So says
this article in the New York Times. Playing off a common thread in science fiction - that our lives might be lived within a completely virtual world, a la
The Matrix - some artificial intelligence researches have come to the conclusion that you are almost inevitably a highly advanced program, being run inside an immensely powerful computer, decades or centuries in the future, by "posthumans" who are interested in simulating their ancestors - us.
The argument is fleshed out at sites such as
The Simulation Argument:
[A]t least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
In other words, the stronger you happen to think the case is that one day our computers will be powerful enough to
create a fully simulated Earth, circa 2007, the greater the chances are that you happen to be living within such a simulation yourself... unless, for some reason, our descendants are unwilling, unable, or uninterested in SimCity-ing us.
Even more bizarre is the following thought: What happens when the artificial intelligences within a simulation approach a posthuman level of development themselves? In theory, at this point they'd be able to launch their own ancestor simulations - simulations taking place within a simulation - a virtual machine, to use a common concept in computer programming. As anyone who's run Windows on a Mac (back before it could run natively on one) can tell you, the problem with virtual machines is that they eat up resources. So if we're living within a simulation, our existence depends on the resources of whatever computer we're running on. If millions of us begin running our own ancestor simulations in "computers" that are, in reality, virtual machines running on the
real computer, we could unwittingly consume all the processing cycles we depend on to keep our world running! Or, alternately, our posthuman creators might simply set our program up to terminate before that could happen, in order to keep their systems running.
Could the world end in a Blue Screen of Death? Could it be terminated in order to free up resources for whatever the posthuman equivalent of iTunes happens to be?
Also interesting - If we're living in a simulation,
how should we conduct our lives? What will best guarantee that our program will continue? One academic suggests that, all things being equal, artificial intelligences would do well to care less about others, live more for today, make our world look more likely to become rich, expect to and try more to participate in pivotal events, be more entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around us happier and more interested in us.
Theologically speaking, it's an interesting argument - perhaps the strongest case science could put forward for a "creator" of some sort who is completely outside of our universe, who is watching us with interest, who perhaps interacts with her creation (even entering into it via an avatar, most likely as a famous or important person), and who has complete freedom to write (and break) the rules of our universe as she sees fit. The boundaries between science and metaphysics blur quickly in this sort of thought experiment.
God as a posthuman videogamer? I'm not there yet. ;)
But there's definitely something disturbingly compelling about the entire idea.
In the end, it matters little to me whether I exist as matter in a biological body or as an application in a supercomputer of the future - the life I live now is the only one I've got, and however it happens to have come to pass, there's nothing "artificial" about the loves, joys, pain, struggles, convictions, desires, and hopes that fill my world. I exist - and all this exists - because the Creator has called it into being, and whatever that means at the end of the day, it seems to me to be a profound gift.
Hey - it just occurred to me: Al Gore really
did win the presidency in
2004 2000, and we're part of an advanced simulation of how the world would have fared if George Bush had remained in office instead! Hmmm... that's actually depressing. Ctrl-Alt-Delete. ;)
Edit: Yes, yes... so my political timeline was a bit distorted, as Shawn pointed out. At least in
this simulation, Gore got screwed in 2000. It was Kerry who got swiftboated in 2004.
Labels: culture, politics, science, theology, weird
