What Happens If He Takes The Blue Pill?

The idea that the world around us isn’t the real world is not a new one. It goes back to the foundational texts of Hinduism, the Vedas, which were composed in India some 5,000 years ago by shadowy figures known as rishis. Not to be outdone, philosophers both ancient and modern have gotten into the act. Philosophers seem to occupy an interesting middle ground between scientists and mystics, asking some of the same big questions but combining both logic and insight into arguments that are often hard to refute. One of the earliest philosophers to write about this idea in the Western world was Plato, whose Allegory of the Cave appears in The Republic. Outside the cave is a fire or light, which projects shadows onto the wall, like an ancient version of puppet theater. Since the people in the cave have only ever seen the shadows on the wall, that is all they know, believing that the interplay of shadows is reality. Plato argues that philosophers are metaphorically able to break the chains and escape the cave to see outside. When they do, the unchained philosopher will see what seem like wondrous things. The philosopher will want to return and tell the people inside the cave what reality is really like. But, of course, the people in the cave, not knowing any better, will balk at this idea, not willing to give up their familiar life of being chained inside the cave. If this sounds a little like the plot of The Matrix, it kind of is.

Do Yourself A Favour

Plato seems to assert that given this choice, most would take the blue pill and go on with their lives inside the dark cave. Other Western philosophers over the centuries since Plato have weighed in with their own versions of the central idea. René Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician who created the Cartesian coordinate system, gave slightly different versions of an argument in Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy from 1637 and 1641, respectively. Descartes starts by considering whether there was an evil demon of utmost power and cunning that has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. If the evil demon could make it seem like Descartes was in a physical world by deceiving his senses, then Descartes could not be sure he was in the real world and not in a dream world. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. The only thing he could be sure of, though, was that he was there thinking and perceiving, and this led to his famous phrase, I think, therefore I am. In another version, there is no evil demon, but Descartes is simply in a dream world that seems, as many dreams do, completely real. In this scenario, there is an actual brain in a physical vat, with wires that are sending in all the signals that normally come to the brain from the body. The brain, theoretically, should be unable to distinguish between whether it is in a body or not, since it is getting the same signals. Since no one has been able to keep a brain alive outside a human body, this is a thought experiment only, but an interesting one in the context of our discussion about simulations. The Boltzmann brain argument is a little bit different.

Much More Than Can Be Said

This argument specifies that in an infinite universe, through quantum fluctuations, all the atoms that make up a normal human brain, complete with memories, are bound to come together at least once, randomly. If they do, then this human brain would think it had a past and was living in a real universe, but it would really have false memories.40 Of course, neither the philosophers of hundreds of years ago nor the mystics of thousands of years ago used the terminology of computer simulations or video games. They did, however, use the metaphors of the technology at hand. At night, he lives another life online, hacking the net, where he comes across a number of enigmatic references to something called the Matrix. He then proceeds to give Neo the choice of the red pill or the blue pill. If he takes the blue pill, he will wake up in his bed the next morning and nothing will be different. If he takes the red pill, he will wake up. He has been living in a dream world his entire life. The film and its sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, are equal parts philosophy, science fiction, and action. They follow the adventures of Neo and company as they try to rescue humanity from this fate, and have become cultural touchstones. Bostrom’s Ancestor Simulations and the Simulation Argument It wasn’t until 2003, when Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, now professor of philosophy at Oxford, wrote his landmark paper, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? that the idea moved beyond science fiction and the terminology we use today of the simulation hypothesis started to catch on.

Heal The World

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. Let’s add this to our growing list of definitions. Introduced by Nick Bostrom, this refers to a particular kind of simulation run by an advanced technological society that decides to run simulations of their ancestors. Bostrom goes on to say that computational power may not be limited on cosmic time scales and that it is possible for technologically advanced civilizations to devote an entire planet’s worth of resources toward computing, estimating that would provide more than enough computing power to simulate a whole universe and the people in it. Bostrom presents his conclusion early on in the abstract, and you can read the paper to get the details:43 It could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.