Substances can just sit there self-existing, but virtual worlds must be sustained. We make things and walk away, but virtual objects that aren’t refreshed disappear, as they don’t self-exist. Our games need power to run because their objects only exist for a moment then must be redrawn. Hence if our universe is virtual, everything in it must be constantly re-created at every instant, not just our earth but also all the galaxies we see. Starting a virtual world then, like having a child, is an ongoing commitment that grows as it does.
If a power cut kills a computer game, we reload from the last save, but quantum processing can’t be saved (2.1.3), so our world is like an iron man game that has no saves. If it ever stopped, even once, it would have to restart from its beginning fourteen billion years ago! This means that an unbroken causal chain links our universe now back to the first event.
Virtual worlds take effort not only to create but also to run, so they usually exist for a reason. For example, our free online multi-player games aren’t there by accident, because say someone left a server running by mistake, but because their creators benefit from them. The effort needed to run a virtual reality the size of our universe for fourteen billion years is mind-boggling, so it beggar’s belief that it exists for no reason. What then could warrant such a massive investment?
Game worlds exist for many reasons but none of them are for outcomes in those worlds. 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 worlds exist not for themselves but for their observers, so if our universe is the same, how does it benefit its observers?
This reasoning reduces the question of why our universe exists to how it benefits its observers, but is the observer a scientific concept? In fact it is, as quantum theory needs an observer to cause collapse, and relativity needs an observer frame of reference, so Wheeler’s participatory universe describes our world as an observer-observed reality. On this foundation, which also satisfies common sense, the next chapter examines whether our universe exists to grow the consciousness of its observers. This concludes Part 1, on the observed reality, and introduces Part 2, on the observer reality.