Dilettante the Noob, Ian

When Dilettante was a wee spazz of 12 or 13 years age,

When he was really more of a Noob than anything else,

Having not worked up the muster to rise to the

Torporous heights of dissipated ennui, he asked himself:

  What's the point in doing anything

  if God's in charge of

  everything I do?

If God's preordained it all?

Even then Noob né Dilettante at least had a sense of something being out of kilter.

He did not yet know that the Earth wobbled or that not trusting was even an option.

Still, he had more questions than answers, a deficit which would prove to have no ceiling.

The natural world behaves exactly the same way as the environment of Grand Theft Auto IV.

In the game, you can explore Liberty City seamlessly in phenomenal detail.

I made a calculation of how big that city is, & it turns out it’s a million times larger than my PlayStation 3.

You see exactly what you need to see of Liberty City when you need to see it, abbreviating the entire game universe into the console.

The universe behaves in the exact same way.

In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a definite state unless they’re being observed.

Many theorists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how you explain this.

One explanation is that we’re living within a simulation, seeing what we need to see when we need to see it.

Writes Rich Terrile.