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A Turing-machine based simulated reality certainly would have been incomprehensible, but pre-20th century philosophers have thought about the idea of the world
by charles-salvia 10y ago
A Turing-machine based simulated reality certainly would have been incomprehensible, but pre-20th century philosophers have thought about the idea of the world not being "real" in some sense. I would even conjecture that the universal experience of dreaming, and the fact that we often can't tell when we're dreaming, would have probably inspired this line of thought going back possibly even pre-homo sapiens.
Of course, Plato's cave is the most famous writing about the idea of a "simulated" reality from antiquity, in the sense that it discusses the idea that prisoners who spent their entire lives in a cave would assume that the cave they see is the only reality.
- tryrall 10y agoIndeed, what I find much more fascinating is that these ideas are not new at all, but each generation frames it in a new technological light. It's like how the brain used to be an ocean, then it was a windmill, then it was a steam engine, then it was a computer, and now it's a GPU cloud. I wonder what will come first: humans finally understanding what a brain is, or making one.
- sixQuarks 10y agoTrue, the dream world makes sense as an analogy. They just wouldn't know how it was technically possible to create a "virtual dream" world.
- CuriouslyC 10y agoThe Hindu cosmology with its concept of Brahman has Plato lapped.