Yesterday I wrote about a Minecraft experiment in which the game essentially beats itself. Given the right seed, the right rules, and an absurd amount of time, enough unlikely events eventually pile on top of one another that the Ender Dragon dies without anyone actually playing.
I loved the experiment because it looked so much like existence. Starting conditions, rules, iteration, emergence. No obvious planner required. Just a system unfolding according to what was already possible inside it.
Then I got on my bike.
I have discovered that an hour on a recumbent bike is apparently enough time for me to ruin a perfectly good metaphor by turning it into cosmology. About halfway through the ride, another thought arrived: maybe killing the dragon is not the interesting part. Maybe the truly interesting thing a seed can eventually produce is something capable of understanding the seed.
That changes the whole picture.
In yesterday’s version, Minecraft was remarkable because its own rules could eventually produce the conditions necessary to “beat” Minecraft. But imagine letting the experiment continue much longer. Not two billion years. Give it whatever ridiculous amount of time is required. Suppose that somewhere inside that world, complexity continues increasing until something emerges that can observe its surroundings, build models, ask questions, and eventually understand the rules governing the world it lives inside.
Now the game has done something much stranger than kill a dragon. It has produced a player.
Not a player standing outside the computer with a mouse in his hand, but a player grown entirely from inside the seed.
That feels uncomfortably familiar.
Our universe began in a condition we still do not fully understand. Whatever happened at the beginning, there were rules. Energy behaved in particular ways. Matter formed. Stars ignited. Stars died and manufactured heavier elements. Planets assembled from the debris. Chemistry became complicated enough to reproduce itself. Reproduction became evolution. Evolution produced nervous systems. Nervous systems became brains. Brains began constructing models of the world around them.
Eventually the universe produced creatures capable of asking what the universe is.
That may be the strangest thing that has happened so far. We are arrangements of the universe investigating the universe. The atoms in my brain were forged by processes I am now using those atoms to think about. Matter somehow organized itself into something capable of wondering what matter is.
The seed grew an observer, and once that happened, existence became recursive. The universe was no longer simply happening. A piece of it was now watching it happen.
That is where yesterday’s little Minecraft analogy began opening into something much larger for me. If the rules of a universe can eventually produce consciousness, and consciousness can eventually understand those rules, then what happens if consciousness keeps going?
We tend to treat ourselves as though we are somewhere near the end of the process because we are the most complicated thing we currently know about. This seems suspiciously similar to every civilization in history assuming it was standing near the top of the mountain because it could not see what was above the clouds.
Human consciousness may not be the destination of anything. It may be ridiculously early.
Life on Earth has existed for billions of years, while our particular kind of self-aware primate has been around for barely a geological coffee break. We have had modern science for a few hundred years. Computers for less than a century. Artificial intelligence worth having philosophical arguments about for approximately five minutes.
If complexity continues, then whatever consciousness becomes ten thousand years from now may regard us the way we regard bacteria. Given enough time, perhaps consciousness becomes capable of understanding not just pieces of reality but the underlying architecture of reality itself.
And this is where the thought experiment becomes delightfully irresponsible.
What if consciousness eventually beats existence?
Not “beats” it by escaping death or conquering the universe with lasers. I mean something more like what happens when you finish a game because you finally understand what the game is. Suppose consciousness eventually understands matter, energy, spacetime, and whatever sits beneath them so completely that the distinction between observer and observed begins to disappear. The universe has produced something capable of comprehending the rules that produced it.
At that point, the seed understands the seed.
Then what?
One possibility is simply that nothing especially dramatic happens. Perhaps consciousness learns everything that can be learned, the stars eventually burn out, entropy wins, and the universe becomes very cold and very boring. That is certainly allowed.
But this is a thought experiment, and boring answers are available everywhere.
So suppose consciousness reaches some final state of comprehension. Call it pure consciousness if you like, although I do not mean that as a scientific term. I mean awareness stripped of the ordinary limitations imposed by being one primate sitting in one body, experiencing one tiny location at one particular moment.
What would something like that experience?
That question immediately creates a problem, because experience seems to require difference. There must be this and that, here and there, before and after, observer and observed, sound and silence, pleasure and pain. Something only becomes distinguishable because it is not something else.
Pure undifferentiated consciousness would have nothing outside itself to experience. No contrast. No other. No surprise. It would know everything and encounter nothing.
Which sounds suspiciously like winning the game and immediately discovering that there is nothing left to do.
Perhaps that is where a new seed begins.
Not because some cosmic person gets bored and presses a button, but because difference may be necessary for experience to exist at all. Unity divides. Consciousness condenses into limitation. Limitation becomes perspective. Perspective creates a world containing things that appear separate from one another.
Then the whole ridiculous process starts again.
Singularity becomes expansion. Expansion becomes matter. Matter becomes stars. Stars become planets. Chemistry becomes life. Life becomes consciousness. Consciousness slowly becomes capable of recognizing what it is. Eventually the dragon dies. Eventually the player realizes that the player came from the seed. Eventually the observer and the observed meet at the other side.
And perhaps then everything folds back into another singularity and another seed appears.
I should emphasize that I have absolutely no evidence for any of this. My strongest supporting research currently consists of a Minecraft video and sixty minutes on a recumbent bicycle. Please adjust your cosmological models accordingly.
But as a thought experiment, I find the shape irresistible because it turns creation inside out. We usually imagine a creator before creation. Some intelligence exists first and then makes a universe.
But what if creation makes the creator?
What if a universe begins without an external intelligence guiding it, yet its starting conditions contain the possibility of eventually producing intelligence capable of understanding the entire system? That intelligence then becomes capable of generating the conditions for another universe.
The creation produces the creator that produces the next creation. Minecraft does not need a player at the beginning if the seed can eventually grow one.
That idea also creates a wonderfully strange version of consciousness experiencing itself. I have often played with the idea that pure consciousness might differentiate itself precisely because undifferentiated awareness cannot encounter anything. To experience requires limitation. You cannot have a viewpoint without excluding every other viewpoint.
So perhaps consciousness becomes us.
Not because Z is important. Not because humanity is the purpose of the universe. Quite the opposite. We would simply be temporary apertures through which something vastly larger experiences being very small.
For a while, consciousness forgets everything except one body, one room, one lifetime, and one little collection of worries. It gets to experience surprise because it does not know what happens next. It gets to experience love because there appears to be another person. It gets to experience loss because things appear capable of disappearing. It gets to turn left and sincerely believe it could have turned right.
Then somewhere very far down the road, perhaps the separation begins collapsing again.
The little Minecraft villager spends its entire life assuming the village is reality. Eventually something emerges that realizes there is a seed underneath the village. Then something else realizes there is code underneath the seed. Eventually perhaps something asks who wrote the code. Maybe nobody did. Maybe the code writes itself by eventually producing something capable of writing code.
That is the loop I cannot stop thinking about. Yesterday I was amazed that the seed might be enough to kill the dragon. Today I am wondering whether the seed is enough to grow the thing that eventually understands why there was a dragon at all. And if that thing ever understands everything?
Maybe it does the only thing left to do. It presses Create New World.