To that end I often wondered whether a character in a video game such as 'Grand Theft Auto' would be able to tell, simply by the behavior of the characters around it, that the world in which it was living wasn't 'real'.
Not really a good case study, because the characters in most video games are not connected to sophisticated LLM AIs, but rather tend to have only special-purpose AIs and scripted behavior. Now I don’t want to bash video game AI development - during the AI Winter that lasted from 1987 to 2000, much of the AI development that happened was for video games and computer games - pathing AIs, AIs to control opponents, AIs to control the behavior of complex simulations in open ended educational simulation games (my favorite) like Sim City 2000, the Sims, SimFarm, SimIsle and so on (and other Sim games, many of which had fairly sophisticated logic, which resulted in one ridiculously dry attempt at a game simulating the healthcare sector, SimHealth), Rollercoaster Tycoon, Transport Tycoon, and other games of the city building type, and the related genre of turn based and real time strategy games like Civilization, Starcraft and so on. So that by the year 2000, when the need for improvements in search engines and various business applications sparked a renewal of interest, the video game community had been carrying the torch.
However, video game characters in games like GTA do not think; they do not engage in the GPT-type neural network cognition of LLMs like chatGPT 4o or chatGPT 5 Instant, nor do they engage in the more structured reasoning LLM approach of models like openAI o4, chatGPT 5 Thinking and so on.
So the question is, does reality pass the Turing test? Does it act like a freely evolving natural world, or does it act more like an purposely designed simulation?
Yes, reality passes the Turing test. If in doubt, pray to God.
For Christians, we experience reality comforted by the Holy Spirit, and taste reality in the most joyous and painful moments of life - in prayer, in the joy of the Eucharist, in the sorrow of grief and bereavement, the pain of physical suffering, the comfort of healing, the joy of helping others to heal through the practice of charity, and especially through love - love for our family, for our spouses, for our brethren, for our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and godchildren, or for those who are monastics, for fellow monastics and spiritual children, and for the love of our fellow men (see charity).
I would suggest if you have any doubt about the nature of reality you volunteer to serve with a Christian charity in your area. This is one area where my Roman Catholic friends particularly excel; unfortunately we Orthodox just do not have in the US the same kind of infrastructure they have, except in parts of Alaska, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, although we are trying, for example, the Antiochians have the Order of St. Ignatius, which has among other things built housing for homeless teenagers in the Tijuana area, to shelter them during the rainy season, as many were perishing from exposure or drowning.
One Catholic charity group I particularly like that is very accessible to ordinary people is the Vincentians.
The Episcopalians also have some very good programs, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, as do many other denominations. Indeed at some point I intend to conduct a survey of charitable operations by the major denominations in the US to see how they stack up in terms of the number of charities, the total amount of money spent, and the percentage of charity as a proportion of the overall activity of that denomination both financially and in terms of the time commitment of members relative to volunteers and employees engaged in other types of work under that denominational aegis.
But where such charities exist, they provide an immediate means of interacting with those who need help. Some denominations, like the Salvation Army, are really driven by charitable projects more than anything else.
But by loving those who are suffering, you transcend political issues and can taste the reality of the world by experiencing the reality of God through acting in what in Orthodoxy we would call synergy with His uncreated energies of love, grace and mercy. Even if you aren’t a Christian, you can still taste God in this manner. The Sikhs and certain other Far Eastern religions also engage in extensive charity; the Sikhs have a nice saying “Service to people is service to God.” The theology underlying the basis for that statement is somewhat different (although not to the same extent as Hinduism insofar as Sikhism was influenced in a monotheist direction by contact with Semitic and Persian monotheistic religions, primarily Islam, but also Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Judaism.
Thus almsgiving and charity have, since antiquity, been a universal means of catharsis by which those who feel isolated from reality are able to re-immerse themselves in the love of their fellow human beings and through that, in a sense of the divine, which is why relatively few religions eschew charity altogether, and those dubious religions are not particularly nice or worthwhile. Indeed even most forms of Communist religion such as Marxist-Leninism, Trotskyism and so on did on occasion manifest a charitable impulse, although due to the confused eschatological vision of communists, the charitable instinct was often suppressed in favor of the idea that the only way to help those who was suffering was through revolutionary acts of class struggle, an idea which reached its nadir in Maoism and Hoxhaism.
