If computer technology continues to advance at the same pace as it has been, the creation of artificial intelligence is not just a possibility - it is inevitable.
As soon as this happens, in computer games, today's puppet figures will be replaced by characters with intelligence and will. They will no longer be controlled by the movement of our mouse, but by their own logic and reason.
In their virtual reality - already without human participation - they will independently exist, performing actions at their own whim and understanding. Then we will only have to keep track of what they do.
Then someone will shrug: “So what? Why should this worry and interest us? But because, perhaps, it has already happened. In the world where we live. For us, the world is a ghostly, virtual, inhabited by the same virtual characters.
In any case, Professor Nick Vostrom, a philosopher at Yale University, believes that the likelihood that this is the case is high.
Our world is not real, but virtual. We, as characters in computer games, follow the program assigned to us, without questioning the existing reality and us in it.
This idea was expressed back in 1954 by the American science fiction writer F. Paul in his story "The Tunnel Under the World", and after him - by D. F. Galui in The World of Deception (1964).
Several films have been released, where the hero also suddenly reveals that he himself, and everything around him, is a product of some computer technology.
Promotional video:
But for the first time a philosopher tries to formulate this concept as a certain probability. This idea can neither be refuted nor proven. But more and more arguments appear that our world is “not real”.
1. The most random, chaotic phenomena of our world, it turns out, are ordered in the most incomprehensible way. The frequency of earthquakes and ice ages, the rhythm of dripping water from the tap, the dynamics of oil prices, the movement of the eyes of the schizophrenic is chaotic at first glance.
In reality, there is some hidden rhythm in all this. In mathematical modeling, a variety of unrelated events form regular geometric patterns.
“Perhaps,” writes Vostrom, “the periodicity of the glacial eras has no real physical reason other than nature's love of patterns.”
You can describe it as "modeling", "program". And our world is not at all what we used to see it.
2. Coincidences and accidents, it turns out, are also too "ordered" to happen by themselves.
Two cars collided on the highway. The constable wrote down the name of one driver: Jan Purvis. Asks another. He echoes: Jan Purvis. The constable flared up, thinking he was being laughed at. Because he knows: this cannot be. In the coincidence, there really was a kind of grin. But whose?
An apartment thief with prey goes down the drainpipe (Sofia). Unable to resist, he falls down. And - what good luck! - falls on a passer-by, who at that moment was at the bottom. The police detained both of them. It turned out that the second one was also a thief. And his name was, like the first, Milko Stoyanov.
Intersections are known and more complicated. In 1911, three criminals were hanged in London for the Greenbury Hill murder. One was named Green, the other Beri, the third Hill.
Those. Green, Bury and Hill committed the murder on Greenbury Hill Street. Some kind of alien humor is guessed behind all this. Inhuman grin of an eyeless non-human face.
Having once arranged a similar alignment, how could you avoid the temptation to repeat it? Indeed, a few years later in the United States (Louisiana), a local resident who lived on Stril Road Place was killed. There were also three assassins, their names were Steel, Road and Place.
In our reality, such intersections form a pattern similar to that of a carpet. Who woven it?
3. Parallel destinies. Researchers first noticed this in twins. If something happened to one, the same thing must have happened to the other. Two twins were parachuting at the Milan airport.
One, landing, broke his right leg and went to the hospital. The second, returning from the jump, got into a road accident. With a fracture of his right leg, he was sent to the same hospital.
One of the twins (Finland) tried to cross the highway in the wrong place. He was hit by a car and died. A couple of hours later, another, not knowing what had happened, crossed the same highway, was hit by a car and also died.
Such specularity is inexplicable in itself. And it is all the more inexplicable when the twins live far from each other. Twin sisters Dorophie Lowe and Bridget Harrison (USA) learned about each other and met 34 years after birth.
Both had seven rings and two bracelets on their hands, both had a son and a daughter. The sons were named: one - Richard Andrew, the other - Andrew Richard. One's daughter was named Katherine Louise, the other's was Karen Louise.
But this discrepancy might not have happened: the mother also wanted to name her daughter Katerina, but relatives and friends dissuaded her. But on the other hand, both had a favorite cat. And the names of the cats are the same - Tiger.
There are a lot of examples of such inexplicable correspondences. Of course, no heredity, no genes can explain such mirroring. Some completely different, transcendental mechanisms are manifested here.
By analogy with the computer world, you can call it a "program" or something else. Not in terms of the essence - anyway, we cannot imagine them.
Probably, the character of our own computer games could not imagine what a hard disk or a mouse is.
Such similarities of fate are not the fate of twins alone. Completely outsiders are surprised to find out that they, in the most inexplicable way, have the same turning points of fate.
This was noticed in those who completely matched the name, date and year of birth. One can give only one, but the most famous example - the Italian king Umberto I and his namesake.
In July 1900, the king arrived in the town of Monza. With his adjutant went into the first restaurant on the way - to have lunch. Of course, the host himself served the distinguished guest. The king noticed that he was remarkably similar to himself.
It turned out that the owner of the restaurant was also called Umberto. But that was not all. Both were born on the same day - March 14, 1844. They also married on the same day - April 22, 1868. The wives were called Margaritas. Both had sons - Victor. Etc.
The king was amazed at the number of matches. But another thing awaited him. When the next day the king spoke to the adjutant about his namesake, he noted with regret that he had been shot yesterday in the restaurant by some crazy client. The adjutant did not have time to finish when shots rang out nearby. Two bullets hit the king in the heart.
The similarities of destinies are especially obvious when one of the famous people is in sight. An unimaginable chain of correspondences opened up when it occurred to someone to compare the fate of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln.
Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1847; Kennedy in 1947. Lincoln became president in 1860, Kennedy in 1960. Both were shot in the back of the head on Friday. Their killers were born: one in 1839, the other in 1939. The name and surname of each of the killers consisted of 15 letters. The names of the successors of both are Johnson. The last name of Lincoln's secretary was Kennedy, and Kennedy's secretary was Lincoln.
These examples suggest that such a secret chain of intersections probably connects many. And then all. It's just that no one is given to know which of the living or those who lived by their own destiny we reproduce.
If this is not "predestination", not "programming," then what? In any case, this cannot happen by itself. No way.
4. The future is fixed once and for all and cannot be avoided. The evidence supporting this is overwhelming.
Everyone knows Pushkin's prediction - to die of a "white man", "white head" or "white horse" at the age of 37. And so it happened.
Prophetic Oleg the Magi predicted to die from his beloved horse. Oleg stopped driving it. The horse died. In the fifth year after his death, Oleg laughed at the wise men, went to where the horse was buried, stepped on his skull. A snake climbed out of there and bit the prince.
It turns out that the events awaiting us in the future, as it were, already exist, like the stations that we have yet to reach.
The last line of Napoleon's last entry in his school notebook reads: “St. Elena is a small island. After 36 years, the deposed emperor ended his days on the land of St. Helena.
In St. Petersburg, the young company met the new year, 1917. We decided to guess about the future from the volume of Pushkin. The turn came to Marina Tsvetaeva. She, like the others, randomly named two numbers that came to her mind - a page and a line. They opened it and read: "Two pillars with a crossbar." The terrible destiny came true 24 years later.
The Bulgarian fortune teller Vanga was asked how it seemed to her what awaited a certain person. "I see everything as if on a film strip."
Doesn't this inevitability, predestination resemble that harsh computer reality that is so familiar to us? And is there a difference between the one and the other?
5. Space behaves completely differently, as if it followed only the laws of physics. Even the time in which our Universe exists is not enough for life to arise in it, and therefore we.
In the 70s, astronomers noticed that some galaxies, rotating, should have long ago disintegrated and scattered under the action of centrifugal forces. Why this does not happen, no one could explain.
Then, in order to bring the picture to some kind of common sense, a hypothesis was put forward about "dark matter", which we do not see, but which supposedly fills the Universe (90% of its mass). It is this that generates gravitational forces, which explains everything.
The only drawback of the hypothesis is that for 40 years "dark matter" has not been detected. And the galaxies still don't fly apart.
This would certainly have to happen if, in addition to the laws of physics, other forces unknown to us did not operate in the Universe. Without them, life in our Universe could not have appeared either.
Cosmologists calculated: if in any cell of space with an electron volume every microsecond one variant of combinations of 4 "letters" of the genetic code were tested, then even in 100 billion years (and the time of the Universe is only 15-22 billion years), only 10150 variants would be tested …
This number is negligible compared to the required number of 10,600,000 that would give such a chance. So many options would need to be enumerated so that one could accidentally stumble upon one and only one that gives the synthesis of RNA and DNA molecules that determine life?
None of the above is explained. Neither logic, nor a chain of cause-and-effect relationships, nor scientific knowledge can tell us about the mirroring of fate, nor about the order inherent in chaos, nor about a future that cannot be prevented. The only place where this could be possible is an artificially created virtual world.
The ancients guessed for a long time that our world is by no means real. According to Hindu tradition, the world is just an alternation of images and pictures in the imagination of Brahma. Everything that happens in him is an illusion, a chimera, a Maya …
Based on the article by Alexander Gorbovsky "What if there is nothing at all?"