Simulation Running

A spider's web hidden in a ditch along the road in the
Shenandoah National Park Photo by Joel Crook ©2014

What if you had a software application to simulate a whole universe?

What if you had the hardware to run such a simulation?

What if you could inhabit your simulation with "intelligent agents" which appeared to have "free will"?

What if you had programming skills sufficient to manipulate what the "intelligent agents" perceived?

Given that you answered yes to all of the above questions the final question is:

Would you run the simulation?

In a number of forums, public and private there has been an on-going debate as to whether our reality is just such a simulation. The debate started many years ago with the publication of Daniel F. Galouye's science fiction novel Simulacron-3 in 1964.

The debate reached "epic" scale when The Wachowskis released their modern take on "reality as a simulation"--  "The Matrix" soon there after [in "philosophic time]  philosopher Nick Bostrom published his paper "The Simulation Argument".  

Bostrom proposed that we are actually living in an "ancestor simulation". The idea  is very anthropocentric and it may be even a bit naive but the paper did open the door to a serious discussion of not only "What is reality?" and "Can consciousness be 'digitized'?" but "Are we possibly living in a simulation?"

Most people that have become aware of the philosopher's arguments [and their various books on the subject ],  pro and con,  are unaware of a book that was published nearly 10 years before the release of the Matrix but dealt with the central core of the questions asked above AND with one question that was not addressed early on in the discussion: What is the probability that we do live in a simulation?

The author was "Ramsey Dukes" the nom de plume of Lionell Snell an occultist who took a degree in mathematics at Cambridge. The Book was "Words Made Flesh" which was originally published in 1988. In the book after developing the theme as outlined above he proposes, as an answer, what he calls "Johnstone's Paradox": 

"If Reality is ultimately Mechanistic, Then it is highly unlikely that this universe of ours is a mechanistic universe" 

Which is to say... Snell believes that someone answered all the questions above as "Yes".

Do you agree with that assessment? Why?


Card Fun:  For the second day in a row I took out the deck of cards, shuffled and tried to guess the colors of the cards. I guessed the colors correctly 30 out of 52 times. [four cards better than chance]. Does it mean anything? No. After all we live in  an mechanistic universe. Right? I'll keep doing this for a while. Just for fun.