Life is but a dream?

Life is but a dream? ........Scientists ask.


November 14, 2004

Top scientist asks: is life all just a dream?
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

DEEP THOUGHT, the supercomputer created by novelist Douglas Adams, got there first, but now the astronomer royal has caught up. Professor Sir Martin Rees is to suggest that “life, the universe and everything” may be no more than a giant computer simulation with humans reduced to bits of software.
Rees, Royal Society professor of astronomy at Cambridge University, will say that it is now possible to conceive of computers so powerful that they could build an entire virtual universe.

The possibility that what we see around us may not actually exist has been raised by philosophers many times dating back to the ancient Greeks and appears repeatedly in science fiction.

However, many scientists have always been dismissive, saying the universe was far too complex and consistent to be a simulation.

..snip..

In a television documentary, What We Still Don’t Know, to be screened on Channel 4 next month, he will say: “Over a few decades, computers have evolved from being able to simulate only very simple patterns to being able to create virtual worlds with a lot of detail.

“If that trend were to continue, then we can imagine computers which will be able to simulate worlds perhaps even as complicated as the one we think we’re living in.

“This raises the philosophical question: could we ourselves be in such a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of vault of heaven rather than the real thing. In a sense we could be ourselves the creations within this simulation.” ...cont'd

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1358588,00.html

"could we ourselves be in such a simulation and could what we think is the universe be some sort of vault of heaven rather than the real thing. In a sense we could be ourselves the creations within this simulation.”


Hello... can you say "MATRIX"...you know Keanu Reeves...black sunglasses...Mr Anderson......

....or perhaps they should catch "What the Bleep?"

:evilgrin:

I feel like I live in the Matrix, and this is not real, it couldn't be, and my dreaming self is closer to real than my waking self.

There must be some truth to this.

Dover, how interesting! Thank you.

LOL!

From the article:

Despite this, the idea has persisted, popularised in films such as Tom Cruise’s Vanilla Sky and The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves.

It was also the basis for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, written by Adams, who died in 2001. In the book, Deep Thought creates the Earth and its human inhabitants as a giant calculating device to answer the “ultimate question”.

The BBC’s rerun of the radio version of Hitchhiker finished recently, just as Rees was putting together his contribution to the debate in which he will concede that the depictions by Adams, Cruise and Reeves might have been right after all.

:spank: my bad for skimming....

:) loved "Hitchhiker's Guide"....

I am really tired of this nightmare........

just our own unique perception of the "reality" we see around us.....

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream: it may be so the moment after death. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne