Outside the Simulation

When my mother was 80-plus years old, I sometimes thought about that and wondered how my mother felt about it. How did she feel knowing that her demise was, figuratively, just around the corner?

I don’t expect to reach my mother’s age. But the obituaries are full of people who died of natural causes long before they reached my age. You see it on the news too frequently.

Probably like a lot of people, I think about death sometimes. I think about the fact that on any given night I could go to bed, go to sleep, and never wake up. For me, time will stop. The Universe will end. I will sleep a dreamless sleep, as unaware of the Universe as I was during the first 13.8 billion years it existed.

But perhaps I won’t be having a dreamless sleep after all. It’s possible that our consciousness continues after our body dies. Lately, a lot of people—including scientists—have been asking the question, “Are we living in a simulation?”

I would answer that question, “Of course we are!”

The Big Bang Theory is the theory that describes the evolution of the universe. The theory doesn’t tell us how the universe was created; it tells us how the universe evolved after it was created. An article on Vox says,

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones.

So maybe the universe was simply…switched on. I think it’s an interesting idea, but one that won’t affect my life at all, whether or not it is true. How do you feel about it?