Now is a pretty good time to be concerned whether you are, in fact, part of a simulation. ‘Cyberpunk’ has taken us well so far, and now it may be the ‘Anthropic Principle’.
If you saw movies such as The Matrix or Truman Show, you know what I’m talking about: We are running around in this our environment, but is it someone else’s simulation? Some interesting questions come out of this. One question is, how to find out about this, another one, whether it would change anything.
One would think that there would be some cogent observations that we could make to see whether we are in fact running as part of simulations. The key question, a purely theoretical – yet intriguing – question is: what would those observations be?
Intriguing would be to find out what’s back stage. Are people leaving this world at one end and entering it at another? Rebirth is a phenomenon that, so far, has remained mysterious at best.
Another question is about coordination. Is there more ‘coordination’ than you would expect? How do intuition and anticipation work? How do prayers work if there’s any strong evidence they work at all? What form do they have to be: are thoughts enough, or do they need to be written, spoken or communicated in any form? Which form? Apparently, there is evidence that spoken prayers helps patients in hospitals get better sooner.
Yet another question would be: is there a backlash? Would attempts to get to the core matter of such questions be commented on, rejected, reacted to, punished maybe? How would you probe this in any careful way?
Generally, we’d more be looking for phenomena clearly unexplained by us living in an ‘unattended live evolution’ rather than in a ‘set up simulation’ – and not so much for soft probability.
As long as simulation and reality can’t be discerned, there’s no point in ‘wasting’ thoughts about it. Alas, we’re not there yet. Apparently, some people have started to consider the option of us all living in some kind of simulation as a not entirely unlikely option. So at least, you may want to learn more about it. If nothing else, it could be at least entertaining.
Links:
Nick Bostrom’s webpage
Robin Hanson about How To Live In A Simulation
The Apocryphon of John
