An article in yesterday's New York Times discusses the possibility that our world was created as a hobby or as an experiment by members of some more technologically advanced civilization. It's the sort of late-night-type discussion you probably had in college. The twist comes from a discussion with the-always-insightful Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University:
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. [emphasis added by AK]
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
Of course, there are lots of caveats, and Bostrom later offers his gut feeling that there's a 20% chance that we're living in a computer simulation. So, how do you live in a world where you might be part of a computer simulation? I suppose you live according to whatever the simulation has established for you. (Do simulated humans make choices the way that we think we do?) Here's some advice from the article that you will likely find less-than-entirely persuasive:
A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.
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