Life is like a Video Game
10/31/2022 12:21 AM MST
morality, philosophy
Life is like a game in that it starts at a certain point and has rules. Primarily, the main rule being that you shouldn’t die. I posted recently about the three moral emotions. Fear is innate, in that we’re born with it. It’s a generic fear, however, and only after time does the mind associate forms with this fear. Anger usually occurs as a response to fear after a prolonged time in its presence. Focus lies between fear and anger, and requires typically even more time still.
Why did monks spend countless hours writing ancient texts, other than to preserve them? Perhaps discipline, or for something to do while stuck in a monastery somewhere. Why did Moses envision a tablet as the precipice for dictating the Ten Commandments? Perhaps this was the best surface to preserve it. I have another theory, however.
My theory is this. The mind is fairly chaotic, and only language really has the power to reign it in. Monks used language this way to encourage their philosophy of disciple, however I believe there is more to this process than meets the eye. When one writes, one learns to think of their life as a story. As the main character (getting back to the video game metaphor) one needs to have the proper preparations to live and thrive.
Life is a complicated inter-meshing of cycles. There’s the life-death cycle, the seasonal cycle, mood cycling in Bipolar (although I suspect this happens lightly in all of us), and I could go on endlessly. In order to make sense of everything going on, one needs more than logic. One needs a sense of wisdom as to how to operate their human machinery, and this means first understanding the powers that compel us.
When we perceive things in this “video game” world, they typically conjure a valence. The mind creates attachments over time to things which generate positive valence, such as being around people that we love. Over time, we learn what things we like and what things we don’t like. This forms a qualitative wisdom so to speak; a dictionary divided into two categories.
Beyond this, the mind breaks things down into categories, such as joyful activities or disgusting ones. The mind goes about life collecting data and updating this model as needed. However, if one is truly aiming to succeed in the video game world, one needs to view things from the perspective of a programmer who designed it.
Instead of breaking things down into valence categories, I propose we view things using the (to programmers) familiar concepts of inheritance and polymorphism. Inheritance is the concept of organizing classes of objects into a tree. For example, “body part” could be the head of the tree, and below this could be arm, leg, stomach, etc. These “leaves” as they’re called, are clarifications of the semantic instance being described. So for example, you could have a “body part → arm” or a “body part → stomach”
Polymorphism is the concept that objects or instances can communicate or behave as one another through the concept of an interface. An interface describes a generic means of communicating between the instances. For example, there are many races of human yet if we understand the same language we polymorphically have an interface with which to communicate with each other.
Using these concepts, we can organize objects and people we perceive in our environments to create a virtual environment. Why virtual? Because it only exists as a simulation in the mind, and may not be exact. But to get back to the point I brought up earlier: the three moral emotions are fear, focus, and anger. Why care about morality you might first say? Well, apart from the reason that other video game characters will care, you might find that it creates the proper mentality for dealing with the chaos of living. This is personal preference however.
People you encounter will likely invite you on “quests” to satisfy their needs or wants. Unlike a video game, however, trusting the wrong people can lead to death. So, one must first have some calculus to measure or judge others in order to take the leap of faith necessary. This requires some experimentation, so take on small tasks at first (many parents have their kids do chores, which is a basic quest.) Over time, you’ll learn to associate some amount of effort with some amount of reward.
This “reward” be it chemical or emotional, is like a coin in a game of Mario. It’s the trail of treats you may leave your cat to entice them into another room. Over time one learns that these rewards are enjoyable, and begins to seek them out. Around this time typically, one also learns of “punishments. A punishment is like falling into the spikes and losing health or running out of time and losing a life.
One then may adopt a reverse strategy: instead of seeking rewards, one should simply avoid punishment. However, after living this way for some time, one will likely become bored or apathetic, perhaps even adopting a nihilistic attitude. This isn’t an enjoyable way to live however, and one may wonder if this video game world is worth experiencing at all.
This naturally leads to the question of death: what happens after life, and why are we meant to live in the first place? This is where I finally get to address my vision of the moral purpose.
Life seems obviously designed to encourage one to become wiser over time, and those that survive typically are winners of the game in their own right. We may not have any idea what happens after death, but it seems important and we know it to be inevitable. In my artistic view, the manner of our death and the story of our lives are relevant to the afterlife.
The manner of our death instructs us to our errors in life. The fearless warrior who falls in battle learns to be less brave. The woman who falls for another lover and loses her marriage learns to be more judicious. Without death there is no stimuli to instruct the soul as to how to evolve. Death can take many forms. Ego death for example doesn’t require one to die physically in order to reap some of the benefits.
Why is the story of our lives relevant and why did the monks write for countless hours? Because, for one thing, if we learn the correct things in life then we should be fully prepared for the challenges of death. We must have a story in order to justify ourselves to entities we may encounter, be them Gods or not. If nothing else, but to entertain them or pacify them to allow safe passage.
My theory is that after we die, we are sent on a great journey. On this journey, we are tempted by the things which we learned in life to be skeptical of or to avoid. It requires instincts to know that the journey is real and purposeful. Perhaps this could be rebirth or it could be something else entirely strange. The point I suppose I wish to make is that life has a purpose and is more than just a video game. However, video games do provide a valuable means of learning and evolving through life.