20% chance we are already living in the Matrix
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The more you think about this for a second the more it makes sense; even though it is difficult to grasp at first.
A philosopher at Oxford University, named Dr. Bostrom (director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford) explains that our universe might be in fact somebody else’s hobby. Is it hard to imagine our all-powerful maker of the heavens and earth could actually be an advanced version of us playing some expansive video game? Probably…
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable supposition of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical possibility that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are hanging in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s view of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
The assumption is that human race produces computers so powerful that humans themselves become redundant – the processing power of all the human minds in the world in one computer. Posthumans – the surviving remnants of post human evolution would create “ancestor simulations” of their ancestral history
Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
Many experts attest the fact that this computing power will probably be made available in the next 50 years. The ancestral virtual world or ‘us’ now, wouldn’t know whether we are in a virtual world because even though for example, you know you are touching a piece of wood or holding a piece of paper, the feeling that one feels are only explainable because you feel them nothing more, whether this is created by an all powerful neural network made from silicon or not doesn’t matter if you are programmed this way. We would all still want to survive in this virtual world.
Is all this frightening? Ridiculous? Not particularly seeing as we are already taking part in virtual worlds such as Second Life and attending virtual career fairs were we doing this just 5 years ago? The bizarre thought comes when you think that the created simulational ancestors ‘us’ eventually become advanced enough again within our virtual world to create our own ancestral past through a virtual world, and thus repeating this process ad infinitum. But surely we’d eventually understand we were simulations and this would ruin the ‘master designer’s’ logic.
If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.
