As science advances it seems like it will only be a matter of a time before we can understand and prevent human aging. Living for thousands, millions, or billions of years will likely be extremely boring, and with robots to do all our jobs, humans will likely have a lot of time our our hands and play a lot of computer games for leisure. As our virtual reality technology gets better and better those games will become a lot more immersive, and it seems only a matter of time until our technology becomes so good that the games 'seem real'. We'd likely want to forget our aeons-long boring lives for a while during this leisure time and want to immerse ourselves completely in these games while we played them, so using tech on our brains to help us temporarily forget our lives and believe that the game is actually real seems likely something we might want to do.
One type of game that is extremely popular right now is MMORPGs, where thousands of people play together, each controlling a single character, each living their own 'life', who all interact within the game world. A future human with a billion-year lifespan could literally live one million such game-lives, experiencing every kind of possible life in all sorts of game worlds or time periods, and interacting in many different ways with the billions or trillions of fellow-citizens who were also playing out lives within those game worlds. This seems like a highly-plausible thing for technologically advanced civilizations to do, in general, and from observation of our society it seems like something that our own civilization will pretty much inevitably do in the future.
So we can argue:
1. The number of 'in game' lives ever lived would be potentially a million times greater than the number of 'real' lives ever lived.
2. We find ourselves living a life - is it a 'real' life or an 'in game' life?
3. Probabilistically, given (1), it is probably an 'in game' life because there are a whole lot more of those.
So we can tentatively conclude that our universe is probably a giant computer game and we are all players who are living game lives in it.
One type of game that is extremely popular right now is MMORPGs, where thousands of people play together, each controlling a single character, each living their own 'life', who all interact within the game world. A future human with a billion-year lifespan could literally live one million such game-lives, experiencing every kind of possible life in all sorts of game worlds or time periods, and interacting in many different ways with the billions or trillions of fellow-citizens who were also playing out lives within those game worlds. This seems like a highly-plausible thing for technologically advanced civilizations to do, in general, and from observation of our society it seems like something that our own civilization will pretty much inevitably do in the future.
So we can argue:
1. The number of 'in game' lives ever lived would be potentially a million times greater than the number of 'real' lives ever lived.
2. We find ourselves living a life - is it a 'real' life or an 'in game' life?
3. Probabilistically, given (1), it is probably an 'in game' life because there are a whole lot more of those.
So we can tentatively conclude that our universe is probably a giant computer game and we are all players who are living game lives in it.
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