50 million people do it every week

That’s the tag line for a documentary about the New York Times crossword puzzle, that I just watched. Wordplay is truly an entertaining film. The people who are really, really good at crosswords are, to say the least, characters (check out the bios in the “players” section of the film site). The people who write them are very talented. I’ve never been very good at them but Ricardo has some impressive talent when it comes to solving the cryptics.

And if you think you’re good at the crossword, try your luck here.

what if life is just some hard equation, on a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?

I recently read about how Spore is going to change the face of gaming, nay the world. Brought to us by the creator of The Sims, the game ‘draws on the theory of natural selection. It seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game.’

The article brought to mind Nick Bostrom‘s simulation argument. Here’s the abstract:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

I’m not sure of the necessity of posthumanity to the result (or even what posthumanity is; Bostrom gives a definition here). That aside, it looks like the ancestor-simulations are on the way, though not perhaps imminent.

One thing about the simulation argument strikes me: if we are (almost certainly) living in someone’s simulation, the same or similar logic could be applied to the author of the simulation: they are (almost certainly) living in someone else’s simulation. I just checked, and Bostrom acknowledges this in the original paper (p9). As for whether it is ‘necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage’, ‘the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure’. Could it all go around in a circle? Are we living in a simulation created by someone living in a simulation created by someone who will eventually live in a simulation we create? Is existence just a multiple equilibrium story? Jeez, this is more fun than economics.

[Aside: Bostrom too has had the mixed grill.]

P.S. This is the first in an occasional series of posts with titles by the Silver Jews.