Are We Ourselves?

If the theoretical possibility exists that a simulated universe could be created, then how do we know that it hasn't already been created... by ourselves? In other words, are we the God that we have always imagined - the ultimate programmer?

Am I Paul Kimball... or am I someone future person's version of Paul Kimball, a history project by a super-advanced civilization, like a very, very advanced version of The Sims?

The thought occurred to me as I was walking through a cemetery this morning - wouldn't it be interesting to know how these people lived their lives? Who was this man, and who was that woman? All those tombstones - all those stories.

And then, as I stopped by one gravesite and stared at the tombstone of someone who had been dead for over a hundred years, I considered whether some person far in the future took a walkabout like mine, whether literal or figurative, stared at a tombstone or record or something else with my name on it, and decided they wanted to know who Paul Kimball really was, long after he, or I, died.

And so here "I" sit...

Paul Kimball

Seth Shostak - "Who or What Built the Universe?"

In today's Huffington Post, Seth Shostak takes a look at the debate between science and religion over how the universe was built.

An excerpt:

The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the stars in their traces, was sufficiently impressed by the scale and regularity of the universe to ascribe it all to God.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, who has authored a new book on cosmology (The Grand Design), now says that Newton underestimated his own discoveries. The law of gravity is like "love" to the Beatles: it's all you need. With gravity in place, the cosmos-as-we-know-it was just a matter of hanging out for a few billion years.

However, this approach inevitably begs the question, "who designed gravity?" Isn't it remarkable that this gentle force seems so perfectly suited to the job of assembling a grand and habitable universe?

You can read the entire article here.

Paul Kimball