[extropy-chat] Top scientist asks: is life all just a dream?

[Hara Ra]

Some of this stuff just irritates me. Sigh.

Back in 1961, in high school english class, a big debate got raging about 
"Is God Real?". I stuck my hand up, and after forever got my turn (my prior 
last name always put me in the left back corner of the room), and I said 
"This could all be a simulation on a giant computer somewhere." Absolutely 
NOBODY understood what I meant, so the debate went on, and I was bored 
bored bored.

These days, 20 years after Gibson's Neuromancer, these academics saying the 
same thing. Greg Egan having written of these things in his science fiction 
10 years ago. I predict that in about 10 more years the Church of the 
Immaculate Upload will come along. Let's see now: "The Universe created 
thee Pure in DNA, in Original Awareness without Sin. Lay down thy conflicts 
and disputes, come into the house of Primal Upload...."

At 09:48 PM 11/18/2004, you wrote:
>The Times: Professor Sir Martin Rees is to suggest that "life, the
>universe and everything" may be no more than a giant computer
>simulation with humans reduced to bits of software. Rees, Royal
>Society professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, will say that
>it is now possible to conceive of computers so powerful that they
>could build an entire virtual universe.
>The possibility that what we see around us may not actually exist has
>been raised by philosophers many times dating back to the ancient
>Greeks and appears repeatedly in science fiction.
>In a television documentary, What We Still Don't Know, to be screened
>on Channel 4 next month, he will say: "Over a few decades, computers
>have evolved from being able to simulate only very simple patterns to
>being able to create virtual worlds with a lot of detail.
>"If that trend were to continue, then we can imagine computers which
>will be able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one
>we think we're living in.
>"This raises the philosophical question: could we ourselves be in such
>a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of
>vault of heaven rather than the real thing. In a sense we could be
>ourselves the creations within this simulation."
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1358588,00.html
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=   Hara Ra (aka Gregory Yob)    =
=     harara at sbcglobal.net       =
=   Alcor North Cryomanagement   =
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