A world of inert matter just exists but virtual realities need power to run. If the power fails during a computer game, even for a second, we lose the current state and must restart from our last save. If our world is a virtual reality generated by quantum processing that can’t be saved, it is like an iron man game that has no saves, so the only restart is from the beginning, which for our universe was 14 billion years ago! An unbroken causal chain links the universe now to the first event so it must have run all that time without losing a single quantum cycle. The quantum power needed to support a virtual universe as big as ours for that length of time is vast.
One can create a thing and walk away but a virtual reality must be constantly sustained, so whatever made our universe had to also sustain it for every moment that followed. It beggar’s belief that the power needed to run a virtual reality that big for so long was pointless. If the universe is a joke, it is a ridiculously expensive one, even in quantum terms. Virtual realities don’t run for no reason because it takes power to sustain them, so if our world is a virtual reality, why is it running?
Virtual realities don’t exist for themselves. The purpose of the game civilization isn’t to create a civilization to conquer a virtual world, as if it was, it would work better without players. Likewise, SimCity doesn’t exist to build a virtual city, Minecraft doesn’t exist to dig virtual tunnels and the Witcher game doesn’t exist to slay virtual monsters. None of these virtual realities exist for any purpose within themselves but rather exist to benefit their observers in various ways.
A physical universe may have no purpose in itself but if it is virtual, it must benefit its observer. Every virtual reality has an observer benefit, as a virtual reality has no point if it isn’t observed. If the physical world runs not for itself but for its observer, then its evolution must also benefit the observer. This raises the question of what observes our virtual reality?
Science agrees that we are in an observer-observed universe, what physics calls a participatory universe, but there is no agreement at all about who or what is the observer? This chapter ends the analysis of physical reality from a quantum realism perspective to raise the question of what is the observer reality? The next chapter applies quantum realism to the mystery of consciousness.