a continuing fixation on Borges

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

So, has the "Future of Humanity Institute" (as reported in the Science Times) finally caught up with Borges (reaching back via Lewis Carrol to Zoroaster)? A lot of people are talking about this paper with the readymade analogy to The Matrix and Baudrillard's (sp?) "Desert of the Real," but I think it bears a much closer resemblance to Borges' story, published in The Garden of Forking Paths , "The Circular Ruins."
Tierney himself notes that the reality posited by the paper would be fundamentally unlike that featured in the Matrix and the Cartesian "evil deceiver" because "you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits." In this way the paper deals with a situation more similar to that of the Borges story.
The protagonist of "The Circular Ruins," escaping incoming Hellenic influence, moves northward into a remote area of Persia and seeks an abandoned temple to the fire god Ahura Mazda, putting himself in the service of the old god and making it his task to "dream a man" and to imagine that man into reality. With a good bit of hoopla he is eventually successful in creating a man, his imaginary son, and training him in the ways of stewardship to the firegod.
"(The "post-humans of Dr. Bostrom's study would) be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon." The protagonist sends himself off to the southland to revive a further temple, all the while fretting that his 'son' might somehow discover his imaginary genesis. Surely enough the time comes when this son discovers that he is physically impervious to flame and that he is "mere simulacrum." The true kicker comes with the final three sentences, regarding the protagonist himself:

he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

The Tierney article deals with this same probabilty:

the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

While I personally side with those who shy away from assuming a more complex origin for simpler phenomena (the so-called Master Clockmaker) I do think that something akin to this hypothesis can be reverse-engineered to understand the practical realities created by language (especially important in an age of such dense media dissemination, especially dense in an age of such contradictory reports of importance). For instance, the pragmatic truth that all reality is a simulacrum glinted from the too-dense input of the physical universe, which makes it a practical truth that there may as well not be an actual universe, so long as there are minds (or a computer chip) to imagine one.

"The Circular Ruins"

"Our Lives, Controlled from Some Guys Couch"