Nick Bostrom & Ray Kurzweil – Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

A word from the experts…

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host, “Closer To Truth” via Space.com:

    It’s like the movie “The Matrix,” Bostrom said, except that “instead of having brains in vats that are fed by sensory inputs from a simulator, the brains themselves would also be part of the simulation. It would be one big computer program simulating everything, including human brains down to neurons and synapses.”

    Bostrom is not saying that humanity is living in such a simulation. Rather, his “Simulation Argument” seeks to show that one of three possible scenarios must be true (assuming there are other intelligent civilizations):

        1. All civilizations become extinct before becoming technologically mature;
        2. All technologically mature civilizations lose interest in creating simulations;
        3. Humanity is literally living in a computer simulation.

    His point is that all cosmic civilizations either disappear (e.g., destroy themselves) before becoming technologically capable, or all decide not to generate whole-world simulations (e.g., decide such creations are not ethical, or get bored with them). The operative word is “all” — because if even one civilization anywhere in the cosmos could generate such simulations, then simulated worlds would multiply rapidly and almost certainly humanity would be in one.

    As technology visionary Ray Kurzweil put it, “maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high school student in another universe.” (Given how things are going, he jokes, she may not get a good grade.)

Robert Lawrence Kuhn, creator and host, “Closer To Truth” via Space.com:

Kurzweil’s worldview is based on the profound implications of what happens over time when computing power grows exponentially. To Kurzweil, a precise simulation is not meaningfully different from real reality. Corroborating the evidence that this universe runs on a computer, he says, is that “physical laws are sets of computational processes” and “information is constantly changing, being manipulated, running on some computational substrate.” And that would mean, he concluded, “the universe is a computer.” Kurzweil said he considers himself to be a “pattern of information.”
“I’m a patternist,” he said. “I think patterns, which means that information is the fundamental reality.”

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by Marcie Gainer via Disinformation