Dr. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford has come up with an interesting theory that is getting a lot of press. On the surface, it looks pretty much like The Matrix, in that we are all living in a computer simulation. The following assumptions are a little different, however: the “programmer” is a human, and his or her motivation is not very different from a gamer immersed in World of Warcraft, The Sims or Second Life. Or perhaps future scientists will have created a program to study their ancestors, for anthropological reasons. The motivation doesn’t matter much, so long as we can assume it will be done.
The logistical basis is interesting in itself: as we all know, Moore’s Law predicts that computer power doubles every 18 months. Given what we know about the human brain, that puts a simulated human with complete nervous system in the relatively near future. And the entire current human population of 6.6 billion? Around 2050.
Now this is where it gets really interesting. Assuming that humans create such a simulation before they go extinct, and assuming that a great number of them are made, probability begins to factor in. Given 10 simulations, the probability that we exist in one spikes dramatically. The theory postulates that if one simulation is created, thousands will follow, therefore it is a statistical certainty that (given our assumptions are correct) we exist in a computer simulation.
Some cool stuff to think about! Now, I’m thinking that there’s no reason to believe that such a simulation would be totally accurate, no more than the Sims are an exact duplicate of reality. So we could be a hugely simplified (or buggy) version of an unfathomably intricate reality.