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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.
Of course there is: the infinite regression of where did the uber-advanced civilization come from which created our Universe?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
OK, people seem to be getting down on Elon here...
Personally, I don't think we are in a game. I think that the primary use of such simulations will be to have "children" (those under the age of 1,000) experience the "bad old days" back when resources were bounded. So this is school, not a game. I guess we'll know if I'm right in about 50 years, on average.
As for those that think this level of simulation is impossible, it isn't. There may be limits to hardware that prevent exponential increases from going on forever. But there are no such limitations for software. You can optimize the simulation by doing things like dropping information whenever you don't need it (quantum mechanics), and removing redundant calculations (as in, after a quadrillion people go through the same sim, it is unlikely they are actually coming up with anything original...)
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This is just repackaging Anselm's Ontological argument for the existence of God: postulating "a being of which no greater can be conceived" would necessarily mean God exists. Just like living in a computer simulation: imagine "a computer simulation where no greater simulation can be conceived".
But it doesn't make things real. Just because you'd have to imagine a real God doesn't necessarily make it exist outside your head. Same with the simulation.
Neat thought experiment, not a proof.
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Let's say you have a computer program with 10,000 lines of code in it. How many bugs are there? OK, 100,000 lines, are there 10x as many bugs or 12x? 1M lines? Let's say you have a 10M-line computer program, there are going to be tens or hundreds of thousands of bugs in that thing.
How many bugs have we seen in reality? I don't mean "Oh, _that's_ interesting" and later we figure out general relativity - I mean bugs, the shit bluescreens, or if you look in a certain direction, things are different. How many have we found?
AFAICT, we've found _zero_. Every time we find a discrepency in the universe, later we figure out that it wasn't a discrepency, it's how the entire universe works, and our previous understanding was simply wrong. EVERY TIME. So either the bugs self-heal and become consistent universal features, or they weren't bugs in the first place.
If the universe is a self-organizing emergent property on some very fundamental operator, then I don't see how "simulated" differs from "real". We don't write software that way. We don't build hardware that way. I don't mean a little bit, I mean AT ALL, that's entirely alien to everything in software and hardware, to the point where you might as well be talking about something else entirely.
Not senile, but self-indulgent. Any college sophomore can deal with the same ideas and get nowhere. And then there's Mars. I fervently wish he'd leave off the Mars stuff until SpaceX was on a solid footing as a profitable launch company with rapid cadence.
Isn't the entire purpose of SpaceX to get to Mars? The rocket launch business is just to fund things and develop the technology.
I suspect this is why there hasn't been a rush to go public - it could scupper that long-term mission when investors start demanding moar profits NOW.
Even non-Abrahamic religions believe in a grand design or something like that.
Not for most Buddhist's and Hindu's. Jains are agnostic and so are some schools of Buddhism and some now extinct schools of Hinduism. In fact a major school of Hindu Philosophy believes that the whole universe is unreal (Maya). Therefore, yes, Musk could be a religious fellow.
Mmm. I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning. You and I can run conway's game of Life on a computer, fast enough to update an entire screen in real time and see things evolve. GPU's are awesome.
But if you and I are the analogues for the nodes in that Life simulation, we have no concept of how much time passes between each simulation step. For all we know, it could take aeons of what we would perceive to be our timebase for the simulation of every Tp (Planck Time). We would never know any different.
The argument of resource is equally unconvincing - to the (strangely, intelligent :-) nodes in our hypothetical game of Life, the very idea of simulating a complex environment is outlandish, but to us it's a simple situation, taking up next to no resources. The expectation is that the next "level up" that would be running our reality as a simulation would be just as much of a difference (or more) to us, as we are to the game of Life. Ad infinitum, of course.
Physicists get Hadrons!
So then, what came before the Big Bang? What exists inside of a black hole?
Restricting yourself to purely scientific explanations doesn't make these sorts of questions go away. It just means you're willfully ignoring them - pretending stuff outside the reach of scientific inquiry doesn't exist, just like you're accusing others of pretending things outside the reach of scientific inquiry do exist.
Goedel proved nearly a century ago that any logical system is incomplete - there will always be things within the system which cannot be proven by the logic within that system. That is, the set of statements about the universe isn't divided into true and false things. It's divided into true, false, and cannot be determined. So any philosophy based on assuming things are false unless proven true is logically inconsistent. And believing nothing exists outside our current system is just as much a faith as believing something exists outside. The only logically sound stance is uncertainty about what if anything exists beyond our perception.
In that respect, Musk has the more logically consistent argument. He offers no proof but at least acknowledges the possibility that he may be wrong. You on the other hand offer no proof but seem certain that you are right (that he is wrong).
If the universe were being run right now in debug mode with frequent pauses and on-the-fly bugfix-and-continue changes ... would you know? There'd be no evidence in-universe after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Whose to say there aren't bugs? As a physics major in college I could certainly be convinced many aspects of general relativity and quantum mechanics could be considered bugs. Nothing can move faster than the speed of light? Oops. Quantum entanglement and superposition? We'll fix those in version 2.5. Hopefully by version 4 we can finally get the world to run by what you call Newtonian physics with no exceptions.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
In that case you still need the perfect programmer to program the bug-free AI.
I don't really buy the "we are a simulation" thing, but taking your logic to it's reasonable conclusion the simulation could well be run by a bearded man using the cloud. In which case the the major monotheistic religions have had it basically right for quite a while.