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Reaching The Edge of Your “Board Map”: Life Inside the Simulation

Matthew Oldridge
6 min readSep 30, 2019

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Unsplash: Bartek Mazurek

If you knew you were living inside of a video game, how would your life change? Would you act differently?

Nick Bostrom’s Simulation argument claims that it is likely that, given the computing power that will be available in the future, we are all living inside of a simulation. If a future post-human civilization were to create a simulation, then they have probably done so already, his logical argument claims. Their logic for doing so is opaque, however. The motivations of the beings who have created the simulation are unknowable to us, for they are outside of this, our (mostly) knowable, rendered world.

That means that our physical world, its laws, our bodies, and all matter around us are somehow created or simulated, possibly by our post-human descendants. Why they are running these simulations (they have possibly simulated their past many, many times), we do not know. They possibly believe they can learn from their own past, and so simulate it, over and over again, up until they reach their own time period. This reality could be one of many simulations from which they are learning (much like we simulate our elections many times to try and guess the outcomes, or how we can simulate sports seasons with video games).

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Matthew Oldridge
Matthew Oldridge

Written by Matthew Oldridge

Writing about creativity, books, productivity, education, particularly mathematics, music, and whatever else “catches my mind”. ~Thinking about things~

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