Five: Render Distance

Humans’ eyesight is very limited. Average eyesight is 20/20, the best being 20/10. At 20/10, individuals can see objects at 20 feet that average people (20/20) can typically see at 10 feet. A significant number of people don’t even have 20/20. 20/30, 20/40, and worse. This is the simulation’s version of render distance. We cannot see objects miles away in detail because they have not loaded in yet.

Four: NPCs

Is it possible that there are 8 billion people on this planet? Each living their own lives. With their own families, friends, aspirations, fears, enemies, crushes, childhoods. That is a lot of code. If this is a simulation, it must be stored on an extremely large hard drive. It would make a lot more sense to code NPCs, as our video games do. NPCs don’t have those things. They may have families of NPCs, but they don’t have emotions. They have code that tells them what to do when encountering a player character. Otherwise, they walk around, they have mundane conversations. They fill the space of schools, cities, parks, libraries. Have you ever noticed people like that?

Three: Derealization, Memories

Do you ever feel as if you haven’t experienced your life? As if you were suddenly dropped into life right now, with all of your memories just loaded into your brain for your personal access. Or maybe you’ve felt detached from your experiences, like a third person viewer for your own life. This is called derealization and it is very common. More than half of people will experience it in their lifetime. We have no way of knowing that we actually experienced everything we thought we did. Our brains are as easily programmable as a computer. Our hormones like 1s and 0s. We could easily have faux memories programmed into our minds by a higher being. And we would. never. know.

Two: The Illusion of Free Will

Psychologists often speak of free will. It is known as something that only us humans have. The capacity to lead our own lives, make our own decisions. People don’t generally think of rats and ants and lions as having that free will. They do what they can to support themselves and their families and they live and they die. Sounds familiar… We may have free will, but we also have impulse control. Consciences. Common sense. We may have dreams of glory. Of leaving our dead-end jobs. Standing up to abusers. Finding happiness. But how often does that actually happen? If you want to stand up on your desk in the middle of math class… you won’t. No matter how much you want to. There are so many factors preventing you from doing so. If you want to stand up to your boss and quit your job, follow your dream… You won’t. Because you have bills to pay. You have a family to feed.

True free will does not exist.

One: The Universe

Why are science and mathematics so perfect? How does the periodic table… work? The order of the elements is so perfect, they are in order by radius, and by number of electrons, and by electronegativity. Up and down and left-to-right. And yet, they are still grouped by metals and non-metals. HOW? It makes so much sense and yet it makes no sense. How can our universe be so perfect. Math is so perfect as well. We have formulas for everything and some of them are so simple for the most complex things. The concept of π. It is the same for every circle. The ratio between the circumference and the diameter. How did we find this number that seems to go on forever. We know thousands of digits of it. How…

The universe is so vast and mysterious, and yet we know more about it than we know about the oceans on our own planet. There are probably hundreds of undiscovered species living on our own planet. But we insist on exploring others. Our planet is dying and we are trying to travel to another one… Human nature is confusing. It is one of the few things in our universe that is not perfect. Although we don’t have true free will, we often make incredibly stupid decisions. Almost as if we are players in a perfected video game.