C
CollegeBoi1985
Guest
I was discussing various philosphic issues with my friend, trying to defend the position of realism and he alluded to the simulation argument, which I went home and researched and found a surprising amount of information devoted to the theory. Here is an excerpt from an article that best explains it:
"Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University,it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty
reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations."
Full text article here:
nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Disturbing thought. In trying to defend the realist position, I made note of the fact that as humans we have a soul and that if we have a soul, we are not merely a collection of “data in a computer” because our soul is immaterial, is a subject or “self” and is created by God alone. My friend really didn’t seem to buy that as a good objection to the argument as the doctrine of the “soul” is so scrutinized these days. It is the only objection I can really see which “escapes” this type of argument.
If you read the full text article it mentions a “Prime Designer”
which is I suppose an allusion to God. I find it interesting that
they will employ the unmoved mover argument but completely neglect the argument for the existence of the soul.
Thoughts, reflections, comments, assistance, etc. are all very
welcome.
"Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University,it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty
reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations."
Full text article here:
nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Disturbing thought. In trying to defend the realist position, I made note of the fact that as humans we have a soul and that if we have a soul, we are not merely a collection of “data in a computer” because our soul is immaterial, is a subject or “self” and is created by God alone. My friend really didn’t seem to buy that as a good objection to the argument as the doctrine of the “soul” is so scrutinized these days. It is the only objection I can really see which “escapes” this type of argument.
If you read the full text article it mentions a “Prime Designer”
which is I suppose an allusion to God. I find it interesting that
they will employ the unmoved mover argument but completely neglect the argument for the existence of the soul.
Thoughts, reflections, comments, assistance, etc. are all very
welcome.