The Dream Argument Analysis

The nature of reality is strange and fleeting by its very nature. We remember isolated events from our past, and often antagonize about a future that is far off. Rarely do we live in the present and enjoy each moment of our existence. This is odd because as far as we know we are finite creatures living in this reality. However, these assumptions are based from observations by our sense perceptions, and I often wonder if these are incorrect assumptions.

Descartes is the most well-known philosopher who put forth the idea that our perceived reality is not our true reality. He had three main arguments, the first being the dream argument. This is the idea that we should not trust our reality because we experience similar things while asleep and

He firmly believes we are living in a simulated reality and believes there is “a billion to one chance we are living in a base reality”. Professor Nick Bostrom of Oxford makes the claim that our universe is a "richly detailed software simulation of people, including their historical predecessors, by a very technologically advanced civilization." The idea they are presenting is that our reality is simulated by a more technologically evolved species. This concept is recent because of our modern development of computing. Humanity can now do computer simulations of the universe on a grand scale, and see what happens when certain cosmic events occur. These events are things like the rotation of the planets in our solar system or the orbit of a comet around our sun. The more grand and spectacular simulations see what happens when two galaxies collide. These simulations take the events of hundreds of thousands of years and accelerate it to create a simulation in a matter of minutes. With how technology is exponentially increasing there is no reason to doubt that future computing could do simulations of entire civilizations in hours or even minutes. Our entire universe could be the test tube of a much more intelligent species. They could be playing with the idea of nuclear fallout (let’s hope not) or transhumanism (I like this idea much better) and

This is another result of quantum physics, where strange things are bound to happen. There was an experiment done where physicists fired electrons through a slit to see if it would behave like a particle or a wave. When fired through one slit it made a pattern on the back wall like a particle, a solid line. When fired through two slits, the electrons made an interference pattern on the back wall like you would see with a wave. This stunned the experimenters. The electron behaved like both a wave and a particle depending on the situation. This couldn’t be true, and the electrons must be bouncing into each other and interfering with each other. They decided to fire electrons one at a time through the two slits, but the interference pattern remained. Determined to discover what was happening, experimenters put up an observational device to see which slit the electron was going through. When they repeated the experiment with two slits, firing electrons one at a time, with the observation device, electrons behaved again like a particle. The electrons pattern changed simply by being observed. Such a strange finding had to be replicated, so in 2002 another team of researchers attempted to do the same thing faster at a smaller scale. There was no way for the electron to “know” it was being observed. The insertion of the measuring device took only 40ns while it would take 160ns for the information about the