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Bank of America Analysts Say There's A 50% Chance We Live In The Matrix (independent.co.uk)
Bank of America analysts have suggested that there is a 20 to 50 percent chance that the world around us is a "Matrix-style virtual reality." The report stated, "It is conceivable that with advancements in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and computing power, members of future civilizations could have decided to run a simulation of their ancestors." The idea is certainly nothing new, as many influential visionaries have come to similar theories. What some may find most unusual about the report is who issued it. According to Business Insider, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America's wealth management company, sent out a briefing to investors outlining their Matrix theory. In response, Slashdot reader marmot7 writes: Personally, I'd like to see all that brain power go toward a better and more stable banking system, not toward the promoting the nihilistic and self-indulgent idea that this might be the Matrix. Don't worry that banks behave in ways that create instability, it's not real. Just relax and enjoy the ones and zeroes. I have no doubt there are good, well meaning people there. I just don't really need my bank weighing in on the mystery of reality any more than I need them to come up with a unified theory of physics at long last. Well, unless it's in their spare time then by all means.
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Although BofA is HQ'd in Charlotte, NC it was historically a California company and has a large presence in Washington and Oregon--states where pot is either legal or decriminalized and widely used. Just sayin'.
My impression is that banks are about the bottom line and profits. Why is someone at a bank doing that research?
As with God, one has to ask what kind of morality would lead our descendants to (re)create the pointless cruelty and misery seen in the media.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why not e, or 12.44426268%? And haven't they something better to do? They are a bank, not a research institute, are they?
Why do simulated people do anything? It's just the way the program's set up.
To be fair, when the Bank of America analysts were asked this, they were all high on designer drugs after celebrating their record bonuses.
You are welcome on my lawn.
At least, now you know where you should NOT put your money.
What narrow thinking in these comments. I know, "get off my lawn, Slashdot used to be amazing!" has been said before, but all of these comments are simple "LULZ BofA is stoopid!" Come on people, think bigger and more cynically! Why not devote a few analyst cycles to ponder the reality vs simulation question if you're a major finance company? If we are in a simulation, isn't there a healthy chance that simulation includes bugs that could be exploited by economists living within it?
How many billions could you make if you were able to predict glitches in the Matrix?
percentile dice...
If you roll a compound fraction is that "percentile dysfunction"?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
But the human minds kept rejecting it. Entire crops were lost.
So B-of-A was formed instead.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Sault's law says a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself. It is an asymptotic goal. And it is unlikely any civilization would get even close to simulating the universe it lives in.
E Proelio Veritas.
What is a life worth if it's just simulation?
No more and no less than if it's "real". Who gives a squashed shit? If it feels real to me, I'm going to behave as if it's real. And I'm going to get quite cross if you piss on my Wheaties, whether you think it's real or not. Indeed, if you should do such a thing, you will find out rapidly how real I think it is. Which is not to get all internet brave or anything, it's all to make a point; there is only one reason why it would be interesting if the universe were a simulation, and that's that we could then potentially hack the simulation in order to accomplish things which are outside the rules — or at minimum, examine the laws of the simulation so that we could determine precisely what the rules were, so that we could make optimally efficient use of them.
If we determine that this is all a simulation, and then go on living as if we had learned nothing, then the time spent determining that it is a simulation was all a big fuck-off waste of time. It would have been better spent masturbating. At least then, at the end you'd have something.
On the other hand, odds are good that we're not going to be able to break out a simulation even if it is one. The ways in which you break out of simulations tend to involve abusing the simulation. But we're nowhere near capable of doing that. We have barely begun to familiarize ourselves with existing stellar phenomena. How can we even reasonably imagine some case which will break the simulation when we're so unfamiliar with its bounds?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do not try to flip a coin, that is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no coin. Then you'll see that it is not the coin that flips, but you.
I'd love to know what they base it on. The typical argument is that, at a given point in its maturity, any technological civilisation will be able to produce simulations that are sufficiently real that the inhabitants can't tell that they are inside a simulation. At this point, they will do so at least once and there will be more simulated realities than real ones. Some of these simulations will be complex enough for recursive simulation, and so the number will grow. If we assume that the base reality is at least as big as ours appears to be, and has been around for as long as hours appears to have been, then there must be a great many technological civilisations (even if you assume an average of only one per galaxy, it's a huge number) that have reached the point of being able to build simulations. As such, the number of beings inside simulated realities vastly exceeds the number in the base reality and so there is a far greater probability that you are in a simulation (and probably in a recursive simulation) than that you are in the base reality.
A similar argument states that this probability is further increased because we can't yet build realistic simulations and you could significantly reduce the computational requirements of your simulation by not making its inhabitants sufficiently technologically advanced to require recursive simulation.
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