fling93 loves fishies

Life Is But a Game?

This is just a random philosophical musing I had about life and games.

Determinism

In the movie Waking Life (and if you’ve seen it, here’s an excellent breakdown and analysis of the film), one character muses about whether life (or existence, or the universe, or what have you) is deterministic or not. Deterministic meaning that given a starting state, the rules dictate that the system will always go through the exact same states every time, ending (if there is an end) in the exact same spot. For example, the rule of gravity. Ignoring unusual circumstances, if you hold an object in the air and let it go, it will always fall and hit the ground, and (assuming air resistance and other variables remain constant) it will always take the same amount of time and strike the ground at the same speed (determinism is generally a nice thing to have in software design, as bugs are much more easy to fix if you can reliably duplicate them and if you can trace back cause and effect in a linear fashion).

Anyway, this brought to my mind the Game of Life designed by John Conway. No, not that old board game with the spinning wheel and cars and the colored pegs. You have a board made up of squares. Some of which are white. Some of which are black. Every turn, a square neighboring exactly three white squares turns (or stays) white (kinda like giving birth). Every square with more than 3 (overcrowding) or less than 3 (exposure) white neighbors turns (or stays) black. And this cycle just continuous indefinitely. Some starting patterns will die out and become permanently black. Others generate patterns that seem to change endlessly (indeed, I believe there’s an X-Windows screensaver based on the game). I imagine it’s called the “Game of Life” because the patterns behave like crude life-forms, but other parallels occurred to me later, which I’ll discuss at the end.

Note that this game is an example of a deterministic system. Given any specific starting state, it will always go through the same subsequent states and end up in the same place. In a twist on this, in David Brin’s novel, Glory Season (an interesting book, but not one of his best), some of the characters play a version of this game against each other, trying to create a starting pattern that will travel across the board to the other side and obliterate the other side’s pattern. Although you can’t predict what patterns your opponent will create, it’s still a deterministic system in the sense that once the starting state of the board is filled up, the final outcome is determined, and that outcome will be the same every time that same pattern is used.

Of course, some of the physical laws of our universe we’ve discovered do not seem to be deterministic. For example, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle dictates that we cannot predict where an atom will be with 100% certainty. You can only say that it has a certain probability of being one place, and while this probability may be very high, there’s always a non-zero probability that it will not be there. It’s currently unknown whether this is a limitation of our ability to measure things, or just the way our universe works. If it’s the way the universe works, then it is non-deterministic, and inherently unpredictable. It would be like comparing the “Game of Life” to the game of Yahtzee.

“Solving” a game

Speaking of Yahtzee, mathematics and computers have actually “solved” the game a couple of years ago to come up with the optimal strategy. Indeed, there’s a book by Vancura Olaf, PhD., called Advantage Yahtzee which details it. Since chance is involved, you’re not guaranteed to win, of course, just maximizing your chances. This is kinda like basic strategy (and card-counting) in blackjack. “Solving” games is basically exploring all the future possibilities allowed by the rules of the game (and for games involving chance, knowing the odds of each possibility). Once you know that, you can then always pick the best moves, starting from the very first one.

For simple games, like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, Blackjack, and Yahtzee, this has already been done, although even the deterministic games can still be enjoyable to humans because the solution is too complex to easily remember. The more complex the rules, the harder it is to solve the game. For example, chess, which, despite many computer cycles hard at work, has yet to be solved. Games with much more freedom and many more variables, like Scrabble, football, or “Grand Theft Auto,” can be even harder to “solve” in the sense of being able to know every outcome (which can be different from knowing how to win).

In Bob we trust

So, what does all this have to do with philosophy? You’ve heard the phrase, “Life is a game”? Well, what if we’re not the ones playing the game? Consider the possibility that there is a Creator of our Universe, but this creator (I’ll call him Bob) is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Instead, Bob might simply be playing a game where the board is our universe, and he does not know the final outcome. Maybe he has a specific goal. Maybe the goal is to find out what the final outcome is (kinda like Hitchhiker’s Guide, where they found out that Earth was a computer created to find out the ultimate question). Maybe the goal is to “solve” the game by mapping out all the possibilities given these rules (kinda like the concept that the universe/timeline branches off into a multitude of parallel universes/timelines for every choice that everyone can make). Maybe he’s playing against an opponent. Maybe the stakes are high, and the game is a war between good and evil. Or perhaps it’s just for fun.

Maybe Bob is a good soul, who allows bad things to happen because it’s a gambit towards a long-term goal. Or perhaps he has no power to change the outcome once things are set in motion (like Aristotle’s Prime Mover). Or perhaps he doesn’t even know all the minute details of what’s going on inside the game because his user interface abstracts it all for him. Or maybe he knows the game is deterministic, but doesn’t care about the intermediate states, just the end result, so he doesn’t bother checking on it until it’s done.

Maybe the goal is to see whether the patterns will ever repeat. Maybe he just wants to see the pretty patterns to be entertained. Or maybe nobody’s even looking, and we’re just keeping all the atoms all fresh and mixed up, killing time like a screensaver until Bob actually wants to use the universe to work on a new problem.

Maybe we can help or hinder Bob. This goes to the question of free will (which is actually what the character in Waking Life was musing about). The laws of physics dictate which way the atoms in our brain go, thus dictating our thoughts and choices. Perhaps it’s deterministic. Perhaps it’s random. But is there free will either way? If not, we might be nothing but elaborately programmed pawns. If so, we would be more akin to players for a coach, like in football or baseball. Or officers and soldiers in a war. Except that we don’t know the rules or even the object, and our coach or commander isn’t a particularly clear communicator. Or maybe he is, and some of us aren’t listening?

Just things that make you go hmmmmmmmm. And then, “What the heck were you smoking, and where can I get some?”