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28 Jan 09

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

  • It
    may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then
    run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated
    universe. Such computers would be “virtual machines”, a familiar concept in computer
    science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a
    simulated computer – inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it’s
    possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily
    many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations,
    this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we     live
    in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running
    our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may
    also be simulated beings.

    Reality
    may thus contain many levels.

12 Oct 08

Arts & Letters Daily -Iideas, Criticism, Debate

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