Thought du jour - 17 September 2011

"I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it." - David Deutsch

The Simulated Universe

If the theoretical possibility exists that a simulated universe could be created, then how do we know that it hasn't already been created... by ourselves? In other words, are we the God that we have always imagined - the ultimate programmer?

Am I Paul Kimball... or am I someone future person's version of Paul Kimball, a history project by a super-advanced civilization, like a very, very advanced version of The Sims?

The thought occurred to me as I was walking through a cemetery this morning - wouldn't it be interesting to know how these people lived their lives? Who was this man, and who was that woman? All those tombstones - all those stories.

And then, as I stopped by one gravesite and stared at the tombstone of someone who had been dead for over a hundred years, I considered whether some person far in the future took a walkabout like mine, whether literal or figurative, stared at a tombstone or record or something else with "my" name on it, and decided they wanted to know who Paul Kimball really was, long after he, or I, died.

And so here "I" sit...

Paul Kimball