A world of substantial matter can exist by itself but virtual worlds must be sustained after they are created, just as games need power to carry on running. We can build a house and walk away, but a house built in a virtual world will disappear if it isn’t constantly refreshed, as it can’t exist by itself alone. If our universe is virtual then, everything in it must be constantly re-created at every moment, not just our earth, but also all the galaxies we see.
Not only that, but if a power cut stops a computer game we reload it from the last save, but quantum processing can’t be saved (2.1.3) so our universe is like an iron man game that has no saves. If it ever stopped, even once, the only restart would be from the beginning, fourteen billion years ago! It never has, so an unbroken causal chain links what exists now to the first event.
Virtual worlds need power to run, so they usually exist for a reason due to their ongoing cost. The cost of running a virtual reality the size of our universe for 14 billion years is mind-boggling, so it beggar’s belief that it exists for no reason. What then could warrant this massive investment?
We create virtual worlds for many reasons, but none of them exist for themselves alone. For example, Civilization is about world conquest but that isn’t why it exists as if it was, AI players could do it better and faster. Likewise, SimCity doesn’t exist to build cities, Minecraft doesn’t exist to dig tunnels, and the Witcher game doesn’t exist to slay monsters. These virtual worlds exist to benefit their observers, so if our universe is the same, it must also benefit its observers, but how?
The question of why something exists instead of nothing then reduces to how our universe benefits its observers. We experience ourselves as observers, but quantum theory and relativity also need an observer, hence Wheeler’s participatory universe describes an observer-observed reality. The observer has a basis in science, but what observer property did our universe increased by its existence? The next chapter explores whether it is the mysterious property we call consciousness. This ends Part 1, on the observed reality, and begins Part 2, on the observer reality.