Wednesday, August 15, 2007

DOC'S PAPERBACK CLASSIC'S # 24





And while I post this cover, Dr. Adder writes, “some Ph. D at Oxford catches up to where Philip K. Dick was 40 years ago, and somehow it's a major revelation to the New York Times.” And Dr. Adder is right. The idea that we all might just be part of some third party’s computer simulation, construct, or nightmare has been well known to paranoids, acid heads, schizophrenics, and comic book writers for at least a half century, and the concept is even employed in a Daffy Duck cartoon. How do these fools get tenure while I have to work for a living and call it fiction?

"Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims. But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits. You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford." (For more of this nonsense)

The secret words are Red Pill

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for publicly calling out the nimroddery of these fucking nimrods. (Can we just officially say that once an idea has served as the plot of a Keanu Reeves movie, it ought no longer serve as viable fodder for a Ph.D thesis, much less, cause drooly slackjawed wonder at the New York Times?)


This guy
, on the other hand, has a genuinely interesting take on how the universe might be nailed together -- though I despair that the Dr. Nick Bostroms of the world would ever be able to follow how time could move backward as well as forward, and how conscious life forms could (possibly, maybe) be the quantum equivalent of intestinal flora in the Universe's guts, enabling its existence and influencing its evolution.

Anonymous said...

The kink to "This guy" doesn't seem to go anywhere.

Anonymous said...

That should read "link". (Although kink is good in the context.)

Anonymous said...

Kink is always good.

Anonymous said...

Do I detect the hand of Agent Smith in all this?

Your driver said...

Gnosticism has been around in one form or another for over 2,000 years. I often worry that this universe is ruled over by a particularly mean and vindictive Archon (JHVH 1!), exactly as portrayed in the Old Testament. What makes him so very awful: Most of us think he's God. HE thinks he's God.

It is very difficult to think of a dissertation topic, even if you are at Oxford.

Anonymous said...

ARGH. Sorry about the bad kink. Link. Whatever... One should not attempt to compose html, however simple, at 2:42 in the AM.

Let's try this again... I give you Dr. Paul Davies, and a theory of cosmogony bound to vex both harcore "scientific" atheists & religious fundamentalist types.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/07/03/paul_davies/

Anonymous said...

Keith Olbermann just ran this story. You guts beat him by some 21 hours.

Anonymous said...

If there is a God, he's a monster.