In September 2016, Bank of America Merrill Lynch stated in a note to clients that the likelihood that our world is the result of computer simulations is approximately 20-50%. But is there any concrete evidence for this hypothesis?
The existence of the universe
As you know, not many chaotic processes take place in the Universe. If its development was not orderly, it is unlikely that numerous stars and planets could arise, and the likelihood of the emergence of life on them would be completely equal to zero!
Consequently, everything is regulated by a certain higher principle - the "world computer". But there is also the possibility that this system is not primary. That is, the "primary computer" could have generated another system that created its own "ordered reality". And there can be many such levels.
A well-known scientist and entrepreneur, the head of SpaceX and Tesla corporations, billionaire Elon Musk, at the June Code Conference dedicated to the IT industry, said that he hopes that we really live in a simulation, since if it were otherwise, humanity could have been die as a result of some global cataclysm: "Either we create simulators indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist."
A mixture of "real" with "virtual"
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Recently, video games with elements of augmented reality have been actively developing - take the same Pokemon … There are already technologies that help to "superimpose" virtual reality on the real one. Sooner or later a situation will come when it will be difficult for us to distinguish the virtual world from the one that we consider to be genuine.
What if this is happening now? If humanity has been able to create virtual reality systems of this level, then where is the guarantee that we are no longer inside such systems?
Perhaps our world is a model of the world of the ancestors, which was created by our distant descendants? Is our reality what it looked like in the "real" world many years ago?
It is also possible that even our physical body is just a virtual illusion, and we exist in the form of wave “phantoms”. Hence the theory of the rebirth of souls: in each "phantom" there is a program according to which it lives for a certain amount of time, and then "dies" and is reborn in a new virtual shell. For each of us, this will mean a new "life" -reality.
Controlled brain
Elon Musk suggested that in the foreseeable future, people will begin to interact with electronic interfaces through a neural lace - a special layer implanted directly into the cerebral cortex. The term was previously coined by writer Ian Banks.
Neural lace will enable humans to process large amounts of data at tremendous speed. One of its first prototypes was created in 2015, when American researchers successfully managed to implant such a system into the brains of mice.
But if people have already managed to create neuro-lace, then why not assume that it was invented even earlier, because, as they say, everything new is well forgotten old? Are we always in control of our own brain? Now there are already systems that can suppress certain memories or, on the contrary, awaken false memories … And it happens that people commit some absurd and even asocial actions as if under the influence of someone. We mistake them for crazy, why not admit that their brains are connected to an invisible computer that controls us all? Irrational behavior can be, for example, the result of a computer failure. And reality is as we are forced to see it. We are all hooked up to machines that manipulate our minds, like in the infamous Wachowski film The Matrix.
There is no third
In turn, Swedish researcher Nick Bostrom in his book "Are we living in a computer simulation?" (2003) speaks of three plausible scenarios for the development of the human race. The first of them is the extinction of humanity even before reaching the "posthuman" stage (that is, the transition to a wave form), the second - reaching the stage of "posthuman" existence, but without modeling evolutionary history, and finally, the third - we are already in the Matrix. However, it is clear that we will never have access to full knowledge of any of these scenarios, Bostrom believes. We are either in the matrix or we are not. And if this is not the case, we are unlikely to be able to create a matrix, because if the matrix could be created, then it would have happened anyway. And we would be inside her …
