Put down that joint and come back to reality.
Posted on 05/14/2003 4:13:00 PM PDT by ewing
A Philosophy Professor who teaches at Oxford says there is roughly a 20 percent chance that most humans today are really software created beings living in a virtual reality.
Dr. Nick Bostrum says there is a good chance technology can mature to the point where life like simulation programs are regularly run.
If that is the case there is no way of knowing whether right now youre currently living in real history or a simulation of the year 2003.
However, he says it is equally likely that humans will become extinct before then can develop such advanced computer simulations or lose their interest in simulations entirely.
Bostrom's arguement appears in his new book 'Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Matrix.'
(Excerpt) Read more at ncbuy.com ...
I once had a mouse named Slartibartfast.
main()
{
while(1){
fork();
}
} Actually if the Universe ran that, it'd be more like Armageddon. >;)
Douglas Adams claimed that base 13 was a coincidence, but clearly it's a result of his subconscious being affected by the Earth's programming. At any rate we should now move on to the Ultimate Meta-Question: What is the significance of the Ultimate Question?
|exp(ia)| = 1 everywhere. Even on Zeta Reticulae.
Timothy Leary asked that same question. In fact, he outright submitted it as truth.
Just one more reason why tenure is a bad idea.
Put down that joint and come back to reality.
Say I was writing a computer program that read in a list of numbers and plotted them on a graph. The program also has options to compute various statistics about the numbers (mean, standard deviation, etc). But most of the time the users don't ask for that information, they just want the graph. Then it might be more efficient to not compute the statistics as the data was being read, but only to do that if the user actually requested it. Since they usually don't, the program avoids unneccesary work.
Now say I'm writing a somewhat more complicated program that simulates a universe. I could try to keep track of the position and velocity of every single particle, and update everything after each "tick" of the simulation. But that's really inefficient; for example, I don't need to be constantly updating the locations of all the atoms in Pluto. Instead, maybe I'd come up with an equation for each particle that describes where it will be in the future, given its starting position. This way once I've assigned an equation to a simulated particle I don't have to worry about it until I actually need to know where it is, perhaps because a simulated person is looking at it. Then I can just plug in the right numbers into the particle's equation to figure out where it should be.
Then at some point simulated scientists in my universe might figure out that they can cause particles to behave differently depending on whether or not they observe them...
Sheesh, do I need to post chapter and verse? LOL!!
I have no idea, but I have several lesser questions, in the event that life is a computer simulation.
How do I check my score?
Are there save points?
How do I access the instruction manual?
Is this just a beta test? (If so, I've noticed several bugs I'd like to report)
Am I even logged in?
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