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If I’m having trouble sleeping and feel like spinning my wheels in the dark, I like to meditate on the simulation hypothesis—the idea that we’re living inside a kind of game running on a computer in the future. First put forward by the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom and embraced by many notable thinkers, it may be the most incredible idea conceivable, representing some sort of formal limit to the mind’s capacity for being blown. Artists and poets have long imagined that the world may be a dream or an illusion, but dreams and illusions are human, natural things, and…

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December 2018

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