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