"My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.“ So asserts Dr. Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University (John Tierney, "Our Lives, Controlled from Some Guy’s Couch,“ The New York Times, 14 Aug 07).
Mr. Tierney goes on to assert that "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.“
Physical metaphysics, questions of who created us poor humans, and why. "Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or 'posthumans,‘ could run 'ancestor simulations' of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed vitual nervous systems. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.“
"It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, dude.“ A far cry from the notion of humans being The Crown of Creation!
Virtuality brings us into the territory of dreams, and the eternal question of what is really real? This is fascinating stuff to ponder, but, most likely, unknowable. And it still leaves us mortal dreamers with the issue of how to create Dreamful, meaningful, satisfying lives, whatever bigger picture they are nested in.