Living In A Simulation Game Of Life And Speed Of Light

According to an ancient Greek legend, one day the king of the present-day Egyptian city of Thebes, Laius, received a prophecy. The prophecy said that when his son Oedipus becomes the king of Thebes, he will kill his own father and marry his own mother. Terrified by this prophecy, Laius abandons his son in the forest, intending for him to die. But fortunately—or unfortunately—a couple finds Oedipus and adopts him.

As Oedipus grows older, he somehow learns about the prophecy and, in an attempt to prevent it, he leaves his home and wanders the roads in anger—unaware that he was adopted and that the prophecy concerned his biological parents. Eventually, after a minor argument with a passerby, he kills the man in a fit of rage and later ends up marrying that man’s wife.

The man he killed was actually his real father, Laius, and the woman he married was none other than his own biological mother. That means the very prophecy he tried to escape ended up coming true. This just shows that one can’t run away from the past or the future.

The Butterfly Dream: When Reality and Illusion Blur

This leads to a deeper question: Is everything that happens in life pre-programmed?

Are we living in a predetermined simulation?

In the 3rd century, there was a philosopher who once dreamt he was a butterfly. But when he woke up, he was left with two questions: was he really himself who had dreamt of being a butterfly, or was he actually a butterfly dreaming of being someone else? And that’s where the conflict between simulation and reality began.

In Bhagavad Gita,

“You do everything as per your own will and everything happens as per my will”. 

Shri Krishna

Free Will or Just a Well-Written Script?

This sparked a big question: Do we really have free will, or is everything preset and predetermined?

Free will means acting by our own choice.

For example, deciding to pick up a phone and doing it—that’s considered an act of free will.

But think about it: there must be a reason behind picking up the phone. Maybe it was to prove that free will exists. That means something in the past influenced that action.

And that’s exactly what determinism says. Determinism states that all current events are based on past events. All physical events are deterministic.

The Chain Reaction: A Simple Ball and the Illusion of Choice

To understand this better, imagine a ball passes in front of you. It obviously didn’t fly on its own—someone must have hit it. That person chose to hit it, right?

But did they really? They threw the ball because there was probably a match. There was a match because someone organized it. And so on. This forms a chain of cause and effect.

That means hitting the ball might have already been predetermined. Because when the ball was hit, multiple states in the brain collapsed into a single state.

Are Humans Just Deterministic Beings?

A brain state is nothing but a biological state. And biological states are physical. And as mentioned earlier, all physical states are deterministic. That’s why human behavior can also be considered deterministic.

According to determinism, actions are not truly under individual control. They are simply experienced. And some scientists believe this could only be possible if existence itself is inside a simulation.

The Allegory of the Cave: Shadows as Reality

This idea isn’t new. Ancient philosophers had already presented theories supporting such notions, like the famous Allegory of the Cave.

In this theory, it was explained that senses perceive things which the subconscious mind accepts as reality. The subconscious instantly makes decisions without logic or thought and controls vital survival functions like heartbeat and blood circulation.

The analogy involves imagining prisoners tied in such a way that they can only see a wall in front of them. Behind them is a fire source, and in between, a gap. When anything passes in front of the fire, its shadow falls on the wall. The prisoners think those shadows are reality.

But they were just shadows. According to this theory, humans too are like those prisoners. What is seen is just shadows created by some source, and it is considered real because the senses receive it.

Though philosophical in nature and not backed by science, this idea lingered for centuries.

The Game of Life: Mathematical Glimpses of a Simulated World by John Conway

Later, some scientists and researchers tried to mathematically prove similar concepts. One of them even created a simulation-based experiment known as The Game of Life.

It was a simple game: set an initial pattern, and the game would run itself, generating new evolving patterns. Over time, new generations would evolve, and the original one would disappear.

The idea was that if each dot represented an atom, then atoms could multiply and create more patterns—some of which could be life itself.

Although fascinating, this observation lacked solid evidence to confirm that life is a simulation. That’s where quantum mechanics came into play.

Quantum Mechanics: Where Observation Shapes Reality

Quantum mechanics, at its core, provided a perspective suggesting that reality may indeed be simulated.

One experiment challenged the concept of causality. It was similar to the double-slit experiment, but with additional components like a beam splitter and lens.

Photons were split into two pairs. One pair went through a lens to a screen, while the other went to two detectors placed such that they received photons after the first pair hit the screen.

Initially, an interference pattern appeared on the screen. But once the second pair of photons reached the detectors, the interference pattern collapsed into a particle pattern.

This showed that at the quantum level, observation causes light to collapse from a low-energy wave state to a particle state—much like a video game rendering only what the player sees.

Video Game Logic in Real Life: Rendering Reality Like GTA 5

To understand this better, consider how open-world video games like GTA 5 work. When the game starts, the entire map isn’t rendered at once. It would be computationally inefficient.

Instead, the game renders only what is visible on the player’s screen. As the player moves toward unrendered areas, those parts of the world load instantly—just like photons responding to observation.

The similarity between the double-slit experiment and how video games render environments is uncanny.

The Speed of Light: A Universal Clock Speed?

There is yet another clue pointing toward the simulation theory—the constant speed of light.

Every computer has a limited data transfer speed, called CPU clock speed. Similarly, the universe has a maximum transfer speed—the speed of light.

This raises a possibility: Is the entire universe one massive CPU, and everything inside it just a projected simulation?