The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'a group of people made out of computer codes colorful.'
Celebrities like Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson have suggested that we're living in a computer simulation. This surprisingly popular perspective follows Nick Bostrom's famous paper arguing that high tech aliens will probably run ancestor simulations so we're probably in one of their simulated realities. I'm not sure it works like that. But the theory makes a good metaphor in a couple of senses.
Technically, we're all living in simulations of reality generated for us by our own persons. Simulations in the form of stories. The stories our minds and senses tell us about the world are not the world itself. Yet we mistake these stories for reality in a similar way as we might theoretically mistake a Matrix for reality.
Also, the financial system is not unlike a computer simulation that we're all forced to live within. The financial simulation of the real world. In this sim, each of us is reducible to a program that consumes and produces value in service to an inaccessible control regime. Our programs are hooked into our physical bodies. In this regard, we may as well be living in Matrix pods.
It's tempting to imagine UFOs as glitches in the Matrix. Even so, I don't think we live in some advanced ET's computer simulation. I actually suspect that the world is much weirder than that. Maybe even too weird to be describable in terms we can make sense of.
Simulation theory has high-profile believers and a considerable following. I'm not yet sure what the implications of that might be. Traditional religious institutions are on the wane. Some of their values have arguably become less popular. But simulation theory offers no values. Instead, it offers only a story that no one can really do anything about.
There is a sect of transhumanism that believes in life extension by uploading human minds into virtual environments. They believe in this, but it will never happen. Biological information may be scanned and programmed into a digital environment. But consciousness itself is something more than we can measure. The whole idea of repackaging a person's consciousness is pure fiction.
Having said all of that, I do think there's value in creating and exploring artificial worlds. This is a domain that we've only scratched the surface of, and it promises spectacular things. And yet, no matter how immersive our VR experiences become, it will only ever be our avatars, and not we ourselves, populating these artificial realities.
The best of these artificial realities will almost certainly be written by AI. As will most computer programs in the next 20 years. Will an AI eventually create a high resolution human ancestor simulation, populated by representations of us? Maybe, but I wonder if such an AI wouldn't have more important things to do with its resources .
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
