Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch
JOHN TIERNEY of the www.nytimes.com writes how Our Lives might be controlled from some guy’s couch
Read the article before you move down.
Let me quote René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”. It can be argued that the ‘thought’ is planted in our mind, and so, just because I think does not mean I exist. Some might even say that I exist, but in a VR program.
If I am indeed a part of a VR program, then am I writing this because someone else is making me write it?
I don’t think so. Because, I am writing it instead of the guy next to me. Either the VR program has to select me as a person who will write something, or has to choose me at random. If I was chosen at random, then I am getting chosen a lot of times. If I was supposed to write, then I don’t write often enough.
Let me quote René Descartes again, “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”.
I am sure most people have played chess with a computer. There are programs which show the computations of the moves it is considering in real time, but once it has computed it, there is no doubt. A program cannot doubt. It chooses an option, the best one according to its calculations and then moves on. But a human being, me, doubts every move. There is always a small percentage of doubt. It might be better to say, there is a lack of 100% certainty. If I am a VR program, I wouldn’t consider a Matrix like situation.
If you think you are living in virtual reality, then everything you have known is wrong. 1+1 might not be 2, Earth might be flat, robots might have evolved and life invented and so on and so forth.
Even if you are a virtual reality program, you still exist; the only question is where. But I still refuse to believe it, because there are too much that I do not know, and if I was part of a machine then I would have known more; if I was part of a computer program then I would have been able to organize my thoughts better, remember things better and understand everything better.
So the fact that I doubt, the fact that I am imperfect to a great extent makes me human.