Untitled

Marla had talked to her friend Langford, the biomancer, enough to know that such
things were maybe theoretically possible, though the technology was a long way off, so
she nodded. “All right.”
“Then ask yourself whether humans are likely to ever achieve that technology. I think
it’s obvious that we will, unless we cause ourselves to become extinct first, which
seems doubtful, frankly. The tenacity of cockroaches is nothing compared to that of
humans.”
Marla twirled her finger in a hurry-up motion.
“The final question is this: do you believe that such advanced people would never, ever
run sophisticated computer simulations of their own ancestors?”
“I wouldn’t say never,” she said. “People dress up in Civil War uniforms and pretend to
shoot one another in fields, so I guess running a computer simulation of our ancestors
isn’t so different.”
“Then you must agree that, in all likelihood, we are actually simulations living inside a
computer. We’re completely unaware that we’re simulations, truly sentient and
conscious, but actually running on some unimaginably complex computer system
sometime in our own subjective far future. It’s simple probability. If our descendants
can create such simulations, then there’s no reason to assume they would do so on a
small scale, or for only one era. There might even be multiple versions of the same
‘world’ being simulated in dozens or scores or hundreds of computers, with slight
variations. The odds are good that there are far more simulated minds running on
computers than there are organic consciousnesses running on their original brains—and,
so, probability tells us that, in all likelihood, we are simulations. It’s not a new idea—
science fiction writers have played with it for decades—but Bostrom’s paper was one of
the first attempts to treat it rigorously and take it seriously. You’ll have to give me your
e-mail address, Marla, I’ll send you a link to the preprint.”
“I think Rondeau might have e-mail,” she said.
“I’ve got an AOL account,” Rondeau said, in a helpful tone, without looking up from
his arcade game.
Dalton looked at them as if they were exotic insects.
“So we’re all living in a computer,” Marla said. “Who cares? If we’ll never know, and
we can’t tell the difference, why does it matter? It’s like the free-will debate—for
practical purposes, it doesn’t matter. You have to live as if you have free will anyway,
or else you just sit around until you die of starvation.”
“But it does matter,” Dalton said. “Bostrom thinks it matters because of the
philosophical and theological implications, but it matters to us, to people like you and
me, Marla. Because we’re sorcerers. We do things that violate the known laws of the
universe all the time. And do you know why? Because we’re not in nature. We’re in a
computer program, and the rules of the physical universe don’t apply. That’s why I can