For my first blog I think I'll post something dramatic. It is an original thought as far as I'm concerned, seeing as I thought it independently, however I have realised now that there is a philosophical debate about it. Ah well.

We all live inside a video game. Let me explain why...bear with me.

The Sims

Everyone must have played the Sims at some point. You control a family, which you create yourself. You build them a house, and control their lives. You tell them what jobs to take, when to eat, when to shower, who to love. You are in control of their lives.

So what? I mean it's not like there is any difference between us and The Sims...is there? Well for a start the people in the Sims have not got free thought. Descartes said "I think therefore I am". Let's keep things simple and assume they are not conscious, therefore are not real.

The Matrix

So the Sims are not like us. I mean they are just strings of 0 and 1, fragments of data put together by a computer and developer.

Remember the strings of data that run down the computer screen in the Matrix. Well, if we are to take the Matrix philosophy, we live inside a virtual world or matrix anyway.

Pi

I doubt many of you have seen this film: it's about a brilliant if flawed mathematician who by accident while looking for an equation to predict the pattern of the stock exchange, runs into the number of God. The main quote I use is this: "Restate my assumptions.

1. Mathematics is the language of nature
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers
3. If you graph the numbers of any system patterns emerge. Therefore there are patterns in nature".

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsrg5u48wG8)

Now I can hardly base the main argument of this idea on a cult film albeit a very good one. However you would have to be insane to deny that mathematics does seem, like the film states, to govern the universe. Newton didn't just prove gravity by saying "Yep, an apple fell on my head downwards, and that's due to the force of gravity". I'm 16 so my Physics isn't great, but I do know that when you get into university, whether its Maths or Physics, a huge amount of the subject revolves less around theory more around numbers.

You can disagree with me if you like, but I think it's safe to assume with patterns in Maths such as the golden ratio, and mathematics use in Physics of proving some of the secrets of the universe like black holes etc that our world could be said, at its most fundamental level, to be made up of numbers. Whether God put them there, or they were there anyway is your decision, but everything is made due to numbers. The molecules in your body, the air you breathe, and the reason why the sun burns and gives us energy are all at the most basic level due to Maths.

So if our world is made up of numbers, then what's the difference between us and the data in a video game. Hint: it was in the Sims; free thought.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Hal develops from man's machine to an individual entity. He also very nearly kills man, and it takes man's cunning and originality to overcome the machine. That's a basic analogy of part of what that film is trying to say: now what if the people in The Sims developed consciousness. What if technology in 500 years time allowed them to do this? What if it was no longer you telling them to go to bed, or take a shower, but them making the choice for themsleves?

Would they realise that they weren't real, that somebody was looking through a monitor at them, that the world around them was simulated: just a string of data... of numbers???

Would you?

Spore

Finally I thought I'd tease you with this. Even if the above were possible, in The Sims the family live in the 21st century, in a house, in a neighbourhood and nothing more.

Well in Spore you can play God; you create the planet, the organisms, you guide them through the food chain into a civilisation, and then from their planet into space.

So what if human beings are just a custom built race in a game called Spore 2, a game developed by a race not so dissimilar from ours, with the intention to provide entertainment for customers?

It would make a lousy videogame in my opinion, but can you really prove reality? That we are not characters in a videogame, controlled by a player. Playing Solid Snake this morning I thought: "Poor guy: he doesn't know he's not real".

Well: do I?