Saturday, August 04, 2007

Because I choose to!!!!

Okay, here it is, readers. The final straw. The idea, the conclusion, the bit of logic that will make your brain explode!

Look at him. Go ahead, I know he's just too gorgeous, too cool, and too badass for you to keep your mind clear for what's to come, but take in his vapid, empty, almost Buddha-like countenance. Be certain that Keanu is a Bodhisattva.

I just watched this documentary.

I'm not going to ask you to watch it, because it's kind of long, though it is a very interesting BBC production. Probably one of the best on time travel that I've ever seen.

It's also one of those documentaries that's just a huge cock block. They lead you in, sort of give you a bone, make you think that "Yes! Finally, time travel is fucking possible!" but then it drops you on your nuts with a, "but wait, there's a catch."

Of course, the final catch, according to how the math works, is that if you were to build a time machine, you could never travel back in time to before the time machine itself was built.

Yeah. I know. Fucking bullshit, right?

It's at almost exactly the 40 minute mark that the really interesting stuff comes up in the video. The last possibility for time travel: artificial simulation. I'm not sure if Moore's Law still applies, but it is clear that processor power will continue to increase. Our processors will continue to get smaller--just to give you an idea, the most advance chips are manufactured using a 45nm process, 450 times the diameter of an atom....very, very, very, very tiny--hard drives, RAM, things like that will get faster and more sophisticated. The point is, if trends continue--and right now, there's little reason to believe that they won't--some advanced civilization will be able to create a computer with, in essence, infinite computing power.

With a computer that powerful, you can "time travel" by simply modeling the conditions of a long, long time ago and, in essence, bring the past to you, a-la, the holodeck.

If you modeled a human brain, if you built a computer simulation of a human brain and then ran it at speed, do you realize what you'd create? If you built it from the atomic level up in simulation, do you know what it would be? It would be a conscious mind. It would have an ego. It would be, for all intents and purposes, alive.

You get me?

So here's the clincher. In the documentary, linked above, they talked about the laws of probability. ("If-Then Statement" alert) If the computer of the future is creating these simulated realities, these virtual worlds, if this computer is possible theoretically--and we can be reasonably certain that it is--then the machine most certainly has been built at some point. And if that's true, then the probability of the world you and I live in being the original world, the odds against us living in the "real" world are billions to one.

Yeah.

Let it sink in.

The argument is sound, dear imaginary friends and readers. It's rock solid. The odds of you being real, are very, very tiny.

What does that say about the possibility of the soul? How many layers of artificial reality would you have to claw up through to get to the real real world.

You know what would have made The Matrix a better film? If it turned out that the matrix was just a matrix within a matrix and even the machines were a computer simulation that was subjugating a species that was also just a computer simulation. That would have been the mind fucker of the century. I would have hailed the Wachowski brothers as visionary geniuses.

I know I'm not the first stoner ever to say, "What if, like, the matrix is real? What if, like, we are, just in a computer program?" Even the Wachowski brothers weren't the first to think of it. Descartes probably wasn't even the first.

But did it ever occur to you that it was almost certainly the case? Did it ever occur to you, that you're just an NPC in someone else's ridiculously complex game of The Sims?

It's fucking bullshit, I know.

No comments: