We Live In Virtual Reality
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Our world is a virtual reality from businessmen, physics and neurobiologists.
Our world may be someone's virtual reality."In four thousand years, we have not been able to prove to ourselves that reality exists outside the first person." This quote from Peter Watts' science-fantastic novel is perfect as an epigre to our text. 'Cause the point is, we all live in computer simulation. Or not. But it turns out there's an incredibly many smart and educated people, some of whom are on the list of the most powerful, who seriously claim that what's happening around us is illusion.
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You could start with history. To say that the illusion of the world has repeatedly been raised in various religious and philosophical texts. That in Hinduism there's a "cover of Maya," the goddess of the deception that "we're all just going down Buddha." Or, as René DeCart said, there's some "storey genius, very powerful and deceitful" that made us all think there's a physical world, while all around is "catches, broken by genius."
You could start with fantasy and mystics in literature and movies. Remember that Matrix has you (the phrase from the Matrix, remember?) that "The Sads are not what it looks like" (Twin Picks, if you've forgotten), that the simulations can be countless (as in the 13th floor movie) and they all call each other somehow and run each other (as in the Grades's Virus)
But we'll start with another one. In September 2016, the customers of the investment unit of the Bank of America - Bank of America Merrill Lynch - received a letter from the company. The text reads as follows: the odds that the world we see as "real" are actually just a simulation between 20 and 50 per cent. Not enough, you think? Maybe. But they're much higher (a few million times on average) than a chance, say, to win the lottery, so I wouldn't call people who believe that stupid. Especially as among them, for example, Tesla and SpaceX Ilon Mask, who, as early as June, assessed the probability that the reality known to us is the one-million-dollar thing. "We'll be even better if what we accept for reality is already a symulator, created by another race or people of the future," he stressed that "or we will create irresistible simulators or civilization will cease to exist."
