Have you ever wondered if youre just a character in some elaborate simulation?
You shake the thought off because youre a real person, living a real-life, in a concrete reality.
But can you be certain that you are?
Isnt it at least possible that your body and that the world around you are nothing but illusions?
He is a character in a simulation, and this realization changes his life forever.
Many of us have wondered if we, like Guy, are just NPCs in some game.
A skeptical hypothesis like this was first raised by the 17th-century French philosopherRene Descartes.
He didnt imagine he might be an NPC, of course.
But evil demons are considered a bit passe these days.
This is (more or less) the basic premise of the filmThe Matrix.
But now even brains in vats are old hat.
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Do we have free will?
So if we are like Guy and living in a computer simulation, what becomes of ourfree will?
And there certainly seems to be something right about this.
Everything would be determined by our programming.
So, it seems, whether we are in a computer simulation or the real world matters not.
Either way, we lack free will.
There might be some hope for both Guy and us, however.
Can computer programs be conscious?
The mind is on this view entirely distinct from the brain, but the two nevertheless interact.
So conscious thoughts occur in a spiritual mind and are then beamed across to the physical brain.
The consequences of there being conscious computer minds are far-reaching.
How to do this is a complicated issue that philosophers and legal expertsare only just beginning to tackle.
