A world of dead matter can exist by itself but a virtual reality needs power to keep existing. If our reality is virtual, everything around us is constantly being re-created, not just our earth and all its life, but also our galaxy and all its stars, and all the galaxies seen by our telescopes. A virtual world can’t exist by itself alone.
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 for an instant, it could only restart from the beginning, billions of years ago! It never has, so there is an unbroken causal chain from now back to the first event.
We can make things and walk away but virtual objects must be constantly re-created to exist, which uses power. Virtual worlds then don’t usually run for no reason because they need ongoing support. If our universe is virtual, the cost of running it for 14 billion years is mind-boggling, so it beggar’s belief that it exists for no reason, but what could warrant that investment?
We don’t create virtual worlds in games just to do what they do. For example, Civilization is about conquering a world 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 a city, Minecraft doesn’t exist to dig tunnels, and the Witcher game doesn’t exist to slay monsters. These worlds exist not for themselves but to produce a desired observer experience for us. If our universe is the same, it must also exist to provide an observer benefit, so what then is observation?
Quantum theory and relativity both postulate an observer and Wheeler’s participatory universe implies an observer-observed reality, so observation has a basis in science. It is also based in our common experience of being an observer, so we should agree on what observation is, but we don’t. The next chapter considers how our universe could benefit its observer by asking what observation is. This ends Part 1, on the observed reality, and begins Part 2, on the observer reality.