Yesterday I watched a YouTube video, by RedLogic, in which Minecraft essentially beats itself. That sentence was already stupid enough to make me interested.
The experiment begins with a particular Minecraft seed and a simple question: if you created the right starting conditions and then left the world completely alone, could the game eventually stumble its way into completing itself? No player gathering resources. No kid with a headset yelling at his friends. No carefully planned speedrun. Just Minecraft being Minecraft for an absurdly long period of time.
Apparently, the answer is yes.
Not quickly, of course. Nothing this entertaining happens quickly. The experiment stretches across something like two billion simulated years, during which the game’s ordinary mechanics are allowed to interact over and over again. Endermen move blocks. Mobs wander. Creepers explode. Snow golems appear under outrageously unlikely circumstances. Pathways open. Creatures end up in places they were never “supposed” to go. Eventually enough improbable events stack on top of one another that the Ender Dragon dies and the game reaches what we have decided counts as an ending.
Nobody was playing.
That was the part that got me.
At first I was simply amazed by the technical absurdity of it. Minecraft is already a fascinating little universe because it operates according to a relatively simple set of rules and then allows enormous complexity to emerge from them. Give those rules enough room and enough time, and apparently the system can wander into configurations that look almost intentional. Somewhere during the video, though, Minecraft stopped looking quite so much like Minecraft.
It started looking suspiciously familiar.
We live inside our own strange seed. There were starting conditions. There are rules. Matter behaves in particular ways. Energy behaves in particular ways. Gravity does its thing. Chemistry does its thing. Stars form, burn and explode. Elements combine. Molecules become increasingly elaborate. Eventually, on at least one damp rock circling one fairly ordinary star, chemistry became biology.
Biology kept going. Single cells became complicated cells. Complicated cells became organisms. Organisms developed nervous systems. Nervous systems grew brains. Brains became capable of modeling the world around them. Eventually one of those brains invented Minecraft, and another brain made a computer simulate Minecraft for two billion years to see whether it would eventually kill a dragon by itself.
Reality has a sense of humor, even if only because we are here to assign it one.
What fascinated me about the Minecraft experiment was not that it proved anything about our universe. I’m not ready to start a religion around a snow golem. What amazed me was simply seeing the shape of the process: starting conditions, rules, time, iteration and emergence. That is, more or less, the recipe for everything we know.
We tend to look at extraordinarily unlikely outcomes and assume their improbability demands intention. Something this strange must have been aimed at. Something this complex must have been planned. Something this unlikely could not simply happen. But that intuition changes dramatically when you add enough time.
A creeper randomly exploding in exactly the right location might be absurdly unlikely. Give Minecraft two billion years and suddenly you have a lot of creepers.
The same thing happens when we look backward at our own existence. The chain of events required for you or me to be sitting here today is so ridiculously specific that it feels impossible. Move one ancestor. Change one storm. Alter one migration. Delay one sperm by half a second. Let one asteroid miss. Change one tiny event somewhere in the chain and this particular version of reality never happens.
Yet here it is.
That does not necessarily mean the universe was trying to create us. It may simply mean that this is one of the things its rules were capable of producing. The Ender Dragon dying was not necessarily the purpose of two billion years of Minecraft. It was simply one reachable state of that system. Likewise, consciousness may not be the universe’s destination. It may simply be something matter can eventually do.
I find that idea far more interesting than destiny.
Of course, this is also where my thoughts wandered directly into the free-will problem, because apparently I am incapable of watching Minecraft without eventually dragging philosophy into it.
Somewhere in that two-billion-year simulation were countless little villagers going about their days. Farming. Sleeping. Walking around. Occasionally being murdered by zombies. Normal villager stuff. I could not help wondering how many of them thought they had free will.
Imagine one little villager stepping out of his house in year 1,482,771,206 and reaching a path. He turns left. Perhaps he feels wonderfully independent about it. He could have gone right, he thinks.
Meanwhile, from outside the simulation, we can see that his entire world is unfolding from a specific seed, under a specific set of rules, through a causal history stretching back more than a billion years. Maybe his turn to the left was inevitable.
That would not necessarily stop it from feeling like a choice from where he was standing.
And that is the part that feels eerily similar to my own position. I wake up in the morning and make decisions all day long. Coffee or water. Write this sentence or delete it. Exercise now or later. Turn left or right. I experience myself choosing constantly, but I have no access to the full chain of causes producing those choices. I do not know every genetic influence, childhood experience, hormonal fluctuation, environmental cue, firing neuron, forgotten memory or microscopic condition that arrived together to produce the thought I am calling “my decision.”
From inside the system, I experience a choice. From far enough outside it, perhaps someone would simply see the next state following from the previous one.
Some hypothetical observer with complete knowledge of the universe might watch me pause over this paragraph and say, “Of course he kept it.” Meanwhile I am sitting here feeling very proud of myself for deciding not to delete it.
The little villager and I may have more in common than I would like.
What makes the Minecraft experiment especially beautiful, though, is that no creature inside it needs to understand the larger process. The Enderman moving a block does not know that the block might eventually contribute to some chain of events. The creeper does not know why it explodes. The snow golem has no awareness that some observer billions of simulated years away might consider its behavior historically significant. Everything simply does what it does, and somehow enormous patterns emerge.
That feels familiar too.
We are very good at taking the present moment and drawing a story backward through it. We look at the finished pattern and imagine that the pattern must always have been the point. Evolution was leading to humans. History was leading to here. My life was leading to this moment. The universe was leading toward consciousness.
Maybe.
Or maybe we are simply standing beside the dead dragon after two billion years saying, “Clearly this whole thing was arranged for this.”
Minecraft itself does not know that it won. The dragon does not know that it lost. The blocks do not recognize the significance of the event. “Beating Minecraft” is something the observer says about what happened.
That may be the part of the experiment I like most. Reality happens first. Meaning arrives later.
The universe produces stars and planets and cells and brains, and then one of those brains looks around, draws lines between events and says, “Ah. A story.” I love stories. I spend most mornings making them. But I increasingly suspect reality itself may be under no obligation to provide one.
Perhaps there is no grand destination hidden inside the process. Perhaps there are simply starting conditions, rules and unimaginable amounts of time, and every once in a while something extraordinary emerges: a star, a whale, a human being, a snow golem contributing to the death of an Ender Dragon after two billion years.
And somewhere inside it all, a little villager turns left and feels absolutely certain he could have gone right.