Thoughts On: King City

I had been picking my way through Brandon Graham's King City for what seemed like ages. For sure it is a hefty volume, collecting what I think was originally 12 issues, and it is also quite dense. But that alone doesn't quite explain why it took me from December of 2017 through to May of this year to get through it. King City's loosely plotted structure made it difficult for me to read through in extensive sittings, so it always ended up being what I read when I managed to get through my other readings for the day. I can't offer much of an overall opinion on it, I think I need a re-read for that, but here I will collect some of my thoughts, particularly to point out those things in the novel that I found to be standouts in comics. As a comic full of playful inventiveness, there certainly is a lot to choose from...

A Simulated Hypothesis: Thoughts on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument

This piece is actually quite a long time coming. Back in August of 2017 I had recently completed reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and became interested in seeking out his Simulation Argument for myself. I did so, and found it to be rather less sound than I would have expected given the attention it has garnered throughout the years and eager proclamations of the non-scientific that "The Matrix is Real". I sketched out my thoughts then, but considered them incomplete and shelved them and am only now getting around to pulling them together.

Bostrom lays out his position in a short paper (Bostrom, 2003), which argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) humans will go extinct before reaching a "post-human" stage (alternatively, no such "stage" is likely to ever occur, with or without extinction, although this view is not expressed by Bostrom), (2) any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run any significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history, and (3) we are living in a computer simulation.