(Don’t faint or anything, though I guess fainting would be simulated, too.) So if we actually survive to a “posthuman” stage (the so-called “singularity,” or point at which it’s assumed machine intelligence will transcend human), and assuming that we can’t help ourselves - that designing and running what Bostrom calls an “ancestor simulation” is ineluctable - then, according to Bostrom, we’re almost certainly living in a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization. That third point is almost surely true, argues, Bostrom, if the first and second points prove false. (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof) (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom argued that at least one of the following things must be true: Call it another version of the strong anthropic principle, except the universe’s catalyst would in this instance be an advanced civilization running an unfathomably sophisticated massively multiplayer, um, cosmos game. University of Oxford physics professor Nick Bostrom wasn’t the first person to suggest reality could be computer-fied - the idea’s been around since I was a kid, at least, reaching a kind of pop-cultural critical mass in the Matrix films - but he may have been the first to take a stab at a “red pill” explanation, laying out his theory in an actual paper published in 2003. “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” says Laurence Fishburne’s character Morpheus in that eminently quoted scene from The Matrix. Does the possibility that the universe is structured like an extremely complex network - that our brains and the things we create with them, like the Internet, may resemble the universe’s underlying structure - also imply that we exist in an incomprehensibly sophisticated computer-like simulation? This morning, I noticed a story that sort of coincides with one I wrote a couple weeks ago about our brains, the Internet and the universe.
Blue and red pill how to#
Follow started making my way (skeptically) through Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, and at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve also started keeping tabs on KurzweilAI, a Kurzweil-blessed site devoted to futurism coverage - everything from the latest 3D printer tech and anti-cancer drugs to brain-based pacemakers and “ exploding killer plasmonic nanobubbles.”
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