Living in Virtual Reality

It was reported on MSNBC cable television on August 15th that humankind, the world, and the entire universe has a 20% chance, or one in five chance, of being virtual reality. Scientists have speculated that with the advent and rapid progression of computer properties, essentially a twenty-year progression of a room-size computer changing to a desktop or laptop of today, it is quite possible someone before us, in a far future, perhaps five hundred years or a thousand, created this universe as a virtual reality game. We may not be real. We may think we are real, but we have been created and set into motion in a Matrix-type game world. Our God may be a teenager, and he might even have tired of his "Sims" type game and walked away. Which could explain why the world we live on is getting more chaotic--ozone thinning, global warming, wild and unpredictable weather disasters and earth changes.

Soon with the advent of the quantum computer, and within ten or tweny years, the ability of creating our own artificial intelligent virtual reality games, it is possible in our futures to be playing with a world where the creatures or humans we make will have their own ability to think. They, too, may believe they are "real." Actual. Alive. Thinking, breathing human beings making their own life choices. Like the goldfish in the pond, they won't be able to sense the computer which generated them.

So if in our own near future we expect to create thinking beings in virtual reality, there is a 20% chance WE are living in a virtual reality world already.

Now if scientists had postulated there was a 2% chance of this being so or a 12% chance of this being so, it might be easier for us to discard the notion as science fiction. We couldn't possibly be virtual reality simulations, could we? But if as of August 15, 2007 scientists reported a TWENTY PERCENT chance that we aren't real at all, that we are simulations, then it isn't quite as easy to discard the theory as the ramblings of knuckle- headed, over-educated theorists with too much time on their hands.

People would say, well, it can't be true, God created us. Well, what if God is a teenage boy in our future (or our past, as it were) who made the Sim World Earth and put you and me on it?

I would surmise that there is but one way to think of this as being possible. The best advice I can give myself and others who might be disturbed by this notion is: it isn't serious, nothing should be taken seriously. Think about it. If you were created by God or a Supreme Being and given a soul and you await heaven, then don't take it so very serious since no one can prove it.

If you are a simulated human operating in a virtual world created by a being with vaster intelligence and resources than we possess, then don't take it serious.

If neither is true, and there is no God and no virtual reality master, then there still is no point in taking anything serious. We live, we die, who cares. Speculation takes us nowhere but into corners.

Why let emotion over earthly problems affect us so seriously, in these scenarios? Why suffer? Would God, the Supreme, want us to be overcome with despair or despression or anger? Wouldn't giving into these base emotions only thrill the Virtual Creator who watches over his Simulation? Why give any creator the satisfaction? Why take anything to heart, good or bad? Why let any idea, no matter how outrageous or how believable cause us any undue disturbance? Why not play the game the best we know how, going through life doing as little harm as we can, enjoying what we can, taking nothing at all too seriously, and let it go at that?