AreWeLivinginaComputerSimulation.doc

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? High-profile physicists and philosophers gathered to debate whether we are real or virtual—and what it means either way —— By Clara Moskowitz on April 7, 2016 NEW YORK—If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it. The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of “The Matrix,” but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis. Researchers pondered the controversial notion Tuesday at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History. Moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said. 我们正生活在计算机模拟世界中吗？ 知名物理学家们和哲学家们汇聚一堂，就我们是生活中现实世界中还是虚拟世界中展开讨论。 ——克拉拉·莫斯科维茨，2016.4.7 纽约——假使你、我以及宇宙中的任何人、任何事物都真实地存在于一些大型计算机游戏中，可能我们也不得而知。而宇宙是一个模拟世界的观点，听起来更像是电影《黑客帝国》中的情节。不可否认，这也是个合理的科学假说。周二，在美国自然历史博物馆中，研究者们在一年一度的艾萨克·阿西莫纪念馆辩论会上，就这一有争议的观点展开了详细的讨论。 辩论会主持人奈尔·德葛拉司·泰森（美国自然历史博物馆海登天文馆的主管）认为，我们整个世界可能仅是他人硬盘驱动器中的一个程序，这种可能性为50%。他说：“在我看来，或许这种可能性非常高。”他曾注意到 黑猩猩和人类智力之间的差距，尽管 He noted the gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence, despite the fact that we share more than 98 percent of our DNA. Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own. “We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.” Virtual minds A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, t