I found this while on my daily trawl through my favorite website, Wikipedia.org. It brings up some really interesting points, that I think are very suitable to our TOK class.
So I ask of you a few things.
First. Read the page, it isn't very long and it will help.
Second. Answer wheather or not you think we are in a simulated reality.
Thirdly. Should we ever try to create a simulated reality.
Fourth, and perhaps most interesting and applicable. What would happen if you grew up in a simulated reality and were taken out of it?
Monday, September 11, 2006
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6 comments:
I will answer first. I think that it would be impossible to tell wheather we were or not in a simulated reality. There would be no real comparison upon which we could tell.
If we could I don't know if we should, it breaks so many laws of what really "should" happen it seems like something abhorrently alien to me.
I think that if some one was taken out of the simulated reality they would be in the same stupified manor that we imagine someone would be in after being taken out of the cave, in Socrates allegory.
From reading a book, "Programming the Universe" by Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanics professor at MIT, then only computer that can simulate the universe is a quantum computer the size of the universe. This computer would model the universe perfectly and would be indistinguishable from the 'real' universe. Thus there is no difference between a true simulation of the law of physics and the 'real' universe.
To the point, I do not think that we should, because is seems like by doing it the people are saything that they do not care what is happening to the world.
what if inside this artificial universe the simulated inhabitants wanted to create a simulation of the universe?
it would still take something the size of the universe to do it according to this theory. Size refering to the number of particles, of any type.
That is a true article. Stephen colbert went on air and told people to go onto Wikipedia and change that statistic. So many changes occured in the first few minutes that the moderators locked the site. However this is an irrelivent issue to this topic, but if you really want to know, NPR also ran an article about how wikipedia has become acurate because people want it to be. Self full-filling prophecy of sorts.
Aren't we having this same conversation on another post? Is this the same as solipsism? Uh, I just keep writing, don't I?
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