Are We Living in a Computer Simulation

Elon Musk thinks that is it almost certain that we are living in a computer simulation. He Says that humans are basically an advanced version of The Sims. Indeed this idea sounds pretty absurd. But people used to think all planets including sun orbits around the Earth and almost 2000 years ago Galileo proved that is it not. There for the reality could far different from what we are materializing.

If we are living in a simulation, there is a higher level being, but it’s some version of us

Musk is echoing a paper on this theory by Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. His argument goes like this. 40 years ago we had Pong, like two rectangles and a dot. 30 years later we got The Sims, and now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it is getting better every year.

So let’s go about 10000 years in to the future and it’s possible that when we get there, the entire civilization is gone because there is a celling to our advancement. It could be because of global warming or self replicating robots. Quoting Elon, “… if civilization stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization”. But another possibility is that if we keep advancing and assuming everything in the physical world can be simulated, eventually we will simulate ourselves.

Getting enough computer power to run billions of ancestor simulations could be a problem. But Bonstrom thinks we’d send tiny self replicating robots to other planets which would turn the planet into a huge computer and some of the simulations would start making their own simulation. In this scenario there are billions of universes that are indistinguishable from our own. That means chances are we are in one of the simulated universe. And given the other possibility, which is human civilization has an inevitable ceiling. Obviously it’s better that we are in a simulation.

Somehow there is another possibility. Maybe future humans don’t want to run ancestor simulations. Maybe because they think it’s unethical to run ancestor simulations. Because there is a tremendous amount of suffering in the world, and that suffering would still feel real to simulated humans. Or maybe they have other priorities.

However, there are three possibilities, (1) humans go extinct before we are able to run a simulation this big, (2) humans don’t run simulations because it is wrong or boring, (3) we are living in a simulation. Musk think there is only a tiny chance we are in scenario 1 or 2 and the Bostorm thinks it is more like a 20% chance that we are in a simulation but if you are not into futuristic predication,  Bostrom think the argument also provides other rewards. He says, “… it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain traditional religious conceptions”. In other words, if we are living in a simulation, there is a higher level being, but it’s some version of us.

References:

Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 2003, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.

Full interview of Elon Musk at Code Conference 2016

Eastern and Western Narratives of the Philosophy of Language

Language and linguistics are two interesting research areas that I’d like to focus. These interests were stimulated by the work I have done in natural language processing, like unambiguously interpreting instructions from user manuals. After resigning from my previous work place I had some time to restard blogging the things I’m interested. Here I summed few facts that I have collected time by time and I’m hoping to write more about language and linguistics often.

Language is one of the most expressive forms of communicating knowledge with rest of the world; a master of this expressive form could share his wisdom with others. Philosophy of language can be denoted as a systematic study/inquiry of the origins of language, the nature of meaning, the usage and cognition of language and the relationship between language and reality.

The curious fate of humankind.

Philosophy of language has its roots in final centuries BC and early centuries AD. VedicAge in Indian history made contribution to the philosophy of language in early stages of this quest, to be precise philosophical schools of Nyaya and Mimamsa gave rise to linguistic philosophy. For example Sanskrit GrammaticalTradition can be considered and one such contribution.

Ancient Greece covered most of work in philosophy of language from the Western tradition. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics made contributions in that era.

Plato believed that names of things are based on the nature where each smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning represents basic ideas or sentiments. Aristotle considered that the way a subject is modified or described in a sentence is established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. The Stoic philosophers separated five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives, conjunctions and articles. Their contributions are mostly made to the analysis of grammar.

In late 19^th Century language start playing a major role in Western philosophy. Publication like “Cours delinguistique generale” made an impact to that contribution.