Matter as a substance can just sit there self-existing but a virtual world must be sustained. We can make a thing and walk away but a virtual object will disappear if it isn’t constantly refreshed, as it doesn’t exist by itself alone. Our game worlds need power to run because everything in them only exists for the current processing cycle. If our universe is virtual then, everything in it has to be constantly re-created at every moment, not just our earth, but also all the galaxies we see. Creating a virtual world is then like having a child, an ongoing commitment that grows as it does.
If a power cut kills a computer game, we can reload it 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 the beginning fourteen billion years ago! This means that an unbroken causal chain links our universe now back to the first event.
Virtual worlds then aren’t free, because they take effort not only to create but also to run, so they usually exist for a reason. For example, we have free online multi-player games but their creators still benefit from them. The idea that they are there by accident because someone left a server running by mistake is ridiculous. Likewise, the effort needed to run a virtual reality the size of our universe for 14 billion years is mind-boggling, so it beggar’s belief that it has no reason to be there. What then could warrant this massive investment?
Our virtual 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, what is the observer gain?
The question of why our universe exists then reduces to how it affects its observers. We accept ourselves as observers, and quantum theory and relativity also need an observer, as Wheeler’s participatory universe makes our world an observer-observed reality. Given the observer is based in science and common sense, what observer property is our universe then increasing? The next chapter explores the possibility that it is evolving what we call consciousness. This ends Part 1, on the observed reality, by introducing Part 2, on the observer reality.