You're a Big Fake... But So Am I

A quick wrap up regarding Thor. I loved the movie. Loved, loved, loved it. I was 13 years old again. I was stunned that they didn't weaken him like I expected them to. He was a blond haired superman just like he was in the Comics, they were as faithful as could be expected and made Kirby's Asgard come to life. 'Nuff said.

In other news, I've been thinking. As always, by something I read (Click to have your mind blown). What if I...wait, I'm doing this wrong. Let me start over.

When I was a kid of 7 or 8 I lived with my grandparents. They lived in a scary house, built by my grandfather, deep in the woods. Built into the side of small mountain (or really big hill, you pick). It was scary. I mean, scary like I recall the Amityville Horror came out around the time I was living there and saw a glimpse of it - maybe a TV spot - and I thought  that house seemed much less scary than the one I lived in. It didn't matter how many lights were on, it would be dark inside the house. One side of the house faced a vertical mountainside, only feet from the windows, the other into a mountain a little further away, but still close enough to make out the individual trees. I knew things were out there, things that wanted me dead.

Heck, everything about that place was frightening. The 70 year old door locks, the kind with the iron, skeleton keys (no kidding), meant I was always locked inside a room, and even with a key, I couldn't make it turn the tumblers to get out. I had an episode in the bathroom once that I think left me scarred for life.

Most of those monsters and demons, I'm sure, spent time in the basement. My grandfather had dug it by hand, filling up wheel-barrels with dirt and poured the concrete himself. It had the texture of polished stone. Uneven, natural, curved, moldy, and dark. The brightest day couldn't bring enough light into the place - and the single, naked bulb that hung low in the center somehow only gave enough light to cast shadows. No horror story could compare to the things I envisioned that lived down there, day or night. Fetching a jar of beans from the basement was a worse punishment than any whipping I ever received.

That's all true, true to how it was to me as a child anyway, as an adult I still found the place creepy. But as a kid it gave me nightmares that still haunt me even now. I remember the dreams I had in that house to this day. It's been more than 30 years and I can still can't get them out of my head.

One dream disturbed me more than any other, I awoke in tears and nothing anyone could say would console me. 

I dreamed that nothing was real. Not you, not me, not this world. It was all fake, a lie, meant to deceive. My mother, my friends, my memories - none of it real. Not like the matrix, where I was sitting in a lab somewhere. But where the physical universe itself was false.

The thought that we're currently living in sophisticated simulation is not terribly new - it predates my childhood nightmares. The io9 story I read that sent me on this path today intrigued me though, because the conjectures I'd previously read on topic put the odds that we currently live in some sort of computer simulation at around 50/50 at best.

The paper I linked to at the top of the page puts it more like this - If we aren't a simulation then we're all about to die. Awesome. I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about this too, like the Fermi Paradox, it's always on my mind. But this isn't different in that the arguments are more nuanced and harder to understand.

I wrote last year, or maybe the year before that, about the mathematical model that predicts that we're all about to die. I'd never thought of combining the two unrelated items into a single proposition. So, please read the paper - or if you can't take it, then the io9 article I linked to - it gets more and more weird as we go along. It isn't just that this universe may be a simulacrum, but just like the movie inception, we may be simulations within simulations, like a matryoshka doll of reality.

Bizarre? Awesome? Stupid? You decide.