“There are several things we’re looking for.” He was quiet for a moment. “The aspect of our work that relates to the anomaly,” he said, “is a continuing investigation into whether we’re living in a simulation.” “Do you think we are?” “There’s a faction,” he said carefully, “myself among them, that believes time travel works better than it should.”

In the end, transhumanism and other techno-utopian ideas have served to advance what Lanier calls an “antihuman approach to computation,” a digital climate in which “bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments.” In a way we are already living the dualistic existence that Kurzweil promised. In addition to our

Suppose that someone were imprisoned in a small, unrepresentative portion of our own reality – for instance, inside a universal virtual-reality generator that was programmed with the wrong laws of physics.