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Digital Slob
Curt Brandao
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Game of life might actually be simulation
In this hectic, overhyped Digital Age, it's impossible to stay on top of all the little news items and academic breakthroughs, so let me clue you in on a bit of minutia that might have some negligible, passing impact on your life.
You're a computer simulation.
And your kids -- nothing more than snot-nosed binary code. Your dog? Your leftover pot roast? Your morning breath? Fake. Fake. Fake. Everything. Seriously.
This tiny bit of trivia has been deduced by the only true oracle left since the Weekly World News stopped publishing: the Oxford philosophy department.
Professor Nick Bostrom, recently interviewed by John Tierney of the New York Times, asserts that since computing power tends to advance exponentially, there is a significant chance that it already did, and our entire universe is a computer game run by a race of "posthumans" who've created billions of self-aware characters, many of whom are so advanced they can complete a Sudoku puzzle or even drive a car with a standard transmission.
I know, it sounds crazy. Someone probably tossed an old DVD of "The Matrix" into some egghead's ivory tower, and he decided to shout it back down to us in re-imagined academic jargon like a endowment-funded Ten Commandments -- I thought that at first, too.
But then I tried to read what the professor had to say. I understood almost nothing, but terms like "indifference principles" and "math" make me dizzy in a hungover/seasick kinda way, and that's the exact same feeling I used to get Sunday mornings in a place known as "God's house." This cannot be a coincidence.
The possibilities boggle the mind, or "crash the javascript."
History isn't repeating itself, it's rebooting itself. Greek gods were really geek gods. A super-advanced seventh-grader triggered the Big Bang by hitting the "start" button on his gaming PC powered by a Pentium Gazillion processor.
And if all that doesn't blow your mind, try to wrap your simulated brain around this: Even if Bigfoot is real, he's still fake.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, a degree from Oxford doesn't really exist any more than my diploma from a state college. Don't know if Dr. Bostrom thought that part through, but he made his in-game bed, so now he can virtually sleep in it.
For Respectable People it means they no longer have to recycle or monitor their credit ratings. For Digital Slobs it means we no longer have to feel guilty about never doing any of those things in the first place.
Actually, no. As the theory goes, even if our world is fake, its consequences are no less inescapable. As Tierney wrote, unlike Neo in "The Matrix," there's no "real" version of us to unplug. Also unlike Neo, our demigods let us out for a little sunshine every now and then.
But, Bostrom warns, once we can install souls into our own avatars, the Omnipotent Ones might turn us off, since all the layered unreality could freeze their system.
So, slow down, Silicon Valley. I'm not sure what I believe anymore, but I don't want to find out what the "Blue Screen of Death" might really mean.