomplish a goal (beat a boss, find a treasure, etc.).
This provides a remarkably similar approach to how the law of karma, of cause and effect, is used to create situations for us in the dramatic stage play, the lila, of the Eastern traditions. Players can learn skills and hone their understanding of the game world by playing multiple lives and characters over time. Quests and achievements are then chosen based on the karma of each player. Future quests are determined each time we generate more karma. In the Eastern traditions, we often encounter the same people again and again; we have a group of “karmic” friends (who may or may not be actual friends).
However, a more sophisticated game, such as the Great Simulation, would need to keep track of not just a generic quest database but a list of individual accomplishments (tasks that a certain character should accomplish in this life) and a store of past karma (which can be thought of as set of quests or tasks that involve other specific players).
A Quest Engine for Karma
Figure 31 shows how a quest generator, which really functions as the engine of karma in a simulated reality, might work.
First, like any modern video game, it would look at which characters are present in a particular scene. In this figure, we see that characters X1, X2, and X3 are all present in our vicinity (the “Current Scene”). These characters are, of course, being played by players A, B, and C. Each of these players would have a storage of karma from previous lives, along with a set of tasks they are meant to accomplish in this life (their quest manifest).
The quest engine would need to scan both player A’s and player B’s karmic roster to see if there is either a karmic debt or a possible interaction that would work to their karmic benefit (or detriment, depending on how you interpret interactions in the real world!).
Figure 31: A quest generation engine based on karma
The karmic debt may be from a different lifetime in the Eastern traditions but still involves player A and B (even though they are playing characters X1 and X2 now). Using an intelligent algorithm (which would be complex, I admit, but really just a collection of rules—so, very manageable through computer code), the quest engine would generate a possible quest (the green box in Figure 31).
The quest engine would then offer characters X1 and X2 the possible quest, either one of which could accept or reject it. If both sides accept the quest, then the situation that was called for by previous karma (from this or from a previous life) is created, and a new interaction occurs in the present life or game.
This interaction could be a friendship, a violent interaction, a sexual interaction, or a casual meeting of minds or ideas. In the Eastern traditions, these interactions may create more karma between the players (as well as potentially resolve old karma). In our theoretical quest engine, the results of this quest are then recorded, and these results make their way back to the quest manifests of both player A and player B, as shown by the lines originating from the right and looping back to the quest manifests of both players.
This feedback could then eliminate the past karma (if it has been fulfilled) and/or create a new kind of karma, which is the seed of future actions and which might need to be fulfilled in this or a future life depending on the circumstances of both characters X1 and X2, or the players A and B inhabiting other characters in a future life.
Is Buddha’s Endless Wheel an Algorithm?
In this scenario, Buddha’s endless wheel is now a computer algorithm that stores karma created in-game and unceasingly creates additional situations in future gameplay sessions to satisfy past karma with other players who are in the vicinity. The Lords of Karma have been reduced to a sophisticated AI that can track billions of players and create quests for them in each of their lifetimes in real time, dynamically, depending on where in the rendered world they are! The combinations of players are so large, it’s possible that you might go several lifetimes without actually encountering the same person again; it’s possible that your character will play with the same group again and again.
One difference between our MMORPGs and this model of a simulated reality is that players can stop playing—they can be logged in but “afk”—or “away from keyboard”—or not logged in to the server at all. In many of the Eastern traditions and their new age updates in modern times, there’s the belief that certain subtle bodies, which contain consciousness, actually leave the physical body while we are asleep and that this the same as being afk. This is how mystics explain many unanswered aspects of dreams—interactions with the departed, with angels, or with other entities that are not in the rendered world.
