Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö
Vervolgens kwam er in de brievenrubriek** van dit tijdschrift een kleine discussie op gang. Lawrence Ryan uit Wilsonville, Oregon (US) schreef: “When I taught undergraduates the scientific method , parsimony was a key element. I find this lacking in the suggestions that we may live in a simulation. Two scenarios (among perhaps more): our lives are the result of material evolution that gives us the consciousness and intelligence to one day program such a simulation, or another species has already materially evolved these traits to create the program that we live within. The latter is possible, but seems an unnecessary complication, as the former is sufficient to explain our existence. And how much information would be required to simulate the lives, and inner lives of more than 8 billion people? Will computer power continue to grow sufficiently to allow our simulators to generate us? Now, that is a philosophy student’s PhD thesis: what is te information load of a human simulation?
Waarop Bernd-Juergen Fischer uit Berlijn (Duitsland) reageerde met: “Your reader Lawrence Ryan is worried that the concept that our reality is a simulation is lacking in parsimony and asks: “How much information would be required to simulate the lives, and inner lives, of more than 8 billion people?” But the simulation doesn’t need to do any such thing. It only needs to simulate an “I” that believes that there are 8 billion people in the world. And for meeting one of the 8 billion, only the belief that the simulated “I” encounters some “other” with the relevant qualities needs to be simulated within the simulated “I”. The same goes for the rest of the universe: only what an “I” might know needs to be simulated. It seems to me that such a siulation would be highly parsimonious compared with the exuberance of what we take for reality.
En John
Bell uit Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire (UK) viel hem bij met: “Bernd-Juergen
Fischer rightly points out that a simulation of the universe would only need to
take account of the inner world of the subjective “I” and whomever and whatever
they interact with. Taking that concept further, most of the universe would
need only be stored as a vague set of probabilities, which would only have to
be set in Stone as subjective reality when te “I” observes something. Wait a
minute, that sounds familiair!”
