Those who make their own reality tell their own lives’ tales
Holograms
There is a theory of the universe. It has been proposed by physicists but it is more philosophy than science. It is this:
The universe is a hologram that some being or beings has built in order to play in as avatars, like a cosmic videogame.
Let’s explore this notion as a bit of a mind game or thought experiment.
Who? and Why?
First let’s ask Who might be doing this, and why they would want to do it. The two questions are related, since answering Why gives us insight, and holds implications for the answer to Who.
Whoever could do such a thing, must have powers that far surpass our own. We might say that they must then inhabit a world, a culture, that also goes far beyond our own, except for one thing, the fear that our own culture may be less advanced than other cultures in our past that had less technological prowess. Either way, we can’t presume to understand them and say that their values are our values, their way of thought is our way of thought. But if we say they are utterly alien, we can’t play this mind game very far. So we’ll assume they share some characteristics with us. It is not all that far-fetched to think that even as we create videogame avatars that are more like ourselves than not, these beings would create us ‘in their own image.’ (Though again, that is to reason by analogy.)
Why then do we play such games?
- For amusement
- For education
- As punishment
Amusement, for that we are bored.
Education, so that we may learn from other lives.
Punishment, in the form of lessons we wish we didn’t have to take. (This last is theoretical, as I know of no instances of videogames being prescribed as part of a system of punishment.)
But if there is one thing we know about those other selves, that must be true, it is this: that they must be to us like gods.
Gods
They are gods, because they have built our world and all the universe that contains it. It may be they modeled this our universe upon their own; it may be they have conjured it up out of some theoretical basis, one of an uncounted number of possible universes and worlds within those universes.
They gave us life, and they work in mysterious ways.
They gave us life, and they mold the patterns of our lives.
They gave us life, and they narrate the tales we live out.
They are, in short, like the talesmen of Earth.
It may be they are One, or Many. It may be that one of them adopts my being, and another adopts yours, through the whole course of our lifetimes. May be your life is only one round or level in their game. Or it may be that we are programmed avatars responding to the constructs and algorithms of the Program of the Machine that has conjured all this up, and the Others visit this our Earth, among countless other worlds, as tourists, and live among us as spirits, unseen, or as though they were flesh and blood as we are, or as though they were the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the insects in the soil. From these vantage-points, whatever they may be, the Others watch us, and take some pleasure and instruction in seeing how we behave in all our little quirks and niceties and meanness.
Talesmen
Now in these guises, the Others are little different from the talesmen of tales we tell, or (if they be but tourists) from the audience of tales we hear. So what if we compare our relationship to the characters in tales, and think ‘up’ to the relationship the Others hold to us?
We would be characters in books, movies, plays, poetry, legends. And the Others would take pleasure in narrating these tales we live in, or they would enjoy observing them.
What Tale Are You?
This then leads us to a moral outlook from the mind game. If you are a character in a tale, what sort of character are you? Are you hero or villain? Do you help to do good or do you oppose the good works of others? And what sort of tale is it you inhabit, is it epic, tragic, humorous, sad, erotic, adventurous? It is High, or is it Low? Is it Noble or is it Mean?
Supposing we have some measure of control over our actions, it then means that we have that much control over ourselves as characters in our tales, and even over what sort of tales our lives exemplify.
What God Are You?
But if we look Downward rather than Upward, and consider instead the tales we read (and tell) in this light, and wonder, What if the characters in these tales had some measure of control over their actions? If those characters were like us, or like the avatars we adopt in videogames, what moral responsibility would we owe them? A videogame is confined to its genre, and the rules of the videogames we have built so far have been quite narrow. But there have arisen other games that have much more relaxed rules. Second Life is an example much more analogous to the sort of ‘life is a hologram and videogame’ notion that we are pondering here.
I have never played in Second Life but I understand that those who do will rarely adopt characters like their own. They will change races, sexes, age. And yet in the end, their true hearts tell: they act after all in ways consistent to their characters in real life. (I wonder if that is true? Certainly Second Life is a fantasy, an exploration of Eartherea, and as such offers us all a chance to ace quite otherwise than we normally do. How long, then, could any of us live out a lie that is so thorough — not only to adopt the other sex, but to behave according to an ethos entirely alien to our own? Could we do so throughout the remainder of our life?)
Go On
The end of this tale is not for me to tell. It lies rather in each of us to consider this and play it out. The best way would probably to enter into Second Life or some similar game with these thoughts in mind, looking Upward as well as Downward into the game, and thinking that we, as avatars on Earth, have adopted avatars in Second Life.
Go for a year through the game, play it every day for a little while, and act in it as you would wish you could if you were the noblest person on Earth. And then see if you can’t apply some of that nobility to your life here.
And then imagine lending that nobility to the Other that is your True Self, ‘up there.’
Who knows? The Other might himself have an Other whose avatar he is, and that one might be but an avatar himself.
(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 27, 2008)
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