Welcome to the Matrix
I’m pretty surprised I missed this article in last week’s Science Times. It highlights the work of Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford known for the Simulation argument. He observed that humans are likely to one day produce highly complex computer simulations of the universe. These simulations would contain conscious humans. At that point, many of the total number of conscious humans in existence would exist only in simulation. Since we are conscious humans, we should consider it a very real possibility that we exist within the real human’s computer simulation. Fantastically, this was all written up as news in New York Times.
There’s plenty of stuff I could write about this argument, but since it’s late, I’ll defer to folks who’ve already obtained their PhD. Philosopher David Chalmers wrote a very accessible article about why we should and shouldn’t worry about being merely simulated humans. You can also watch him being interviewed at Blogginghead.tv. If your up for discussion, a number of physics and computer science types have had plenty to say about the article here.
Among the commenters is Peter Shor (famous for his work in quantum computing), who points out that if we live in a simulation, all bets are off in terms of our discovering a Theory of Everything. After all the simulation could contain a bug. Scott Aaronson (slightly less famous for his work in quantum computing) also questions the value of the Simulation argument, since it fails to make any actual prediction about how our universe (simulated or not) should behave. In other words, it’s not really science. Personally, I’m not going to lose sleep over the whole thing either, but I am a little less dismissive.
I think the Simulation argument highlights the much more scientific understanding of consciousness computer science may provide us with. Also, as we do develop our own increasingly complex simulations of physical phenomena, we may become aware of their shortcomings. Perhaps a complex computer simulation necessarily leaves its imprint on the phenomena being simulated. If this were the case, we could at least develop an understanding of the implications of living in a simulated universe. I imagine it would look kind of pixilated.