We are living in a simulation or we will soon will be if we can Upload the architecture of our minds/consciousness

The film the Matrix got many otherwise not-so-philosophical minds ruminating on the nature of reality.

But the scenario depicted in the movie is ridiculous: human brains being kept in tanks by intelligent machines just to produce power.

There is, however, a related scenario that is more plausible and a serious line of reasoning that leads from the possibility of this scenario to a striking conclusion about the world we live in - the Simulation Argument.

Perhaps its most startling lesson is that there is a significant probability that you are living in computer 



.



Yikes!  Really....if



if  they can reconstruct the architecture of my consciousness, help

Can we take such a hypothesis seriously

if the simulation hypothesis is true, you exist in a virtual reality simulated in a computer built by some advanced civilization. Your brain, too, is merely a part of that simulation. What grounds could we have for taking this hypothesis seriously?

I feel every part of me protesting at such a scenario.  But then what is 'me' paring it down I am no more than my consciousness

So is the simulation argument argument that my consciousness can by up loaded on to some futuristicsuper computer? 

Before getting to the gist of the simulation argument, let us consider some of its preliminaries.
One of these is the assumption of “substrate independence”.  

We currently (folk) believe one's consciousness/mind/brain/soul/spirit are inviolate
But the argument goes that that conscious minds could in principle be implemented not only on carbon-based biological neurons (such as those inside your head) but also on some other computational substrate such as silicon-based processors.

However  the computers we have today are not powerful enough to run the computational processes that take place in your brain. Even if they were, we wouldn’t know how to program them to do it. But ultimately, what allows you to have conscious experiences is not the fact that your brain is made of squishy, biological matter but rather that it implements a certain computational architecture. This assumption is quite widely (although not universally) accepted among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

So if our minds,have an  architecture and my consciousness does as it is made up my past/present/envisaged future experiences.these thoughts processes which arise out of my daily human interaction, and are framed within a socio/economic/politico framework (how else could they be framed?) then envisaging super fast quantum computers the notion of uploading minds becomes a futuristic reality.

The upshot of such an analysis is that a technologically mature civilization (us) would be able to build computers powerful enough to run an astronomical number of human-like minds,
There is the argument that we are living in a virtual reality anyway, we assess our reality on a macro level but on a micro level the table is not a table, we clod hop on in a naive macro pragmatism

So the argument goes that we live anyway in a virtual reality, and the notion of uploading mindsto quantum computers, although prima facie implausible is not such a far off distant real
Itis not so implausible that as we become more technologically mature we will use some portion of computational resources to run computer simulations of minds like ours - a daunting scenario is that the number of simulated minds that any such technologically mature civilization could run might become astronomically huge.

In this scenario there will be an astronomically huge number of simulated minds - indeed there would be vastly many more such simulated minds than there would be non-simulated minds running on organic brains. In other words, almost all minds like yours, having the kinds of experiences that you have, would be simulated rather than biological.

As Nick Bostron brilliantly argues, '...therefore, by a very weak principle of indifference, you would have to think that you are probably one of these simulated minds rather than one of the exceptional ones that are running on biological neurons.'  Bye bye humanity, hello  In such a frightening and counter intuitive scenario the advice might be distribute our credence amidst such a profound future  scenario for there is a substantial probability of this happening.

Let us suppose that this futuristic scenario is enacted your mind has been uploadedbecause it is technologically possible, for me the thought drives one into a spinning vortex of fearof ontological vertigo

Yet to  reason thus would be an error. Even if we were in a simulation, the best way to predict what would happen next in our simulation is still the ordinary methods – extrapolation of past trends, scientific modeling, common sense and so on.

To a first approximation, if you thought you were in a simulation, you should get on with your life in much the same way as if you were convinced that you are living a non-simulated life at the bottom level of reality.

The simulation hypothesis, however, may have some subtle effects on rational everyday behavior.
To the extent that you think that you understand the motives of the simulators, you can use that understanding to predict what will happen in the simulated world they created.

If you think that there is a chance that the simulator of this world happens to be, say, a true-to-faith descendant of some contemporary christian fundamentalist, you might conjecture that he or she has set up the simulation in such a way that the simulated beings will be rewarded or punished according to christian moral criteria.

An afterlife would, of course, be a real possibility for a simulated creature (who could either be continued in a different simulation after her death or even be “uploaded” into the simulator’s universe and perhaps be provided with an artificial body there).

Your fate in that afterlife could be made to depend on how you behaved in your present simulated incarnation.

Other possible reasons for running simulations include the artistic, scientific or recreational. In the absence of grounds for expecting one kind of simulation rather than another, however, we have to fall back on the ordinary empirical methods for getting about in the world.

If we are in a simulation, is it possible that we could know that for certain? If the simulators don’t want us to find out, we probably never will. But if they choose to reveal themselves, they could certainly do so. Maybe a window informing you of the fact would pop up in front of you, or maybe they would “upload” you into their world.

Another event that would let us conclude with a very high degree of confidence that we are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point where we are about to switch on our own simulations.

This post was inspired by Nick Bostrom's ruminations on virtual reality and simulations