God as Video Gamer?

A philosopher at Oxford, in the absence of any research on the subject, gets in the news by postulating that we don't really exist outside of some super-human computer simulation.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling, and it's nothing more than that, is that this sounds exactly like the stuff of stoned college kids hanging out at the coffee shop. And this is not a unique idea at all. Several authors have postulated that we are merely living in elaborate novels. The world's most famous playwright put forward that all the world's a stage. During the rise of VHS people made films where we existed inside a video reality kept on tape. People get infatuated with their modes of communication to the point where they start to question if the communication itself is the medium of existence. People involved in theoretical mathematics see everything as being an expression of numbers while semanticists see language as the root of creation. Communication is confirmation of reality, but the map is not the territory. My gut feeling, and it's nothing more than that, is that such ideas express far more about those postulating the theories than about reality.

And if our reality is merely an advanced computer simulation with futuristic people playing it like a video game, then I weep for the future of mankind. I mean, this is some pretty boring shit they've come up with. Does creativity not evolve? But I'm not an Oxford philosopher. What do I know?