I found myself in a nondescript, white, glowy room, as most dream rooms are depicted in TV shows and movies. In that room were several of my close friends. We were all talking, laughing and generally enjoying each others company. As our time together went on I began to vaguely understand that I was having a dream. In my dream we began talking about dreams and all came to the conclusion that each of us were dreaming, separately from one another, in our own consciousness but together in the same place.
I woke up with my mind truly blown.
A dream like this makes you think about your perceptions of reality, weather things that we "know"to be true are actually true. I thought that it was entirely likely that the dream was all created by my subconscious just to screw with the conscious part of me.
Then we started talking about Carl Jung and his idea of the universal unconscious and I got really excited. I started to wonder, is there really some underlying connection between all of us? Something that links every conscious being on the planet together like the Matrix or something?
So on a whim I asked the great Google what the "odds of living in a computer construct" were and the first result was a paper by one Dr. Nick Bostrom, a professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Dr. Bostrom says that, barring the extinction of humanity, someday we'll have the requisite computing power to not only simulate one human brain but to simulate all of them. As in simulating entire planets of people and the entire universe that they exist in. Basically like the Matrix but without all the bodies.
Now why would humanity build a computer that would carry out these sort of operations? Because we're naturally curious. The discovery of nuclear fission didn't happen by accident, the time came when humanity had both the knowledge and the technology to make nuclear energy a reality and we went ahead and did it. In the same way, the people of the future will have the ability to simulate entire planets of people through the constructed planet's entire lifespan, so why not see what happens?
Dr. Bostrom describes computers with enough power to simulate the lifespan of each human in the history of the earth in .00000001 seconds. That is the entire lifespan of every person that has ever existed in a fraction so small that it is generally rounded off to zero.
The implications of this idea are tremendous. The idea that the entire course of our universe, from the big bang to the eventual cessation of all molecular motion with universal heat death, could be simulated in a fraction of a second with a computer is staggering.
But the most profound idea, the capstone of this whole concept, is that we could be existing inside one of these simulations. Not even as humans plugged into a machine, but as machines with artifical intelegence sufficient to emulate a human brain. In fact, the probability of our universe existing inside a machine is higher than not. If we accept the ideas presented by Dr. Bostrom then billions of simulations could be initiated and carried out in a matter of seconds. When that is compared to the random chance of human life evolving from an unknown source on earth the apparent odds of us being machines rises dramatically.
The best part is that we'll never know the difference. If we do exist inside a simulation then the construction of the system makes it impossible to discover the system. The computer is advanced enough that it can generate data and images for our "brains" that gives no evidence of a "construct."
Even if the computer did make a mistake, it could just rewind time and fix it. You and I would be none the wiser.
All of this leads to the greater philosophical question: Does it even matter?
If we get to pick our "Neo" I nominate Chuck Norris
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