📘 Why We Are Here: The Ultimate Answer for Individuals, Civilizations, and the Future

How to Begin

Where should this begin?
For me, this was not an easy question.

Strictly speaking, I never intended to write a book like this. At that time, I simply wanted to make an indie game in my spare time—an idea initially inspired by my repeated experiences with Red Dead Redemption 2. The sense of immersion in that work was unforgettable, yet the behavior of its NPCs would always reveal a certain “unnaturalness” at critical moments: sometimes reacting inexplicably, sometimes making decisions that clearly contradicted their own circumstances. They felt “alive,” yet also as if they were being pulled along by some invisible program.

That was when a thought occurred to me:
If one day we could give NPCs a truly coherent, traceable psychological structure—one where causes lead to effects—what would a game world become?

This game was originally nothing more than a technical experiment born from that idea—an attempt to offer players a natural, authentic world imbued with a sense of lived reality. Its goal was modest and concrete: to ensure that every character a player encounters could feel “like a real person.”

But things quickly went beyond the scope of a game.

While constructing mental models for NPCs, I found myself repeatedly reasoning about the underlying structures of concepts such as “consciousness,” “behavior,” “motivation,” “memory,” and “meaning.” And because a game world must operate as a kind of “miniature civilization,” I began to ask:
Could civilization itself also be understood as a causal structure?

The answer arrived more abruptly—and more powerfully—than I had expected.

Late one night, when those scattered hypotheses suddenly snapped into a closed loop, I found myself blurting out, “Oh my God.” This was not exaggeration, but a visceral reaction—a physical jolt that felt like you may have just seen something extraordinary.
To be honest, I was not prepared for that moment.

And so, this book begins here:
from a simple game experiment that unexpectedly stepped into a theoretical world concerned with the very nature of civilization.