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Is Our Universe A Computer Software?

I. Can We Handle the Truth?

In 1940, Konrad Zuse, one of the first humans to ever put together a computer, had a revelation! While working at his computer software he compared it to how the Universe works and asked himself the following question: “Is it possible for the entire Universe to work like a giant computer?” In other words: “Are we living a virtual reality?” Probably from this idea emerged the well-known movie called “The Matrix”.

Today, we have the means of creating learning robots, which are capable of expressing emotions similar to ours. We can copy and replicate all our feelings and emotions and upload them into a robot, similar to Sonny from the movie “I Robot” — because everything is software!


II. Pushing the Truth to the Limits
The Virtual World — The Matrix
From this idea, I want to push your imagination even further. Let’s assume that the US government decides to replicate our world in a PC program, similar to games like Sims or Second Life.

All they need is a good plan, great programmers & huge servers — all achievable.

Next, they create virtual individuals with the exact feelings, emotions and capabilities of a regular human being. They choose to call them “vihums”, from virtual humans.

The software allows them to live, eat, work, create, procreate and… die. Their planet is an exact replica of our planet and the vihums obey the same laws as we do.

Sonny winking — iRobot
The programmers start building a wonderful planet, with millions of species of trees, plants, animals, birds, fishes and insects. They decide that the vihums should start from scrap. They will have to discover fire, how to use tools and so forth. For the vihums to be different as individuals, the program spawns random characteristics for each new ‘born’ vihum.  Now, the newly created ‘Johnny’ likes ice-cream and soda, while his mother likes chocolate and apple juice. In one phrase, the programmers make their lives an exact replica of our lives, and their virtual planet the same as ours.

Screenshot from the PC game “Sim City 4
But the programmers have one dilemma: should they also implement the necessity of sleep for their virtual humans, or is it just a loss of ‘time’? Eventually, they decide that ‘sleep’ is a helpful feature, because they will need to constantly upgrade and improve the servers, program, features, etc. The upgrade will be implemented during one’s sleep. For the human operators to directly interfere with the vihums, they decide to implement dreams, as well. Now, the operators can give suggestions to their virtual buddies about what to do, but of course is up to them if they decide to follow the dreams or not — this is the beauty of the game.

Let’s assume that the work is complete and the program runs smooth. The vihums have NO IDEA that they are not ‘real’ human beings and their world is in fact a virtual program, running on a gigantic server. 
But the programmers are not quite satisfied yet, so they decide to spice things up. They want to — somehow — interact with all the vihums at the same time, but without disrupting their normal lives. So they decide to create a hidden ‘grid’ and connect all vihums to it. Somehow similar to the concept of “common consciousness”. The programmers are now able to see what common goals their virtual buddies have and are also able to add some suggestions into this grid.
Later, the programmers decide to create a very important, but hard to achieve “level” in the program. Those who are able to achieve it, will learn all the secrets of their world. But who are those who deserve this privilege? The programmers decide unanimously that those who are able to ‘live’ their lives in harmony with the program are the ones who deserve this gift.
Just like in the real world, it’s not long before some of the vihums start making trouble. They disrupt the harmony and fights, crimes and murders start taking places everywhere. The programmers don’t have any means to punish the trouble makers without interfering with their lives in a visible way, not to mention that they don’t have the necessary time to deal with each single conflict.
They immediately understand that the only way to make this program work on a massive scale (billions of vihums) is to implement a feature able to auto-manage the program. But what feature? 
Luckily, one of the programmers is very familiar with the so called “karmic law” a.k.a. cause and effect or action – reaction. Everyone understands that this is the best feature for auto-managing the program and even more importantly, it’s completely fair.
Now, the vihums who generate positive things in their lives will be surrounded by harmony and bliss. Every positive action will be rewarded by this ‘boomerang effect’. Not only that the positive vihums will experience wonderful lives, but they will also be able to reach that superior level in the program that allows them unlock the mysteries of their existence.
At this point, the programmers can even speed the game up. They choose to speed it up 50 times and now, their creators live 50 times longer than the vihums.
Unfortunately, at this speed, the lifespan of a vihum is very short, compared to the lives of their creators. Plus, all programmers became attached to the first generated characters and they are curious to know how their favorite vihums will evolve. 
Luckily, one of them has a brilliant idea!
– “Guys, let’s assume reincarnation is real,” he said. “Why don’t we implement this feature in our program? Let’s create a secondary program and attach some ‘souls’ to their bodies. After they die, the souls will enter the secondary program and plan their next incarnations. Wouldn’t this be awesome?”
Everyone is excited by this idea and they soon bring the concept to a whole new level.
– “What if we actually interact with them while they are ‘dead’ and even help some of them plan their next incarnations?” the second programmer says, “and as soon as they respawn, they will simply forget everything that happened while ‘dead’, in the secondary program.”
The idea is gladly embraced by all and the general excitement suddenly boosts. Their favorite characters will be immortal and they will even be able to interact with them. It’s such a mind blowing idea! They start working to their new program, but they’ve had no idea how hard the work will be! This new program, this secondary life, is just as hard to create as the first one.
They need to implement a lot of new features, create new characters that will help & educate the vihums while dead. They call the helping characters, Angels, and allow them to access a specially-built data base, where they have access to a lot of the answers. They reward them with a permanent state of bliss for their hard work and the possibility to evolve to even higher levels, where the information becomes more and more elaborate.
They also decided that the vihums who were able to access the “hidden level” of the program and learn all the secrets, can now work in the secondary program and help their fellow vihums to achieve this level themselves. 
– “It’s simply useless to send them back if they’ve learned all the lessons. They are now much more valuable in the secondary program”, one of the programmers says.
They symbolically call them “saints”, because they behaved so good and added so much beauty into their virtual world.
The programmers have very high expectations now, because they see how easily their virtual world can become perfect. If all vihums understand the karmic law, they will most definitely create only positivity and their evolution will be fast and wonderful.
But the vihums disappoint them day after day!
At first, they begin hunting down animals for food. According to them, it is a lot easier to kill and feed, than to work the land and grow the food. They also start killing each other for materialistic possessions. This brings a lot of negative karma to their lives and they basically surround themselves with negativity from the beginning.
During their so called death, the programmers explain them how special they are and teach them to act like one single organism, because they actually ARE one — all made from the same thing (all computer programs, games or software are made from numerical patterns called BITS, a shortcut from Binary Digits. And the binary digits mean that all information is encoded in patterns of “1” and “0”. Their entire program is made from 1’s and 0’s, from vihums to their surrounding environment. They are all bits of information).
But, unfortunately, as soon as they respawn into the main program, they return to their useless, negative actions.
The only solution, without interfering too much, is to send few “messengers” into their reality and educate them. Hopefully, the vihums will accept the teachings and implement them into their lives. The programmers decide that the Angels and Saints should be allowed to incarnate once again if they decide to, but with much higher access into the secondary program. They will be guided and helped during their infancy and helped to remember who they are and what their missions are. Similar to our Jesus Christ and to other spiritual teachers.
But, unfortunately, most of the vihums are not very receptive. Some of them don’t believe a word, others accept the knowledge but don’t know how and what to change. The more powerful vihums perceive them as a threat to their small “empires” and decide to eliminate them.
Only few of the vihums are able to make a difference, but because they are either oppressed by the society or misunderstood, they decide to retreat into the mountains. They create small communities there and live in harmony with the entire Creation — just like the Buddhist monks and other spiritual communities.
The human programmers are very disappointed. All their efforts were in vain! Some of the vihums even created false cults and religions to benefit from the naivety of the others. They raised great fortunes preaching lies, and promoting them as facts. Instead of teaching the vihums how to achieve perfection and how to live in harmony, they confuse and scare them with a lot of nonsense and apocalyptic theories.
The programmers see all their efforts trashed!
Speeding the program even more, they now see a very evolved species of vihums, very similar to ours. There are small differences, of course, in fields like architecture, fashion or transportation. But seeing the wider picture, the vihums and their creators evolved in a very similar way. The programmers are now scared to watch into the future. The ongoing wars and powerful weapons are a constant threat to the fragile balance of their world.
The creators simply don’t want their hard work to be destroyed, so they slow the speed down and start searching for solutions. They want to help the vihums overcome all challenges.
III. The Final Stage
In order to find a solution, the programmers decide to create other worlds and other species, but only slightly similar to the vihums. The more diverse they are, the better the experiment. They want to see what it takes for a species to discover perfection.
Now, the creators assign themselves an even more difficult mission: to create an entire Universe, with thousands, or maybe millions of different inhabited planets and variations of vihums. Of course, it would be useless to create only original vihums everywhere in the Universe. The programmers already know almost everything about them, so they decide to create totally different worlds. These newly created species will look different, think different, communicate in different ways and they will even obey slightly different laws.
After several years, the programmers were able to create thousands of different species, only slightly similar to the original vihums. All these species and their home planets are now part of the same, gigantic, virtual program. 
Now, let us assume for a second that you are a vihum yourself, living in a completely virtual world, part of an elaborate program. Would you be aware of it?

By Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com;