The other day I was at my parents place and my father was watching a documentary as he does a lot, and as I did with him as a boy. The topic was the British SAS forces in Northern Africa. The interesting thing was that they did a computer simulation of their actions and movements. In a computer graphic sense it wasn’t the best, there are games today that outmatch the documentary. But both of them could in a distans futuristic sense tell us something more. If we today, only 70 years after a war when no computer as we think of it today existed, are making digital computer reenactments and games that let the player kill like they did back then – What lies ahead?
If 40 years of computer graphic is what we have today, what will 400, 4000 years of it do? Of course we don’t know, but there’s a great chance of the computer power being so strong that it can create the world as we experience today. Like a holographic universe. As Nick Bostrom presented in his Simulation Argument. So wouldn’t this really be in resonance of what the enlightened people throughout history tried to tell – our existence is an illusion. The reenactment of the SAS tactics in the documentary was some kind of very primitive ancestor simulation.
So imagine that you (for some reason) play a computer game and there are characters in it, all facing each other. While you’re playing on or a couple of them together start looking up to the screen and pointing fingers. They are aware of the illusion in which they live in but will never be able to move outside it or see your true face.
Here’s the article on the latest research being done on this, Do we live in a 2-D hologram? New Fermilab experiment will test the nature of the universe.
And here’s Nick Bostrom shortly on his Simulation Theory. Just ordered his latest book release today Superintelligence, looking forward to reading it.
What do you think?