Existence shares characteristics with things we created to entertain ourselves. It inherently has game qualities. What could the game/purpose be? Is there any way to get a glimpse of what it is or at least what it is not?
Are there many purposes or games?
- The animal game: survival and reproduction.
- The curiosity or quiz game: being entertained by understanding more about how the world works. We try to figure out what all this is about.
- The movie: sometimes we feel like we have zero or very little choice in what we are and what we can do. Existence feels like an effortless movie in which we are entertained by the multitude of phenomena and new experiences in the world.
- The curation game: existence as a process of discovering its value and meaning as it unfolds. There is no prior set value or meaning. We can assign different meanings to an empty canvas of meaningless existence.
Is there a main game? If so, is there any way to know whether we are aligned with it or on the same track as its original purpose?
Could it be to help other humans or humankind in general? This resonates with us. Is it part of the animal or reproduction game?
What tools can someone use to find this? Is watching other life forms enough to make decisions?
Are there sub-games? If so, do they matter? Is there any way to determine whether we “are” on the main path of existence, a necessary step towards its goal and purpose, or just a beautiful but random side step that wasn’t planned and simply emerged?
What if there is no main game? How strange would that be, though? Would that mean that total chaos is equivalent in meaning to the world as we currently experience it? Or is there a hierarchy of purposes and games?
If existence is indeed a game, who is playing and why does it exist? Does it exist before the game? Is it the creator of the game?
What would be the purpose of a self-conscious organism, regardless of whether it is human, an AI, or an alien? Does all of the above mainly apply to human existence?
These questions cannot be answered or explained by the phenomenal world. Phenomena can explain causation only inside their own system. For example, an entity inside a digital pixel world could potentially predict future frames if it reaches a sufficient state of understanding. However, it would have no way of understanding what is happening outside its world, e.g. whether there is a developer who created the game, how, and why. Nevertheless, it might still be able to get some answers about how things couldn’t be, or a very abstract idea of the general direction of the game’s purpose.
Humanity has these kinds of questions too, and if a creator exists, it probably faces issues of the same nature, so the inquiry itself enters an infinite regress (who created the creator).
Maybe these questions are part of the quiz-like experience/purpose of existence? To exist is to wonder?
What questions are common to:
- us
- a potential creator
- the pixel entity
- every intelligence that could ever be?
Is there a method to search for such questions and their answers?