The murder trial spawned what’s now known as the “ Matrix defense,” a version of the insanity defense in which a defendant claims to have been unable to distinguish reality from simulation when they committed a crime. On a February night, he shot and killed his adoptive parents with a shotgun.
In 2003, Cooke was 19 years old and suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness when he became obsessed with “The Matrix.” He believed he was living in a simulation. The documentary’s most troubling sequences features the story of Joshua Cooke. A few of the film’s subjects describe the idea of other people being “chemical robots” or “non-player characters,” a video-game term used to describe characters who behave according to code. For example, if you believe you’re in a simulation, you might also think that some people in the simulation are less real than you. Another interviewee, a man named Paul Gude, said the turning point for him came in childhood when he was watching people sing at a church service the “absurdity of the situation” caused him to realize “none of this is real.”Ī Glitch in the Matrix – Official Trailer But others have darker reactions after coming to believe the world is a simulation.
The film features, for example, a man called Brother Laeo Mystwood, who describes how a series of strange coincidences and events - a.k.a “glitches in the matrix” - led him to believe the world is a simulation. In the new documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix”, filmmaker Rodney Ascher sends viewers down the rabbit hole of simulation theory, exploring the philosophical ideas behind it, and the stories of a handful of people for whom the theory has become a worldview. These worlds would probably be populated by simulated beings. The basic idea: Considering that computers are growing exponentially powerful, it’s reasonable to think that future civilizations might someday be able to use supercomputers to create simulated worlds.
We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.Any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).The human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.The most cited explanation came in 2003, when Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper claiming at least one of the following statements is true: But Twitter memes and quotes from “The Matrix” aside, simulation theory has some lucid arguments to back it up. Maybe it was during the chaos of 2020, when Twitter users grew fond of saying things like “ we’re living in the worst simulation” or “what a strange timeline we’re living in.” Or maybe you saw that clip of Elon Musk telling an audience at a tech conference that the probability of us not living in a simulation is “ one in billions.” Maybe it was in one of the countless articles on simulation theory.
If you’ve spent enough time online, you’ve probably encountered this question.