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MIT Developer and Play Labs's Executive Director Rizwan Virk expanded on Bostrom's ideas in his book The Simulation Hypothesis, describing what he calls the " Simulation Point," or the moment at which we could realistically build a Matrix-like simulation. The argument provides a stimulus for formulating some methodological and metaphysical questions, and it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain traditional religious conceptions, which some may find amusing or thought-provoking."īostrom is not the only person that believes that we are living in a simulation. He cites Hamlet’s cautionary remark to a friend in Shakespeare’s "Hamlet": “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."Apart from the interest, this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in futuristic speculation there are also more purely theoretical rewards. Whatever we might think of the simulation hypothesis, Bostrom thinks the mere act of pondering it provides a welcome dose of humility. “You could similarly ask, ‘shouldn’t we be in perpetual fear of dying?’ You could have a heart attack or a stroke at any given point in time, or the roof might fall down,” he says. Others imagine evidence in support of the simulation hypothesis could engender a new fear - that the creators might grow tired of the simulation and switch it off. “There is nothing more damaging to our social order than this notion.” Knowing that our thoughts and deeds aren’t our own could “relieve us from being accountable for our actions,” he says. Harvard astronomer Abraham Loeb says the knowledge could even trigger social unrest. What if we did confirm that we were living in a simulation? How would people react upon learning that our world and thoughts and emotions are nothing more than a programmer’s zeroes and ones? Some imagine such knowledge would disrupt our lives by upending our sense of purpose and squashing our initiative. Similarly, the idea of a superior being forging a simulated universe parallels the notion of a deity creating the world - for example, as described in the Book of Genesis. Yet, there’s a familiar ring to the idea that there’s a simulator, or creator, who does care about us. “I don’t know why this higher species would want to bother with us.” Echoes of Genesis “Why simulate us? I mean, there are so many things to be simulating,” she said. And she wonders why advanced beings would bother to simulate Homo sapiens. During a 2016 debate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall said the odds that the simulation hypothesis is correct are “effectively zero.” For starters, there’s no evidence that our world isn’t the array of stars and galaxies that it appears to be. “We are within a generation of being those gods who create those universes,” he says. Detailed as they are, today’s best simulations don’t involve artificial minds, but Terrile thinks the ability to model sentient beings could soon be within our grasp. That question makes sense to Rich Terrile, a computer scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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That led him to wonder: Are we sure we aren’t embedded within a world created by beings more technologically savvy than ourselves? He recalls playing a virtual reality game so realistic that he forgot that he was in an empty room with a headset on. Rizwan Virk, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s PlayLabs program and author of "The Simulation Hypothesis," is among those who take the simulation hypothesis seriously. “While the world we see is in some sense ‘real,’ it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.” Simulating worlds and beings “If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence,” Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom said in a 2003 paper that jump-started the conversation about what has come to be known as the simulation hypothesis.