Post by auntym on Dec 12, 2012 12:41:01 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/12/the-idea-that-we-may-be-living-in-a-computer-generated-universe-that-has-been-debated-by-the-greats-of-philosphy-fromplatoto.html
December 12, 2012
"We May be Living in a Massive Computer-Generated Universe" [/color]
--Physicists Say Its Reality Can Now Be Tested
The idea that we may be living in a computer generated universe that has been debated by the greats of philosphy, from Plato to Descartes, who speculated that the world we see around us could be generated by an 'evil demon'. Plato wrote that reality may be no more than shadows in a cave but the human species, having never left the cave, may not be aware of it.
More recently, the concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:
(1) The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history. We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation; (3) “the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”
The conical (red) surface shows the relationship between energy and momentum in special relativity, a fundamental theory concerning space and time developed by Albert Einstein, and is the expected result if our universe is not a simulation. The flat (blue) surface illustrates the relationship between energy and momentum that would be expected if the universe is a simulation with an underlying cubic lattice.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/12/the-idea-that-we-may-be-living-in-a-computer-generated-universe-that-has-been-debated-by-the-greats-of-philosphy-fromplatoto.html
December 12, 2012
"We May be Living in a Massive Computer-Generated Universe" [/color]
--Physicists Say Its Reality Can Now Be Tested
The idea that we may be living in a computer generated universe that has been debated by the greats of philosphy, from Plato to Descartes, who speculated that the world we see around us could be generated by an 'evil demon'. Plato wrote that reality may be no more than shadows in a cave but the human species, having never left the cave, may not be aware of it.
More recently, the concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:
(1) The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history. We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation; (3) “the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”
The conical (red) surface shows the relationship between energy and momentum in special relativity, a fundamental theory concerning space and time developed by Albert Einstein, and is the expected result if our universe is not a simulation. The flat (blue) surface illustrates the relationship between energy and momentum that would be expected if the universe is a simulation with an underlying cubic lattice.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/12/the-idea-that-we-may-be-living-in-a-computer-generated-universe-that-has-been-debated-by-the-greats-of-philosphy-fromplatoto.html