Blood Engines(54)

 

“Sure. Computers and what we call, for want of a better word, sorcery. Everything in the world is information, Marla. Me, you, this desk.” He thumped the desktop with his fist. “And information can be manipulated and reconfigured endlessly. When you break it down, everything’s made of math and emptiness.”

 

“Maybe there’s something to technomancy, after all,” Marla said thoughtfully. There’d only been one prominent silicon mage in her city, and Marla had flung him off a rooftop for interfering with her fiscal policies by trying to steal several million in city funds.

 

“Technomancy is the key to everything,” Dalton said. “You’re like a savage digging in the dirt with a stick compared to me. So was Finch, and so’s every other sorcerer in this city. See, they don’t get it.” There was a certain light in his eyes now, an almost evangelical excitement. Marla had seen it in necromancers talking about bones, and in pyromancers talking about the cleansing power of flames. “Are you familiar with Nick Bostrom’s simulation theory?”

 

“I’m afraid not,” Marla said, sitting back more comfortably in her chair. She had a feeling this might take a little while.

 

“He’s a philosophy professor at Oxford. He makes an argument that it’s quite likely we’re all actually simulations of long-dead people, running in an emulated environment created by our own technologically advanced descendants.”

 

“Ah,” Marla said.

 

He sighed. “I’m trying to tell you something important,” he said.

 

“Is it about Mutex?” she asked.

 

“Potentially,” he said. “Here’s the core of Bostrom’s argument. First, you have to begin from the premise that it will someday be possible to re-create a human mind in a nonorganic environment. That is, to make a computer that operates in a manner indistinguishable from a human mind, to create consciousness in a machine.”

 

Marla had talked to her friend Langford, the biomancer, enough to know that such things were maybe theoretically possible, though the technology was a long way off, so she nodded. “All right.”

 

“Then ask yourself whether humans are likely to ever achieve that technology. I think it’s obvious that we will, unless we cause ourselves to become extinct first, which seems doubtful, frankly. The tenacity of cockroaches is nothing compared to that of humans.”

 

Marla twirled her finger in a hurry-up motion.

 

“The final question is this: do you believe that such advanced people would never, ever run sophisticated computer simulations of their own ancestors?”

 

“I wouldn’t say never,” she said. “People dress up in Civil War uniforms and pretend to shoot one another in fields, so I guess running a computer simulation of our ancestors isn’t so different.”

 

“Then you must agree that, in all likelihood, we are actually simulations living inside a computer. We’re completely unaware that we’re simulations, truly sentient and conscious, but actually running on some unimaginably complex computer system sometime in our own subjective far future. It’s simple probability. If our descendants can create such simulations, then there’s no reason to assume they would do so on a small scale, or for only one era. There might even be multiple versions of the same ‘world’ being simulated in dozens or scores or hundreds of computers, with slight variations. The odds are good that there are far more simulated minds running on computers than there are organic consciousnesses running on their original brains—and, so, probability tells us that, in all likelihood, we are simulations. It’s not a new idea—science fiction writers have played with it for decades—but Bostrom’s paper was one of the first attempts to treat it rigorously and take it seriously. You’ll have to give me your e-mail address, Marla, I’ll send you a link to the preprint.”

 

“I think Rondeau might have e-mail,” she said.

 

“I’ve got an AOL account,” Rondeau said, in a helpful tone, without looking up from his arcade game.

 

Dalton looked at them as if they were exotic insects.

 

“So we’re all living in a computer,” Marla said. “Who cares? If we’ll never know, and we can’t tell the difference, why does it matter? It’s like the free-will debate—for practical purposes, it doesn’t matter. You have to live as if you have free will anyway, or else you just sit around until you die of starvation.”

 

“But it does matter,” Dalton said. “Bostrom thinks it matters because of the philosophical and theological implications, but it matters to us, to people like you and me, Marla. Because we’re sorcerers. We do things that violate the known laws of the universe all the time. And do you know why? Because we’re not in nature. We’re in a computer program, and the rules of the physical universe don’t apply. That’s why I can instantiate duplicates of myself, using something we choose to call sympathetic magic, with the help of some very fast computers.”