Megacatastrophes! by David Darling

Author:David Darling [Darling, David & Schulze-Makuch, Dirk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780740270
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

THE WORLD THAT NEVER WAS

More disturbingly, the possibility has been suggested that we may already be living in a simulated reality. What we take to be the natural cosmos may be just a simulation set up by some intelligence beyond our ken. According to this idea, we’re no more than self-aware characters in a holodeck novel.

In 1988, the Austrian computer scientist Hans Moravec became the first to suggest what’s become known as the simulation argument. Ten years later, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrum, at the University of Oxford, explored the ramifications of this argument in detail.31 Bostrum started from the premise that it’s not unreasonable to suppose that an advanced civilization would eventually develop the means to create a simulated reality – and not just one simulated reality but very likely a huge number of them, for research purposes or just for fun (maybe in the form of a commercially available game). Now, Bostrum asked, what’s more likely: that we’re the first species who in time will do this, or that we’re actually the characters in one of the countless simulations created by other intelligences? Remember, if we are just conscious characters in a simulated reality we wouldn’t know it because to us it would seem like the “real world”.

Maybe the virtual characters in a simulated reality can become so advanced that they can fashion their own simulated realities, and so it might go on, layer upon layer. Following this line of reasoning, we may not even be in a “first generation” simulated reality but one that’s nested much deeper. Suddenly the multiverse concept of the cosmologist starts to seem small beer by comparison. Reality itself might be a relative concept and in truth there’s an untold number of simulated realities, many of them inhabited by sentient beings who are under the illusion that they live in the one true reality, arranged in a mind-bogglingly vast hierarchy.

Unfortunately, simulations can be ended with disturbing ease by their creators. Just as we can close down a computer game with a simple click when we’ve had enough of it, so, if we were virtual characters in some much more elaborate charade our existence could be rudely curtailed by a higher being getting bored of the goings-on in our own little cosmos. Press “quit” and we and our fictional universe are returned to the digital recycle bin of a computer in a more real level of reality.

Perhaps if we live in a simulated reality we’ll find out about it, just as some of the protagonists in The Matrix do. Then we might find some way to pop out of our simulated reality into the reality level above us. After all, whether we’re participants in a simulated reality or not, we are conscious entities and we’re ambitious and smart.

On the other hand perhaps in this case ignorance is a blessing. The obsolescence of humanity would be tragic enough. The discovery that we’d been totally irrelevant all along would be unendurable.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.