Hope You're Making The Most Of It!

A co-worker sent out a link to an interesting site where an argument is made that we all just exist inside a computer simulation. I couldn't follow all of the math closely enough to be able to say that I believe things are as straight-forward as the author posits, but it's certainly an unusual approach. (And being in a computer simulation would explain away phenomena like deja vu, paranormal activity and the popularity of Reality TV and Paris Hilton!)

One thing I noticed in the paper was that it makes an assertion which, if taken to its own logical conclusion, would seem to invalidate the larger premise. In writing in support of the viability of a "posthuman" era with completely life-like simulations, the following is provided:

"Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficient detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis. Should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem."

I love that notion, but of course it completely rules out any possibility of us actually being in such a simulation. Why? Because, according to the author, any detection of the simulation would result in changing "the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation." So the entire exercise of writing up this thesis should've been aborted (or rewound so that it could be pushed in another direction) if there were any truth to it.

Still, I get a bit of a thrill imagining that we're all just in a virtual reality here, especially when I think about us playing video games: simulations within simulations, dudes!

So if you were convinced that all of this really was just happening in a virtual reality, what would you do differently? I'd probably eat more ice cream...