UFOs and Virtual Reality

The ruminations that Earth and human existence are a computer simulation (Virtual Reality) is not dismissed lightly by some in the scientific community, and accepted by many in the computer sciences.

Jaron Lanier provided a piece in Discover magazine [November 2007, Page 29 ff.] entitled “Are we trapped in some god’s video game?”

In it he quotes philosopher Nick Bostrom: “it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”

The idea that this existence is “virtual” is not new. William Gibson's Neuromancer covered the topic in fiction [1984] and even Immanuel Kant touched on the possibility in his 1781 “Critique of Pure Reason” [Transcendental Aesthetic, Section II, Time, 7, Elucidation].

Therefore, if our existence is virtual, then UFOs have to be virtual also. (Virtual reality can’t subsume real reality, and vice versa.)

The scenario goes something like this, as Lanier has it in his Discover column:

“If a simulation is perfect in every way, it is by definition indistinguishable from the thing it simulates…

[Trying to determine the difference between real existence and virtual existence] people are interested in…the existence of an entity that can look into the lives of players in VR, a powerful player who is usually but not necessarily hidden. It’s similar to believing in a god…Some people imagine this creature as a pimply nerd in the sky who is running a cosmic copy of The Sims, who are us.”

Lanier’s suggestion of a kid/nerd would explain why UFOs are so confusingly variable in behavior and configuration, even schizophrenic-like.

Jacques Vallee’s other-worldly UFOs would be easily explained if UFOs are the by-product of the computer simulation that is life, our life.

That is, the nerd who has created us – our virtual reality – is an immature being, a kid as it were.

And UFOs are just one of the many aspects of this kid’s “game.”

Such a virtual reality would explain the nonsense(s) of humanity: wars, natural disasters, crime, and UFOs.

(It could also account for the esthetic aspects of this existence – the music, art, literature – but that for another time, and another virtual reality; one that runs parallel to our virtual reality, and explained by quantum mechanics.)

UFOs may be the clue to this game of god (or the gods); a clue that we’ve mistaken for a reality that doesn’t actually exist but which we have access to in our confined simulation.

But one can’t expect ufologists to render the clue meaningful as ufologists seem to be quirky avatars that our nerd/god created to make his game, and our virtual reality, more bizarre, for this nerd/god’s silly entertainment.