Multiverses and Simulations: a Modern Crisis
In a previous article here, I mounted a criticism of the popular notion — first mooted by former Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom — that we may be living in a computer simulation. I won’t recapitulate here my reasons for finding that proposal unconvincing, not to say absurd. What can’t be doubted, however, is that Bostrom struck a cultural chord. This was four years after the 1999 film “The Matrix” had introduced cinema-goers to much the same idea, albeit in a more dystopian guise. A year before that, “The Truman Show” presented a similarly paranoid vision of reality, Jim Carrey’s character discovering that his whole life is a sham, a carefully constructed plot being streamed to television audiences without his knowledge.
The publication of Bostrom’s paper within five years of these two blockbusters can’t be regarded as coincidental. Ideas about life being a simulation or an artificial construct were emerging as part of a trend brought on in part by the exponential growth in computing power during the last decades of the twentieth century.
The ever-increasing ability of computers to mimic reality was beginning to undermine trust in the mainstream view of the world that had held largely unchanged for most of the previous century. Somewhere around the year 2000, we went from questioning whether the images we were seeing on screens were real, to…
