Forty years ago the most advanced game we had was Pong: a game with two rectangles and a dot bouncing around, now forty years after Pong, we got 3D photorealistic games with millions of people playing simultaneously around the globe, which soon will be replaced with virtual reality and augmented reality games specifically made to make simulated environment indistinguishable from our own reality. With this speed of advancement in technology, imagine what a hundred or even a thousand years hold for us, humans.
If you and me and every person and any other forms of life in the universe were actually characters in a gigantic computer game, we would not necessarily know it. The hypothesis that reality could be simulated to an extent of which it is indistinguishable from “true” reality—or that we are living in one, is a new hypothesis rising in the wake of technology and game advancement on this computer age. Simulated reality is a philosophical discourse as much as it is a legitimate scientific hypothesis.
The idea of simulated reality was first published by Hans Moravec in a series of articles written between 1992 until 1998, the decade of information technology birth. The articles were not so popular, but can be noted as the rise of our consciousness of how the future would rule out.
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“I think therefore I am” is not a reference to self-awareness, and certainly not artificial intelligence, but the simple fact of existence: I can’t be having the thought I’m having now if I don’t exist somewhere, in some form. Descartes had a pre-digital understanding of a simulation, arguing that he could well be a “brain in a vat” being fed false experiences. But the basic form of the problem is the same as our computer interpretation, though less specific and