Its Life... But Not As We Know It

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I watched the end of an interesting looking show the other day about time travel and how humans have tried to control time over history. Interested, I did some searching.

There's a theory that suggests that some time in the future, humans will have the technology to create a 'quantum computer'. Essentially this computer is powerful enough to perfectly simulate the past and not just this past, but millions and billions of other potential pasts. What this means in effect, is that there is a large likelihood of both you and I not actually being real, merely just players in one of countless simulations.

Is getting pinched really enough to tell you that you're awake?

*sigh*

Welcome to the Matrix.

I saw that program as well. It was quite interesting.

The fact that we may be just a computer simulation is plausible but since it is unprovable and does little to change reality for knowing, doesn't really bother me.

Wow, I actually recognized a Star Trek reference.

That said...I'm sorry, I don't want to think about things like this.

Does it matter?

I don't know if I'm real, but I feel like I am real.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in this world, and all things and animals and plants and the rest of people are just illusions of my mind...

any simulation that advanced is a universe in and of itself, so the point is moot.

I often wonder if the sims think that they're real? Maybe somewhere on Earth right now, a sim in the game is posting messages on an Asperger's forum about a computer that can simulate the universe right down to a person posting messages on an Asperger's forum.

That's almost as complex as the infinite loop Dude-Sweet Paradox.

Who cares if we are real or not? As long as they don't switch me off until my program completes....

if it is a real simulation then I still have free will.

i'd be very worried indeed about someone who simulated me.

But... I don't mind being stimulated

I doubt that the Sims could ever become self aware. Most of the ones I've created are so dumb they still wet themselves.

By the way, isn't "real simulation" an oxymoron?

Real simulation is indeed an oxymoron....

I was trying to say, if a simulation was a perfect simulation (i.e. real, as in, as close to reality as reality itself) then the characters would have exactly the same quality of life as real people... so essentially, there'd be no difference to real life.

But you wouldn't know if they did switch you off... or back on again... or back off again...

A fun book on this topic is The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.

Doesn't matter as long as they switch me back on.... Hey... Maybe if I do a sexy dance they will alter my program to make me win the lottery.

Perhaps the simulation in itself is one of the parallel universes. What if the computer created all the multiple strands in the first place? Then jumping between them would be like moving between folders.

I recall the Assimov story where this species built this incredibly smart computer that existed in hyperspace in order to save them from heat death of the universe, as in accordance with entropic principle. anyway, flashfoward something like forty five billion years, the universe is buggered, the computer, that is unaffected in hyperspace then goes... LET THERE BE LIGHT... and the universe is created.

So perhaps we create the computer that leads to our own creation (that's almost as bad as the Terminator principle, but still worth debating)