No Man’s Sky

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/

I rang up Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the nearby University of Oxford. Bostrom is a longtime proponent of the idea that it’s possible we are living in a simulation. “If the simulation hypothesis is true,” I asked him, “what implications would that have for our existence?”

“One might be the idea of an afterlife,” he said. “From a naturalistic understanding, when we die we basically rot. But if we are in a simulation, if you stop the program, you can restart it again. You can take data created by one program and enter it into another without violating any laws of nature.”

“If this world is a simulation,” I asked, “What does that say about our creators?”

“There might be different motives,” Bostrom acknowledged. “In many ways it has parallels with reconciling evil in the world with an omnipotent and benevolent God. You could say that we are not created by someone who wanted the best for the world, or you could say that all of this suffering is illusory, or you could try to concoct some explanation for why it’s actually necessary. Either way, there’s an intellectual challenge there.”