David Sklansky .... Your thoughts?

[Jetboy2]

The New York Times
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August 14, 2007
Findings
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
By JOHN TIERNEY

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.



Link to the rest of the article

*edited for copyright reasons

[Jetboy2]

Did this guy read your book?

[L'ennemi.]

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Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

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That's good science!

[Phil153]

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The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run.

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“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,”

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This guy's got his hand wrapped firmly around his mental Johnson. I can't believe someone from Oxford has the sophistication of a 12 year old Star Trek fan.

[carlo]

[ QUOTE ]
This guy's got his hand wrapped firmly around his mental Johnson. I can't believe someone from Oxford has the sophistication of a 12 year old Star Trek fan.



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[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[All-In Flynn]

Mmmm. My gut feeling is that there's a monster who makes faces behind my back and vanishes every time I turn around or walk in front of a mirror. But there's probably an even more grotesque monster behind its head...

This guy has stumbled on to the true Philosopher's stone - you could talk unlimited garbage about this idea for fifty years and it would literally never matter in the slightest to anyone... but still he gets his his paycheque.

[L'ennemi.]

I'm not so sure that it'll guarantee him a paycheck for fifty years.

[All-In Flynn]

If he's talking about stuff like that to the media, my guess would be he's got tenure.

[evil twin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom

He suggests that if it is possible to simulate entire inhabited planets or even entire universes on a computer, and that such simulated people can be fully conscious, then the sheer number of such simulations likely to be produced by any sufficiently advanced civilization (taken together with his Strong Self-Sampling Assumption) makes it extremely likely that we are in fact currently living in such a simulation.

Pretty interesting idea.

[oe39]

[ QUOTE ]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom

He suggests that if it is possible to simulate entire inhabited planets or even entire universes on a computer, and that such simulated people can be fully conscious, then the sheer number of such simulations likely to be produced by any sufficiently advanced civilization (taken together with his Strong Self-Sampling Assumption) makes it extremely likely that we are in fact currently living in such a simulation.

Pretty interesting idea.

[/ QUOTE ]

we might not even be in an actual simulation, merely a simulated one. turtles all the way down.