From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sat Apr 12 2003 - 22:36:48 MDT
I think Nick Bostrom found this small article on the Saturday April 12 NY
Times science section, and sent it to the Everything List. I shall provide a
URL for those, so inclined.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/opinion/12DAVI.html?pagewanted=2
<<At the same time, the multiverse theory also explains too much. Appealing
to everything in general to explain something in particular is really no
explanation at all. To a scientist, it is just as unsatisfying as simply
declaring, "God made it that way!"
Problems also crop up in the small print. Among the myriad universes similar
to ours will be some in which technological civilizations advance to the
point of being able to simulate consciousness. Eventually, entire virtual
worlds will be created inside computers, their conscious inhabitants unaware
that they are the simulated products of somebody else's technology. For every
original world, there will be a stupendous number of available virtual worlds
— some of which would even include machines simulating virtual worlds of
their own, and so on ad infinitum.
Taking the multiverse theory at face value, therefore, means accepting that
virtual worlds are more numerous than "real" ones. There is no reason to
expect our world — the one in which you are reading this right now — to be
real as opposed to a simulation. And the simulated inhabitants of a virtual
world stand in the same relationship to the simulating system as human beings
stand in relation to the traditional Creator.>>
Comment: Hmmm. This sounds like a job for Jurgen Schmidhuber!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Apr 12 2003 - 22:45:24 MDT