A few weeks ago, we featured a piece from The Economist marking the 25th anniversary of the cult movie Fight Club and its increasing relevance in today’s world. This piece cites the 25th anniversary of yet another path breaking movie “ The Matrix” and how in the age of Artificial Intelligence and computing power, its simulation theory is more relevant than ever today. Elon Musk was only half joking when in an interview few years ago, he quipped that there is a non-zero probability we may not be in base reality i.e, we are part of a simulation by a more advanced civilisation given that the computing power available today has made such a simulation well within the realms of reality.
This entertaining yet thought provoking piece by Atanu Biswas in the Business Standard traces the history of the simulation theory through various books and movies, fiction and reality that have advocated it.
“The concept is as old as Plato’s Republic and as modern as Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.
For many years, sci-fi has emphasised topics like computer gaming, virtual reality, and AI. For instance, Daniel F Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3 (1964) describes a virtual city created as a computer simulation for market research, where the simulated inhabitants possess consciousness, with all but one unaware of the true nature of their surroundings.
Furthermore, it’s commonly held that a speech novelist Philip K Dick gave in France in 1977 provided the structural inspiration for The Matrix, highlighting the modest origins from which “sim-theory” initially gained popularity. A few years after the film’s release, “simulation theory” was formally developed, proposing that people are likely preset, coded constructs within a digital world, and that we are probably living in a computer simulation rather than as “real” and substantial individuals. In his 2003 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom argued that posthumans might possess supercomputers capable of running intricate simulations of their ancestors, where the simulated entities exhibit a form of artificial consciousness. In essence, it would be similar to us simulating ancient Athens or Ujjain.
Bostrom’s argument presents a trilemma: Either such simulations are not created due to technological constraints or self-destruction, advanced civilisations choose not to develop them, or we are almost certainly living in one. Bostrom concluded that “we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones.” The total number of simulated ancestors, or “Sims,” would far outnumber the total number of real ancestors if even a small portion of them performed “ancestor simulations.” Bostrom asserted that “unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation.”
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