Ancestor Mesh
Although not a new topic(more below), it’s timely given the emergence of the meshverse, that people are exploring scientific basis for our living inside a computer simulation. Via Futurismic, I came across a NY Times report that Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford
assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. …
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
If we are living in a simulation, the ancient Egyptian text Coming Forth By Day sure reads like a how-to-exit manual written by someone who created ancestor simulations. There are two non-technical books by noted physicists that cover this topic of simulating the universe - The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead and The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications. The latter I highly recommend.
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August 16th, 2007 at 1:37 am
[...] Ancestor Mesh [...]
August 16th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I was thinking about this very thing a month ago (note “Virtual history” entry in my moment of epiphany).
Interesting take on the The Book of the Dead. I’ll need to look into that.
January 31st, 2008 at 8:57 am
[...] and finance come to mind but the practice goes back much further to the art of memory and beyond to ancient Egypt. In the world of ubiquitous computing and locative art I call the meshverse, coding has to move [...]