Posted on Mar 8, 2017
Accepting that we live in a simulated universe is game-changing, like Copernicus realizing Earth was not the center of the universe. “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?”
Rich Terrile, a Voyager scientist who discovered several moons of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said research shows that consciousness, a product of the brain, can be reproduced. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,” Terrile said. “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.”
Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is like a pixelated video game. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said.
“Quite frankly, if we are not living in a simulation, it is an extraordinarily unlikely circumstance,” he added.
Terrile claims “our future selves” may have already accomplished this task and a simulation could be occurring already. He said he believes that is a wonderful thing because it provides a “scientific basis for some kind of afterlife or larger domain of reality above our world.”
“You don’t need a miracle, faith or anything special to believe it. It comes naturally out of the laws of physics,” Terrile said. “We will have the power of mind and matter to be able to create whatever we want and occupy those worlds.”
Terrile said on Morgan Freeman’s program Through the Wormhole that God must be an “interdimensional being, connected with everything in the Universe, a creator, responsible for everything in the Universe, and in some way able to change the laws of physics, if he wanted to. I think those are good requirements for what God ought to be.”
The Daily Galaxy via christianexaminer.com and theguardian.com
Image credit: National Geographic