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Elon Musk: 'One In Billions' Chance We're Not Living In A Computer Simulation (vox.com)
An anonymous reader writes: At Recode's annual Code Conference, Elon Musk explained how we are almost certainly living in a more advanced civilization's video game. He said: "The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale. So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?" You can watch Elon Musk's full interview on YouTube.
Is it just me or does it start to seem like ol' Elon is going senile?
...we'd be the Jetsons. Cars have been getting better every year for 100 years. Soon we'll have electric cars, hybrid electric cars. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then cars will fly.
CEO logic, avoid it.
The circles of CEOs and geniuses rarely intersect. Not even this time.
This is just a fancy sort of solipsism.
You could also describe it as a modern form of faith-based explanation for existence couched in a scientific framework, but otherwise much as conventional religions attempted to explain existence before the scientific framework came about. It explains nothing, because if the world is a simulation, there is an outside to the simulation and one still has to explain how that world came about. Just as older explainers said the world was created by gods, leaving open the question of how the gods came about.
Bruce Perens.
then will the owners please debug the code and/or get the hardware fixed? I'm getting sick and tired of glitches like 'Real Housewives', Kardashians, and Donald Trump.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I find that pretty weak.
Things plateau and don't always improve at a linear, never mind exponential, rate.
Sure Moore's Law has served us well for a generation and a bit, but on his "evolutionary scale" it'll likely be seen as a blip.
All bubbles are obvious after they burst, but when inside one, it can be hard to recognise them.
I have lots of respect for Musk, but this just seems ridiculous.
We had transoceanic ships half a millenium ago, and it improved quite a bit from those days, but today's tech would be basically recognizable to someone from the 1600s, even if unbelievably large in scale. Metal ships & propellers seem to be the biggest advances (disregarding nuclear fuel sources vs ICEs) and those aren't considered new by any means.
We've had air travel for over a century, yet in the past 30-40 years there hasn't been that much improvement; in fact just try to get a supersonic passenger flight now - can't do it.
We've had men in space for half a century, had men on the moon almost half a century ago - can't do it now - USA can't even put a man in space on certified technology.
Mr Musk must be aware of these limitations, surely.
In light of those examples, I call his arguments on us living in a simulation very weak.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't.
Without ANY bugs? Really? The only way this idea works is if you have a divine programmer who cannot make any mistakes who created the universe. This is more like scientology than science.
s there a flaw in that argument?"
There are lots of flaws in that argument. It's basically a version of the brain-in-a-jar argument. It is an argument possibly from a false premise. It has no physical evidence and (so far) no testable model to verify it. It's a mathematical and philosophical argument based on extrapolations and probabilities and axioms, not a (yet) physics argument based on empirical evidence.
This is one of those times where somebody from physics tries to play in philosophy without knowing that this is ground that has been covered before.
Like the idea of Multiverses (you know, this thing when everytime you make a decision, the whole Universe duplicates in two branches, and in the other branch you made the alternate choice), like the theory of Panspermism (life never born around here but brought by some intergalactic comets from unreachable places), we face here a nice theory that completely eliminates the risk of being tested.
In other words, it is not a scientific proposal : it's a faith that is proposed to you.
And a low-grade one at that. The Matrix movie did much better.
We'll soon have enough such topics to start a dictionary, whose first historical chapter would address Angel's sex debates in the Middle Ages.
My concern is, that historical chapter probably will relate the Angel's thing to the time and place where the quarrel happened -the famous city of Byzantia, just when it was about to be destroyed.
History tells us that when a society's intelligence falls this low, its end is very near.
Herve S.
The idea that we are living inside a simulation is far from original from Musk.
Perhaps the most prominent contemporary proponent of this idea is the philosopher Nick Bostrom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's also peripherally related to the idea of a Boltzmann brain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also there is Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" which describes prisoners in a cave viewing the shadows on the wall as their reality and similarly our own view of reality being perhaps like a "shadow" of a meta reality.