Down the rabbit hole? Maybe you’ve never been anywhere else (Image: Anglia Press Agency/Rex Features)
Read more: “Special issue: What is reality?“
BEFORE cursing the indolence of today’s youth, absorbed in the ever-more intricate virtual realities of video games rather than scrumping the ripe fruits of real reality outside, consider this. Perhaps they are actually immersing themselves in our future – or even our present.
The story of our recent technological development has been one of ever-increasing computational power. At some future time we are unlikely to be content with constructing tightly circumscribed game worlds. We will surely begin to simulate everything, including the evolutionary history that led to where we are.
Flicking the switch on such a world simulation could have fundamental ramifications for our concept of reality, according to philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford. If we can do it, that makes it likely it has been done before. In fact, given the amount of computing power advanced civilisations are likely to have at their fingertips, it will probably have been done a vast number of times.
So switching on our own simulation will tell us that we are almost undoubtedly in someone else’s already. “We would have to think we are one of the simulated people, rather than one of the rare, exceptional non-simulated people,” says Bostrom.
“SWITCHING ON A SIMULATION WILL TELL US THAT WE’RE IN SOMEONE ELSE’S ALREADY”
Probably, anyway. There has to be a basement level of reality somewhere, in which the “master” simulation exists. It is possible that we live in that reality. Depending on its laws of physics, the basement’s computing…
