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By Root 2087 0

able to fully explain what was happening, an iconoclastic thinker might suggest a radically different idea. If the continuum laws that physicists had developed over many millennia were input to a powerful digital computer and used to generate a simulated universe, the errors built up from the inherent approximations would yield anomalies of the very kind being observed. “Are you suggesting that we’re in a computer simulation?” you’d ask. “Yes,” your colleague would answer. “Well, that’s nutty,” you’d say. “Really?” she’d reply. “Take a look.” And she’d produce a monitor showing a simulated world, which she had programmed using those very same deep laws of physics, and—catching your breath after the shock of encountering a simulated world at all—you would see that the simulated scientists were indeed puzzling over the very same kind of strange data that troubled you.6

A Simulator who sought more assiduously to conceal herself could, of course, use more aggressive tactics. As inconsistencies started to build, she might reset the program and erase the inhabitants’ memory of the anomalies. So it would seem a stretch to claim that a simulated reality would reveal its true nature through glitches and irregularities. And certainly I’d be hard pressed to argue that inconsistencies, anomalies, unanswered questions, and stalled progress would reflect anything more than our own scientific failings. The sensible interpretation of such evidence would be that we scientists need to work harder and be more creative in seeking explanations. However, there is one serious conclusion that emerges from the fanciful scenario I’ve told. If and when we do generate simulated worlds, with apparently sentient inhabitants, an essential question will arise: Is it reasonable to believe that we occupy a rarefied place in the history of scientific-technological development—that we have become the very first creators of sentient simulations? We may have—but if we’re keen to go with the odds, we must consider alternative explanations that, in the grand scheme of things, don’t require us to be so extraordinary. And there is a ready-made explanation that fits the bill. Once our own work convinces us that sentient simulations are possible, the guiding principle of “garden variety,” discussed in Chapter 7, suggests that there’s not just one such simulation out there but a swarming ocean of simulations, which constitute a Simulated Multiverse. While the simulation we’ve created might be a landmark feat in the limited domain to which we have access, within the context of the entire Simulated Multiverse it’s nothing special, having been achieved a gazillion times over. Once we accept that idea, we’re led to consider that we too may be in a simulation, since that’s the status of the vast majority of sentient beings in a Simulated Multiverse.

Evidence for artificial sentience and for simulated worlds is grounds for rethinking the nature of your own reality.

The Library of Babel

During my first semester in college, I enrolled in an introductory philosophy course taught by the late Robert Nozick. From the very first lecture, it was a wild ride. Nozick was completing his voluminous Philosophical Explanations; he used the course as a dress rehearsal for many of the book’s central arguments. Just about every class shook my grasp on the world, sometimes vigorously. This was an unexpected experience—I’d thought that upending reality would be the purview solely of my physics courses. Yet, there was an essential difference between the two. The physics lectures challenged comfortable views by exposing strange phenomena that arise in wholly unfamiliar realms where things move fast, are extremely heavy, or are fantastically tiny. The philosophy lectures shook comfortable views by challenging the foundations of everyday experience. How do we know there’s a real world out there? Should we trust our perceptions? What thread binds our molecules and atoms to preserve our personal identity through time?

While I was hanging around after class one day, Nozick asked me what I was