The Thirteenth Floor

Good evening all! (or should I say Good Morning?)

I watched a really sci-fi movie the other day which typically isn't my thing if I'm completely honest. But it was very good. Its called The Thirteenth Floor. The 1998 version. It was pretty awesome.

Basically this computer company builds a virtual reality of 1937 LA and they can connect into the system by downloading their minds and personalities into a simulated person in the VR. One of the characters has to go and investigate the world because his colleague was brutally murdered and he left him a message "in the system". The message goes astray and one of the 1937 characters discovers that his reality isn't a reality at all and has a major identity crisis.

The movie is loosely based on the book Simulcron-3. It was quite a good movie, but also slightly scary. It got me thinking-- how do we know that our world isn't just a computer simulation?

This got me to reading. Here is an article from the Philosophical Quarterly that I hope will work. I had some issues with it earlier. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3542867

It's basically an article that Nick Bostram wrote trying to prove via math that we do actually live in a computer simulation.

If you click on the title you should be able to watch the preview of the movie. Enjoy!