"Wake up! Wake up, Arun!!" Suhani was trying to wake me up. I
could barely open up my eyes. I looked at the alarm clock on the side
table, it was showing 9'o clock.
"What is it? Why are you waking me up so early? You know I spent almost the whole night in the lab yesterday.'
"Yes,
but it is Monday. Don't you have to go to that seminar you were eagerly
awaiting? Something about we all living in a matrix?"
Oh, yeah! I was waiting for weeks to attend that seminar. How can I
miss that being delivered by Prof. Nick Bostrom himself! "Wake up, Dr
Arun Anand!", I told myself.
"Well, it is a bit
different than the matrix, you see, in matrix the machines were
harvesting humans for energy while imprisoning their mind inside a..." I
tried to clarify the difference as I was interrupted by Suhani.
"Yeah yeah yeah! It's all the same to me anyway. Now, get dressed up and get going."
I
hurried through my morning routine as I really wouldn't want to miss
this chance for the world. The seminar was at 10'o clock. One of the
perks in being a researcher at the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research (TIFR) is that you get a quarter just across the road to your
office. It would be a nightmare to beat the traffic in south Mumbai
otherwise.
I reached the
lecture theatre at 9:55. The entire hall was jam-packed. I wasn't
surprised. I was preparing myself to stand in a corner throughout the
lecture. I was looking out for a nice corner and... "Here, here Sir!
This way. I saved you a seat.", I saw Raj waving at me. Well, yet
another perks of being a faculty member is the respect that you get from
students. Raj, my doctoral student saved me a seat. He knew how excited
I was to be here today. I was blabbering about this on and on since
almost two weeks. It was not the case that the seminar had much to do
about our research. I was rather interested in quantum physics and so
was Raj. I think Raj came here just because of me. I remembered how I
used to go to every talk suggested by my supervisor...
"Ladies and Gentlemen!" My chain of thoughts was broken by Prof Iyer, the Director in-charge of TIFR.
"It
is an honour to welcome Prof Nick Bostrom! Prof Nick Bostrom is a
faculty member at the Phillosophy and Oxford Martin School. He is also
the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute as well as Programme on
the impacts of future technology at the University of Oxford. He will
be speaking about his seminal paper on Are you living in a computer simulation?. Without further ado, I request Prof Bostrom to take the stage".
"Friends, I have been invited to talk about ...."
Prof Bostrom directly came to the point. The talk was having a
mesmerizing effect on me.
"....So, I argue that at
least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is
very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any
posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of
simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are
almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief
that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who
run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a
simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. ...."
He
proceeded towards the mathematical formulation of his hypothesis. He
finished his talk in about 45 minutes. "Amazing timing!", I admired him
in my mind. The floor was made open to questions. Lots of hands were
raised. Questions varied from the computational models of the simulation
to the parameters he picked for his equations.
"Is there a way to know if we are living
in such a simulation?" A PhD student standing in a corner asked. "Damn!
That's a really good question. Why didn't it occur to me?" I was cursing
myself.
"That's an excellent question!" lauded Prof Bostrom.
"If
you are inside a simulation, it is very hard to realize the existence
of an entity outside the world (the simulation) that we perceive.
However, let's assume that their model of computation is just an
extrapolation of the model that we have today. That means, if it is a
piece of software there might be bugs. Some bugs causes the software to
crash, that means, we all cease to exist at once. So no-one would be
there to observe such a phenomenon. But there are other kinds of bugs!
Imagine that we all are variables in this computer program. Now, when we
observe some interesting phenomenon in some of our experiments, we
usually run it once again. We may change a few parameters here and
there, just to see how these changes affect the phenomenon in question.
In this repeat run, what if we forget to reset a variable? This
variable, or in our world, this person would have the memory of the
earlier experiment as well and thus can witness an anomaly. Something
like a dejavu...."
Wow! Wild imaginations were taking over my mind and
suddenly they came to a stop as the sound of a huge applaud reached my
ears. I was still mesmerized though.
I went back to my
home for lunch and then took an afternoon nap to compensate for the
sleepless night I had earlier. I went back to the lab in the evening and
I saw Raj already there. We were in the middle of an important
experiment so we were going at it night after night. It seems there is a
deep bond between researchers and nights. We were a bit tired so we
went for a walk at the private beach of TIFR. The brightest idea often
comes when you are taking a walk. Also, the moon light, the sound of the
ocean and the cool breeze really act as catalysts to giving a fresh
perspective.
Finally, I called it a day at 5:30 in the morning. I walked back
home, gave Suhani a light kiss on her forehead and went to sleep.
"Wake up! Wake up, Arun!!" Suhani was trying to wake me up. I
could barely open up my eyes. I looked at the alarm clock on the side
table, it was showing 9'o clock.
"What is it? Why are you waking me up so early? You know I spent almost the whole night in the lab yesterday.'
"Yes,
but it is Monday. Don't you have to go to that seminar you were eagerly
awaiting? Something about we all living in a matrix?"
----
Epilogue
: Needless to say the story and all the characters are fictional (or so
I think :-) ). However, Prof Nick Bostrom is very much a real person.
The original article by Prof Bostrom can be accessed at :
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
