This argument is extrapolated from observing current trends in technology, including the rise of virtual reality and efforts to map the human brain.
If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. ‘Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,’ said Rich Terrile, a scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
At the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them. Guardian online article 11 October 2016, ‘Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it’s more likely than not’
Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. Nick Bostrom, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? 2003
Is reality real? Or could we be living in a sophisticated simulation? Could the universe be more like a dream than we’ve ever imagined? The Simulation Hypothesis, 2015
‘How would you know the difference between the dream and the real world?’ ibid. The Matrix 1999, Morpheus to Neil
What would you do to change the world? ibid.
Science is beginning to see a correlation between our world and the world of a virtual reality. ibid.
Our universe simply makes more sense when viewed as a virtual construct emerging from consciousness. ibid.
Everything is made from finite bits. ibid.
Quantum Entanglement: Particles separated by unlimited distances in space, and this only makes sense if the world is a virtual construct. ibid.
How the light chooses to display itself as particles or waves is dependent on how much we know about it. ibid.
Our reality may be very much like theirs. And all this might be just an elaborate simulation. Star Trek: The Next Generation s6e12: Ship in a Bottle, Picard
Are you living in a computer simulation? This was the title of philosopher Nick Bostrum’s now iconic paper 2023. Simulation Theory, Youtube 29.37, 2021
In 2016 a New Yorker article reported that many in Silicon Valley had become obsessed with the idea. ibid.
Magnate Elon Musk has also been public about his personal fascination with this idea. ibid.
So computationally expensive that it would be unobtainable for even the most advanced technological civilisation … A simulation could dramatically cut simulation costs by rendering only those parts of the simulation which are of direct relevance. ibid.
Consciousness may lie forever beyond what can be realised by digital computation. ibid.