Fine, We're Simulations

[metadigital]

Image: The Joy of Tech

 

So are we all just a bunch of consciousness programs running on some post-singularity universe simulator?

 

The New York Times' John Tierney wrote about this yesterday, with transhumanist bigwig and Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom providing the ideas:

 

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. [...]

 

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.

 

Fine, we could be simulations. Now what? Tierney doesn't have time to do much more than scratch the surface, but that's okay. When it comes to cutting-edge prognostication, it's not the New York Times we turn to. It's science fiction, which has been kicking around digitally replicated consciousness for a few decades now.

 

One of the best treatments of this idea comes from Charles Stross. His Accelerando is a multidimentional, multimillennial romp across space, time and competing software formats. It's got political conspiracies, intelligence embodied as a flock of seagulls, and inspired the title of an upcoming feature of mine: "Even Posthumans Have Mothers-In-Law." Best of all, it's available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here.

 

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch [New York Times]

Nick Bostrom

Wired

[Walsingham]

It could explain that terrible sense of deja vu I get when jelly wrestling.*

 

 

*Like I say, Sand, old man, you've been wasting a lot of time.

[SilentScope001]

There are two thing you can do:

 

1) Pray to the "Person Running the Simulation" to grant you a utopic life and get the milloniaress to propose to you.

 

2) Try to Escape from the Simulation. How? I don't know. Maybe ask that "Person Running the Simulation" to disconnect you?

Edited August 31, 2007 by SilentScope001

[mainstreet]

Is it just me, or does this sound like The Matrix...

 

Already thought concept... ugh.

[metadigital]

The Matrix didn't invent the metaphysical concept detailed here, though it is a very famous and recent dissemination of it.

[Tale]

If it turns out we're simulations, well... I'd hope for Godzilla. Because that was the best Sim City random event EVER.