Friday, March 4, 2011

In The Matrix

Konrad Zuse suggested that we might live inside a computer.  Because of the halting problem running a piece of software seems to be the only way to know what any given program will do.  So the problem of evil is solved, "the great programmer" can't know how his program will function until he runs it.  We who live in the program can survive death, the programmer can rerun our routine whenever he likes.

I have argued against us living in a simulation by saying that our behavior is too inefficient, our programmer would have to be incompetent.  But perhaps he is just exploring what a given set of algorithms will do and, because of the halting problem, can't know in advance how things will go.

But of course such extraordinary beliefs would require extraordinary evidence.

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