Our Lives, Controlled From
Some Guy’s Couch
The New York Times
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it
never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t
imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could
be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model
railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems
quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr.
Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone
else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in
“The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their
world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are
suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you
wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a
network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your
brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see
through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom,
the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances
could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the
world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor
simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited
by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on
trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of
this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes
50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that
stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research
purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created
would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors
to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and
feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be
so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made
it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
The math and the logic are inexorable once you
assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of
alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization
never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it
self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that
posthumans decide not to run the simulations.
“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of
having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom
says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons
because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s
quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people,
although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of
these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out.
“My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a
20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
My gut feeling is that the odds are better than
20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that
civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the
computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds
like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations
just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles
as Cleopatra or Napoleon.
It’s unsettling to think of the world being run
by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of
classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world?
For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like
World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
A more practical question is how to behave in a
computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore
because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of
silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon
doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.
David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the
You still have the desire to live as long as you
can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of
this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral
principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would
reward you for being a good person.
Or maybe, as suggested by Robin
Hanson, an economist at
Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer
would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the
designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still
more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of
simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation —
the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).
Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t
allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once
they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s
logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun
for the Prime Designer?
If simulations stop once the simulated
inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading
Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime
Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we
start figuring out the situation.
It’s also possible that there would be logistical
problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough
computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a
virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of
inhabitants apiece.
If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists
who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the
inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new
virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with
a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.
It might be something clunky like “Insufficient
Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and
familiar: “Game Over.”