Is this the end game? By GAVIN SIMPSON. 17 August 2002 The West Australian RELIGION WORLD WHEN you think about it, we live in a very strange universe governed by some very odd rules. Innocent people suffer horrendous deaths. Whole continents face starvation, pestilence and natural disasters while others get off relatively scot-free. Evildoers prosper and men and women of goodwill cop it in the neck. Various belief systems do their best to make sense of it all and provide codes of behaviour which offer a way out of a very confusing situation. And of providing hope that there is a better state of things to come. But the catch is, you have to follow some apparently paradoxical rules to have any chance of passing on to a better life. Many of these rules seem to fly in the face of human nature. Our evolutionary instincts appear to be pushing in one direction and these appeals to moral virtue in another. The seven deadly sins - pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony and sloth - are good examples. Without them, it seems difficult to comprehend how our modern capitalist world would continue to go around. Greed, as Gordon Gecko famously observed in the movie Wall Street, is good. Without it, who would bother fighting to get to the top, amass as much wealth as possible, and keep the whole show on the road? Then there's pride. But if you're not proud to be yourself, what sort of life would you have? And envy. Well, who isn't a bit envious of just about anyone doing better than we seem to be? And if we weren't, would we try so hard to get ahead? Anger? What's the big deal here? Even God gets angry - we are told we must fear the wrath of God more than just about anything else. And, it is often argued, you can't get very far or change things that need to be changed without getting steamed up. So where are we up to now? Ah yes, lust. Well, from an evolutionary point of view, what's wrong with that? Without a lashing of lust, where would the next generation come from? And it's good for the economy, too. Where would consumerism and the advertising industry be without it? If we were not so preoccupied with procuring the objects of our lust - or trying to turn ourselves into such objects for others - not nearly as much money would be spent. Next? Gluttony. Boy, do we need that in a consumer economy. Enough said. About the only sin that would seem to be a vice in the evolutionary and market sense might be sloth. We need to work ever harder to get ahead and keep the wheels of commerce turning. But then again, where would the holiday and leisure industries be without our giving in to that temptation to just do nothing, take a well-earned break and spend lots of money in the process. Maybe this state of affairs is all part of one big game plan. Not arranged by some benevolent deity with our best interests in mind but by a much more malevolent force. Maybe, as fellow columnist Nick Miller reflected recently, we are like Keanu Reeves in the movie The Matrix, living inside a computer simulation, a cosmic game programmed by who knows who. Miller's namesake Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Yale University, thinks (maybe he thinks too much) that this could well be the case. He speculates that just such a program could have been developed by a post-human society living in what we think of as the future. In a paper submitted to the journal Mind, he argued that humans would one day simulate consciousness and then go on to simulate universes for it to live in. If that is true, the chances are, so the argument goes, that it has already happened and we are living in one. Robin Hanson, from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, says the way we come across to our "creator" might determine whether we live or die. If we play the game the wrong way, we might just get zapped - deleted from the program. The other way to get into trouble might be to realise it's all just a game. So if I were you, I wouldn't be telling too many others about this. Otherwise the game might be up. email: gavin.simpson@wanews.com.au.