News - Science - If life is just a game, who's the programmer? QED. 

By Roger Highfield. 

18 August 2002
The Sunday Telegraph
29 

For once, Hollywood science fiction appears to be trailing behind 
developments in the real world. As the publicity for the sequels to the 
blockbuster film The Matrix are being aired on a clutch of official and 
unofficial websites, it emerges that we might already be living in a 
computer simulation, analogous to the one popularised by the original 
high-kicks, high-concept Matrix film. 

The Matrix depicted humans farmed for energy by computers that, in return, 
ensnared their minds in a vast simulation that made even Keanu Reeves's 
acting look convincing - almost. This premise has a profound and universal 
appeal, having been explored elsewhere, for instance in The Truman Show, 
Dark City and even on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise. 

While Reeves and Laurence Fishburne were busy working on Matrix Reloaded in 
Sydney earlier this year, back to back with another gravity-defying sequel, 
Matrix Revolutions, Dr Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at Yale 
University, has leap-frogged developments in the fictional world of films by 
concluding that the idea of an alternative computer-generated way of life 
might not be sci-fi but sci-fact. 

Dr Bostrom, who will conduct research at Oxford University later this year 
and has outlined his ideas in a forthcoming paper submitted to the journal 
Philosophical Quarterly, envisages three scenarios if a society develops to 
the point that it becomes technologically possible to mimic consciousness in 
a machine. 

First, an extinction event might wipe out that civilisation before 
artificial consciousness is achieved. In this pessimistic case, we have no 
reason to suppose that we are in a simulation. Real life remains real - 
until it ends for good. 


Second, the advanced civilisation will not be interested in running 
simulations, or may lay down laws to prohibit them. But there is another 
outcome, one possible in a century or so on Earth if human technology 
continues its pace of development. Civilisation will one day simulate 
consciousness - if it hasn't already - and then go on to simulate universes 
for artificial consciousness to inhabit. "If the last possibility is true, 
then it could already have happened and we are almost certainly living in a 
simulation," Dr Bostrom said, estimating the probability at "about 20-25 per 
cent". 

If that is true (he has cunningly ignored the decades-old debate over 
whether artificial intelligence is really achievable) the chances are that 
it has already happened and we are living in a glorified computer game, a 
"historical simulation" run by our ancestors for their amusement, or even by 
film corporations of the future. Disturbingly for scientists, the physics of 
the universe that we can see may not even resemble the physics of the real 
world of the simulators. Of course, Dr Bostrom concedes that we may be part 
of the pre-simulation real world or "original history", rather than a 
"posthuman civilisation". But given how many simulations there will be over 
the lifetime of the universe, the odds are stacked against it. 

What do we do now? Get on with our lives, even if they are unreal. Dr 
Bostrom believes that, since we don't know the purpose of our world, there 
is no point trying to impress the "creator". He said: "The least misleading 
advice would be to get on with your business as you would have done before." 

Others have mused on whether reality is actually virtual. Dr Robin Hanson, 
from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in the Journal of 
Evolution and Technology, says that if your life is a computer simulation, 
you should do everything possible to avoid being deleted. 

First consider the possible purposes of the simulation. If it is for 
entertainment, then you should be jolly, extrovert, sexy, wild, bizarre, 
pathetic and heroic. If the simulation is for the creator to participate in, 
then "suck up to celebrities". 

On the other hand, if the creator is playing God and dishing out rewards and 
punishments for behaviour, one should lead a blameless life. Being a martyr 
may be a good thing, since that may make your story so compelling that your 
descendants may want to simulate you again and again. 

But Dr Hanson, an economist, says that it may not do for everyone to realise 
that they are in a simulation. If that happened the whole model would start 
to look staged, and the creator may have second thoughts about running the 
simulation. 

For that reason, he says, keep the matter that we inhabit a hypercomputer to 
yourself and a few friends. Perhaps we should even boycott the Matrix 
sequels - or at least not take them too seriously - lest our creator pulls 
the plug. 

Robert Matthews is away.