I wonder if the people from Maxis (the developers of the game the sims) had any idea of the concepts that and complications and ideas their little game represents, for those of you who have never played THE SIMS, its basically a game where you totally control a miniature digital human being (or beings) from above in their own little neighborhood and own little house, the SIMS have status bars that represent ‘hunger’ ‘entertainment’ ‘bladder’ ’relationships’ the goal being keeping a kind of homeostasis of social’ psychological and physical problems, they earn money, buy household items, and have relationships, these things effect their status bars in different ways, they read, and watch television, use the computer and internet, turn lights on and off and basically carry out many human like deeds, its like a giant interactive dolls house.

It’s a sad fact that the first time I played the SIMS I decided to build a house with no windows toilets, or doors, and then introduced things into the environment, to see how each item affected my sim, then eventually after months of deprivation and experiment, I starved my lab rat sim and put him out of his misery.

Aside from my digital experiments in sadism, the implications of this game go well beyond simple entertainment, anyone who has played the game for a long period of time, goes through this unusual feeling where you start to actually feel the cause and effect response factors of everyday life, even while playing I noticed my own ‘bladder’ status bar going up and down, and if you play for too long your ‘relationship’ status bar decreases, I started to look at items around me in a different way, and wonder if every item in my life effected my status bar, I wondered if I fall in love if there is a little love icon lighting up somewhere in your head, or even somewhere else, maybe I am a SIM!

The whole philosophical argument of freedom and determinism, interdetermism and fatalism are all tricky ones, it’s a bit like wading knowingly into a vast swamp of quicksand, but seeing this SIMS game so righteously dips itself in, without so much as reference to a single philosopher, or to the developments of many century’s of philosophical thought I think its safe for anyone to have a go.

It impossible to talk about determinism without going deeply into causality, ‘cause and effect’ that permeates throughout out our lives, the general premise of determinism is:

‘The World is nothing but a chain of events leading up to this moment or action.’

If you have trouble envisioning such a world just imagine a neat little mathematical equation that sums up just about every physical action in the universe, from big bang forward, this idea of a structured divinely created universe, is not uncommon, it exists in every scientific field of study, people like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein strongly believed in such an idea, that was of course until naughty Neils Bohr, came forward and threw a spanner in the works with his famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which basically stated no physical phenomena can be measured to arbitrary accuracy, physicist’s somehow accepted Bohrs principle and developed quantum physics, the principle itself had profound implications for science and created some exciting arguments for philosophy, it put a cap on what we can know, there was something that was not determined in the world, there was something in science that was uncertain, that you could not know by observation, or experiment, however we are still waiting for the philosophers to use the uncertainty principle to pull apart science like a pack of vultures, it seems they are much too busy sipping lattes and talking about Sartre.

The thing with determinism is, that is that it means you and I have no free will, there is nothing within the scope of determinism that just happens by chance or that is random, its simply a case of us not understanding the information or values, if you look at modern science as we move further into the 21^st century, psychology, biology, social and cultural scientific studies just about every field in science could in essence explain everything within the human consciousness, in essence there isn’t much difference to you and a rock down on the beach, you are subject to the same elements and deterministic factors as the rock, albeit a little more complex.

If you choose to believe in determinism in a mild form, or more radical forms, you must at some point come to ask about a first cause, when you play the Sims, you control them, with your mouse and keyboard, if you neglect them their lives fall apart and they die, you control their surroundings, and determine what will happen, and yet even they are trapped in their bodies, and what and they are, at some point you have to ask? Who sets these limitations or these values on me as a human?

Look at our lives and who and what we are, the various functions humanoids have, are we not the product of millions of generations of life, that have been influenced, by the determined environmental and physical factors of this planet, a camel develops its hump to conserve water, to survive, the same way humans perspire to cool down, in your DNA is a code that tells you the story of those factors.

What or who, determined all these things?, are we just a factor of cause and effect, if so was there a very first cause, that set the chain of events going, and who or what set the ball rolling?

Some people like to place god in this position, its really a comfortable place for the bearded old fellow to be, however other questions arise, like ‘what caused god’ or ‘can something be caused outside of time’ there are even more questions about causation itself, like If I dropped and egg here right now, and you bumped your head somewhere else, is there any real causal link between the two actions? Is x always linked to y, or inversely y always linked to x?

All this causes all sorts of wonderful problems for Christians in fact the whole argument was first constructed century’s ago by Christians frantically finding a place for god in a modern world, its safe to say the argument is still alive and kicking today with the development of ‘intelligent design’ and such movements.

I feel its mainly all to do with believing, if you believe that your free and stay ignorant to larger cause and effect, problems around you then you can go most of your life without ever contemplating determinism, my Sims never suspected they where being controlled or determined, do you?

Tim Nash