There’s an infamous anecdote about a scientist who was presenting a lecture on how earth and other celestial bodies orbit around larger bodies. When he finished the lecture, an old lady supposedly stood up and claimed that the scientist was wrong because the world wasn’t floating in outer space but was in fact supported on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what was supporting the turtle, the old lady replied: “it’s turtles all the way down.”
While this story is often used to explain the concept of an infinite regress, it’s also a great example of how the simulation hypothesis – the idea that the universe as we know it is a kind of virtual reality – is actually much older than the modern concept of computers.
However, it was only with the technological advances of the 90s that this idea became prevalent in popular culture...
While this story is often used to explain the concept of an infinite regress, it’s also a great example of how the simulation hypothesis – the idea that the universe as we know it is a kind of virtual reality – is actually much older than the modern concept of computers.
However, it was only with the technological advances of the 90s that this idea became prevalent in popular culture...
- 3/11/2024
- by Luiz H. C.
- bloody-disgusting.com
The Wachowskis' 1999 cyber-thriller "The Matrix" took the world by surprise. Although cyber-thrillers and V.R.-inflected sci-fi films were de rigueur throughout the '90s, the Wachowskis' unique blend of black-trench coat cool, overloaded action, and trippy pop existentialism shook the zeitgeist in unprecedented ways. The premise was powerful: in the distant future, humanity will be enslaved by intelligent machines and bodily stuffed into goopy cocoons. The electrical impulses in human brains are used by the Machines as a power supply, and every human being has a needle plugged into their skulls. In order to keep those impulses pulsing, the Machines have created an elaborate virtual reality for its living batteries, an electric realm called the Matrix. The Matrix is what you or I might call "the real world."
The notion that our perceived lives are merely an illusion is quite ancient, and even the sci-fi spin on that philosophy...
The notion that our perceived lives are merely an illusion is quite ancient, and even the sci-fi spin on that philosophy...
- 2/17/2024
- by Witney Seibold
- Slash Film
World on a Wire Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Written by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder Starring Klaus Löwitsch, Mascha Rabben, Karl-Heinz Vosgerau, Adrian Hoven I’d never heard of World on a Wire before Criterion’s announcement of its re-mastering and subsequent theatrical re-release in 2010. The trailer they’d put together hooked me immediately, based mostly on the retro-future set design and the promise of a strange, hard sci-fi thriller full of intrigue and mystery. The picture did not disappoint. With the recent blu ray release, I was thankful to be able to sit down with this epic film once again and try and make sense of any details I’d missed the first time around. In the not-too-distant future, a supercomputer called ‘Simulacron’ provides scientists with the ability to simulate and study a virtual society comprised of 10,000 ‘identity units’. When the technical director of the program, professor Vollmer,...
- 3/8/2012
- by Jay C.
- FilmJunk
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire,” a once-thought-lost, nearly-four-hour-long sci-fi epic about the nature of reality and the ways in which we lose ourselves in that potentially futile quest, was made way back in 1973 and for that reason alone, it’s hard not to goggle in awe at how ahead of its time it was, even when it very nearly bores you to death. Based on an novel called “Simulacron-3” by American writer Daniel F. Galouye, “World on a Wire” was originally presented as a two-part German television miniseries (it’s being shown theatrically with a brief, ten-minute intermission, at…...
- 7/19/2011
- The Playlist
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