[AndyPharmc]

dear bill and friends,

you may want to check out these links which are along a similar line;

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

are you living in a computer simulation?
by nick bostrom
department of philosophy, oxford university
this is a preprint of the final version which appeared in philosophical quarterly (2003), vol. 53, no. 211, pp. 243-255.

abstract

this paper argues 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.

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/ar...simulation.htm

gary osborn asks
is life a computer simulation?

submitted in response to reading andrew collins's article gods, grails and morphian contact, gary osborn, co-author of the serpent grail with philip gardiner, asks is reality updating itself constantly to accommodate new thoughts and ideas, not just in the here and now but in the past as well? read what he has to say in this debate ...

is life a computer simulation? well ask philosopher nick bostrom. he says our lives:

' . . . could well be programmes developed by a post-human society living in what we think of as the future.'

'at some point, probably in this century computers will become capable of mimicking what we call consciousness. the rest follows logically. once there's enough computing power to simulate consciousness, creating an environment for it to interact with would be easy. simulating an entire universe down to the minutest level would be a waste of resources; you would only need to simulate to a degree where the inhabitants didn't notice any irregularities. there would be no point filling in every microscopic detail, or the minutiae of distant astronomical objects, unless someone decided to look at them. then the creators could fill in the necessary details on an ad-hoc basis. this recalls whether a tree exists when no one is looking at it; and it might explain why "reality" at the quantum level appears so strange.'[1]

really? - you mean 'strange,' as in how energy takes small, quantum steps; fixed at certain values, as if all things are "snapped" to different frequency-energy grids, just as pixels and rendered objects are "snapped to grid" in computer art programmes?

be well, be love.

david