Are we all just characters in the Sims v. 27?

I’ve thought about this before. What if we’re just some really advanced computer simulation operating on someone’s computer. What if I’m just part of a game called The Sims v. 27 … ? I doubt we are because I think in that world, there would be a lot more of the two things that gamers just love - violence and sex. But it’s a thought that other people have had too, according to the New York Times:

Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford… assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
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There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
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It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

Read it here

 I’ve been reading the follow up blog posts to this at NyTimes and it has me thinking about all those poor, hapless sims I have murdered in games like Age of Empires. What happy lives those neurons lived, if only for an hour or two before I slaughtered them.

 It becomes freakier when I remember the times I only needed one soldier to complete a mission, and then have engaged in a ritualistic killing of the rest of them.

Moving on from these thoughts, it would follow that a simulation wouldn’t waste too much computing power on the unnecessary beings (such as Bangladeshis). So there’s a chance that me, one of my readers, or someone who I have met is going to move on and do something massively historical with their lives. Or else, why would the Grand 15.Yo. Nerd be keeping us alive? Hmm. That assumes that the conservation of computing power would be an issue.

The question is, where would all the electricity come from to make this computational power happen? It’s not an abstract concept - the higher the power, the more electricity it needs.