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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?
Cognito ergo sum
...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.
10000 years later there will still be linux users and they will still be playing pong and tetris and having one windows box hidden somewhere offline just , just for "gaming".
Sister Miriam Godwinson was quoted today saying, "We must Dissent."
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
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
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.
You have already lost. Respawn at home base.
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.
When challenged to explain the lack of evidence for "god" theists will sometimes argue that the universe was deliberately designed not to reveal the evidence. Naturally one is left wondering what difference there is between a universe that contains no evidence of a creator and a universe that had no creator.
What's the difference between a simulated universe and a "real" universe if the two are indistinguishable?
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
One should assume energy use will scale with computing power and a "console" capable of known universe scale of simulation would also need similar levels of energy. Even if we assume to have harnessed singularities or something and have unlimited energy, it's unlikely every house will have that level of energy (10^50 hiroshima bombs) available
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.
Fuck you for all the pain and suffering, cunts.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I had a professor who posited that we were all part of a Matrix-style simulation. How could we possibly know? My response, "Commit suicide." If it's a simulation, you'll come out of it. Mr. Musk, prove me wrong. What are the odds that I'm wrong? A billion-to-one?
Makes me very uncomfortable thinking that this guy runs a company that wants to sell us selfdriving cars, but apparently he doesn't understand odds. Odds are derived from observation, not from fantasy. More specifically he effectively states that the probability of us living in a simulation are 1e9 times greater than reality being - well just that. Probability means we have observed 1e9 : 1 events that speak in favor of a simulation, and then he goes on to cite computer games become "almost like" reality. In other words to this point there is _no_ event that speaks in favor of a simulation.
In his argument, we are like the non-player characters (NPCs) in this advanced video game. Tell me, in what game do the NPCs exhibit the ability to, for example, learn about the world they live in through the scientific method?
Think of all the computing power we throw at complex modelling, e.g. of weather patterns, quantum phenomena, financial markets, protein folding, etc. Many of these simulations run much slower than the processes they examine. Now imagine a game that models a universe like ours to the subatomic level. Even if a transistor were the size of an atom, we could not build a machine capable of running this game using all of the ordinary matter in our universe (think about it).
But perhaps it is done with rocks: https://xkcd.com/505/
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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Slashdot is definitely a computer simulation. How can it possibly be real?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
Someone's got to have 'em...
This signature can save you $400 on your car insurance!
Well, consider f'rinstance the uncertainty principle. Certain phenomena (e.g. the state of a particle) do not fully manifest until someone/something is observing it. That strongly resembles a rendering optimization to me...
-Meteor strike -Climate change -Conventional war -Nuclear war -Pandemic(s) Any of those items could devastate or eliminate the human race.
that we live in an objective reality ?
i'm not sure why it makes more sense that our universe is a simulation rather than we just live in "the universe" as it was created in an actual reality.
Absolute statements are never true
No, I don't care. I care about those who care.
Achille Talon
Hop!
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...
The world would be a much safer place then.
Yes, we could be in a simulation. In fact, maybe none of you exist. I might have been created 5 minutes ago complete with false memories in a virtual world where I am the only conscious entity. The folks running the simulation would also be conscious entities. I might be one of their experiments.
The operative words in the above paragraph are 'could', 'maybe' and 'might'. In fact most the time I don't think about it; I just assume that other people exist and my memories and sensory input have a rough correlation to some sort of reality because that seems like the practical thing to do. But I acknowledge that I can't know for sure that that's the case. So, the rest of this post, I'm going to assume that you other people exist and this is not just for the amusement and edification of some AI students observing me in yet another run of their simulation software.
Back in the 1600s, philosopher Rene Descartes considered the matter and decided that the only thing he could know for sure was that he existed, because he was thinking about it. Everything else might have been false. (His famous line, in Latin, was Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am.) Older than DesCartes is the idea that life is a dream, or we are living in the dream of some god, who is himself living in the dream of a god, etc.
Presumably, we (or at least I) might be in a simulation nested in another simulation. But working up through the levels, one would expect to get to the original. The creators of that first simulation don't have to be gods. They might have evolved up from a primeval universe formed in a big bang. They wouldn't necessarily know the answers to the really fundamental questions like how did it all get started? Why is there something instead of nothing?
I don't know the answers to the fundamental questions and I don't think anyone else knows. (If I thought somebody else knew, I'd ask them, and then I'd know, right?) This is what being an agnostic (from ancient Greek for not knowing) is all about.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
if this is a simulation, all he offered was a simulated argument.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Stupid science about why superheroes can do what they do, or trying to explain how the sun went out and our plucky heroes are going to restart it just grates on the the nerves.
It would be so much better if Musk took up a conventional religion with decent moral imperatives rather than trying to be a damn special snowflake.
P.S. if he wants stupid science fiction religions the scientologists still have openings.
I think there's a minimum amount of energy required to flip one bit (in our physics). The "outside world" will need insane amount of energy to maintain billions of simulations (assuming that in their physics bit flipping ain't free either)
That's what Wolfram is The Computational Universe">working on.
Elon Musk Gets Totally Baked, Flouts Thermodynamics in Attempt to Philosophically Construct Secular Afterlife
I mean, I don't even think he's completely wrong, but holy shit the way he's saying this makes it clear he was toasted.
Let's say you have a 10M-line computer program
Not necessary.`
Or eight years ago.
Everybody knows that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe.
An obvious flaw in the argument is that it assumes that there is a more advanced civilization than ours out there somewhere. But following Fermi's Paradox, where are they ? There has been no evidence of any other extraterrestrial civilization advanced or otherwise. Drake's equation states that there probably is, but again, where are they ?
We do not have a photo realistic 3D simulation that millions of people play at the same time. That would be nice, but we aren't even fucking close. We do have lot of great looking 3D simulations that people play in groups or by themselves. Maybe a few hundred on a server at a time, but that's it. We can't even get 1k people on the same server at the same time to have a serious deathmatch in any FPS. Shit, even WoW can't put that many people on a server at a time, and their graphics are cartoonish.
So Elon, you might know some things, but the current state of video games? You don't. And thinking it's the strongest reason for why we are living in a computer simulation only shows how much you don't know. I don't know shit, but come on dude.
Be seeing you...
... a few weeks ago.
... the scientists change the rules. Let's hope our overlords are willing to let the experiment run, even if people start to publicise this as a theory. On the plus side, we'd never know it if we're a simulation. Everything will just go offline instantaneously.
And I think it'd be cool if that jesus guy was just someone who figured out a cheat code to our reality. Then the ban-hammer came down, of course...
Physicists get Hadrons!
He's smokin' simulated weed
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Quite an assumption. If it were so, would it not be easy to derive those ten lines of code from any maxim as everything is dependent upon them? Classic folly of the Greeks and their invention of geometry trying to figure out the universe.
Doesn't matter really. Elon is relying on scaling conventional programming as a premise, so your injection isn't relevant.
likely you and I are just the NPCs
This "NPC" demands the source code, the debugger and full root access.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
So, Elon Musk want's to become the next L. Ron Hubbard? Scientology isn't enough of a hairbrained "religion", now we need to bring Tron and/or The Matrix into the religious text club?
--- Keep the choice with the user..
So we're basically back on the turtle argument? Man that took a while to come back to.
Living within a simulation would certainly explain the Fermi Paradox.
We have no aliens because they haven't been patched in yet. Next DLC, I bet.
This signature is false.
It's easy to see how Musk thinks he's in a game then. Clearly he hasn't thought this through very much, or he believes everyone but him is an NPC.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Input and output devices get better all the time, their job is to stimulate the player's brain into thinking it sees real scenes, hears real sounds. Eventually the IO device will directly interact with the brain, bypassing those pesky eyes and ears.
Later even, the brain itself will host the processing, the external "game" system will no longer dictate everything it will instead have set the player's imagination free-running, or networked imaginations to make shared dreams possible. In that case the sensations that the actors in those dreams feel will be figments of the imagination of the player.
so we then have the thought processes of the actors (you and I) being run on a real brain (the player) so we're back to reality
It's no longer a simulation on a computer
Nullius in verba
There are aspects of the universe which become quantified with out real/intermediate values.
That could be the limits of resolution of the simulation.
Likewise light being waves or particles.
Tyson's argument was once we make a simulation of the universe, that will constitute good evidence that we are probably in one. It was on slashdot a few months ago so Musk is a bit late to the party.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You need to go out more, into the woods for example. THOUSANDS OF BUGS there I tell you, THOUSANDS! Under every rock, log and leaf!
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
...okay, so the entities that have us in a computer simulation likewise are living in a simulation of other entities, who are also living in a... *rollseyes There isn't infinite energy to sustain all that.
The issue is more that when I can fap to a virtual lover of my choosing, my DNA doesn't get into a human receptacle for procreation. I've had a virtual pet in a virtual world, it's "dead" now. It never evolved to generate simulations and virtual species.
Also, we had virtual worlds decades ago, which are no better than the best now (just shinier). The majority of folks still need to earn a living to eat. No matter how sophisticated, we can't eat pixels. 3D food printers will need to be refilled.
This has all the same flaws as creationism or rapture theory in the church. Hand-waving the complexity of the world we're in and putting it up to a hypothetical universe the simulation is running in simply kicks the can down the road. There's no evidence for it, just an argument from incredulity at the nature of the world we actually interact with. A universe with a civilization advanced enough to simulate ours doesn't make the questions go away, or simplify them one bit.
Further, squandering the energy reserves of a civilization to simulate another civilization and universe to this level doesn't seem something a civilization could get away with doing for millenia. Ours sure isn't.
Same old myths, just somebody has a computer on their desk instead of a bronze age text. Humans don't change much.
"Where we're going, we don't need roads."
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The hypothesis is neither here not there.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
i don't think anyone's arguing that you're the one paying. you're just a simulated AI (who's been programmed to think he's not).
i could live a little longer in this prison
How many bugs have we seen in reality?
Given the percentage of a population that are about to vote for someone who's running on a platform of building a wall around the country, I'd say the bugs are in the 100s of millions :)
This "NPC" demands the source code, the debugger and full root access.
Tron FTW!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Dear /.
the underlying doubt comes from Descartes' deliberations on how to obtain knowledge (chapter 3, "meditations"):
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr...
The re-loaded version for the 21st century can be found here:
http://www.simulation-argument...
The guy who wrote it got his own department at the University of Oxford (to study "existential risk" -- earth and life on it are threatened by the power button on a space-age playstation ...):
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/
Best regards,
Oliver
You'd never notice the bugs. You'd be programmed not to. Or, as philosopher Nick Bostrom ("The Simulation Argument") explains it, "you could edit the mental states of the beings... you could erase the memory of any glitches or rewind the simulation"
Geez guys, what's up with all these badly thought out single sentence posts that just dismiss the simulation hypothesis without a single argument? Kind of like how people dismiss evolution? When did Slashdot become facebook?
a few things things: .So Musk started talking about things quasi-randomly and this somehow came up.
1. The two people interviewing Musk when the simulation hypothesis came up were terrible, cringe inducing interviewers
2. The simulation hypothesis is pretty well known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
3. It's a simulation *HYPOTHESIS*. Believing in a hypothesis is an oxymoron.
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
Philosophy begets science.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
This is precisely what Kant meant when he argued that the principle of non-contradiction does not prove the existence of anything, and that reason left to its own devices can conjure up anything it wants.
"Oh my duck! His pants have disappeared! Kid, everybody's watching!" - Barney the Bozo
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
If we are in a VR world created by a Microsoft-like company it would explain why the world is in the shape it is in.And it might even explain Donald Trump. Nah, tech support would have told them to reboot us a long time ago.
The simulation part is correct, but they're just simulating your brain. Everyone and everything else is a construct of that.
By that same logic, we're most likely just a game within a game within a game within a game ...
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
One in billions is also the chance that a randomly chosen human isn't sick of hearing about Elon Musk.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All Sci-Fi is an extension of today, so in the 50s we had the space race so all sci fi was rockets and space travel. Computer games is so yesterday. What about facebook. Maybe the future we will all click like at cat videos. G
Neat idea, and given Elon Musks numbers are correct, he's right. But, if we are living in a simulation, it is a simulation with self-aware software agents. I do not think there will be "billions" of those in any forseeable future, so the basis is wrong.
I'm disappointed noone has yet brought up Pascal's Wager. The idea that "there is an infinitesimal chance we're not living in a computer simulation" is akin to Pascal's wager: "an infinitesimal chance of heaven existing means we should worship god", in that they both make difficult-to-prove claims about the nature of the universe which are (or border on) religion.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
On one side, if this was a computer simulation, we would have magic.
On the other side, that could explain the McCulloch's fly by anomalies. They would simply be the result of reaching the precision limit of the simulator's variables.
So I don't know what to think, I suppose that's about par for an NPC.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
When a crazy billionaire Bond villain engineer says we're probably a computer simulation... I have no idea.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Theories are, at best, models of reality - that is something people keep forgetting. A model can never represent the whole truth about what reality is - I think we can probably even prove that with some of Goedel's theorems (I say probably, it is still not uncontroversial, what his results actually tell us). The best of our theories are useful, because they give us a practical tool for making calculations and predictions; even QM and GR are only models - when we say "space is curved", it means that our calculations are much easier to handle and understand in that model; it is quite likely that we could make a workable theory if we decided that space must be Euclidean - but the physics would look much weirder and much, much messier as a result. The same goes for quantum mechanics. Models are only tools that simplify our understanding of reality.
This is the background on which we need to see the holographic models and the models that interpret reality as computer simulations: they are proposing new ways of looking at the same reality, in the hope that it may simplify certain aspects of our observations. And, crucially, we know from the start that they are not accurate - reality stretches far beyond any model we know of or can imagine yet. And, embarrassingly, there are always people around the fringes of any theory, who will start reading Gods and Intentions into anything that is new and sounds mysterious enough. Quantum mechanics used to be riddled with it, and as far as I know, the same happened when electro-magnetic theory was first developed; there are simply people around, who are determined to be idiots, no matter what.
One in a million chance that Musk is not jacked up on amphetamines. Have you seen him lately? Dude looks _really_ worn out.
Occam's razor can never fall apart - by definition. It can fall apart in retrospect, though. Similar to how it is always today, but what is today today is yesterday tomorrow.
How? Because the idea is that if there are multiple explanations which EQUALLY explain all known relevant observations - choose the simpler / simplest one. As soon as an observation comes along that makes the erstwhile simpler explanation false - Occam's razor no more prefers that explanation. NOW, Occam's razor prefers the simplest of the remaining explanations.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Musk is just projecting. He's a reductionist. Last, he can't prove his position. How does one prove that one is inside a simulation,when it must be assumed that the simulation is under another's control; thus,the attempt at proof,and even hunches that seek one to pursue proofs, are part of a controlled simulation?
By that follows that we are at the bottom of infinite layers of virtualization. Because what goes for us, also goes for the people upstairs, and their creators, etc. We at least know we are are the very ass-end of whatever high pile it might be, because we have no universe in a box here yet. And if there are infinite layers, what are the chances that NONE of those jokers upstream haven't accidentally unplugged/crashed/whatever their stuff yet? Zero right, because shit happens. Therefore; we are not virtual.
would it not be easy to derive those ten lines of code
Interestingly enough, stephen wolfram is trying this by creating and running every permutation of every possible program. He claims to have found some that are close, but nothing that matches our universe yet.
Here is a long, but interesting talk about possible universes and possible types of consciousnesses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
While I remain agnostic of Elon's argument I would like to know what is the matter with this absolutism of vision. Who ever said that the entirety of our 'reality' has to be simulated? That's just BS. You have to think in human terms, our extremely limited senses can be easily simulated, ever wondered why we have almost no conscious perception or control over our 'inner' biological functions? Simple: code optimization. Do the planets/outer space really need to 'exist' while you have breakfast ? Not really. There are just a handful of items that need to 'read' the universe... namely telescopes and such, and most of them are just displaying visible light 'images' of what's outside. So easy to cheat... Do atoms really need to be simulated during your daily activities? Looking at what we can do with CGI and so forth times 10k years, not really. And the list could go on forever. I find disturbing this 'modern' trend of black or white vision. It's either all or bust.... Hollywood films too much?
It's a pretty boring game, at least for most of us NPCs (assuming we are, indeed, NPCs). Like, who would enjoy playing a game with your character gets up before sunrise, drives for an hour or more to go to work, sits at a desk all day, drives for an hour to get home, eats, and is too tired to do anything except sit in front of the TV for an hour or two before going to bed? And playing this almost every day for 40 or 50 years worth of their character's life. And then, on top of that, for the character to retire and die a few months later. Or for the character to get a fatal disease...
Nah, we're not in a game. If we were, it would have been turned off by now. And we'd see people standing at the side of a road (or sitting in their car, or whatever) not moving for periods of time while the player was /AFK 'cos their mother called them for dinner.
Rather than assuming that we're living in a simulation, lets assume for the moment that we're not. Then the logic of the argument suggests that our civilization is NOT going to survive long enough to create the simulations Elon Musk is suggesting. Now given that we're facing Global Warming, Nuclear War, Resource Exhaustion, Exponential population growth and other problems without current solutions I ask you this. Is it more likely that we're living in a computer simulation we're not aware of or is it more likely that high energy civilizations with exponential growth have inherently limited lifespans?
Not only that, it makes it far more likely that their natural habitat is zoos.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
law of diminishing returns, 80:20 rule etc. 20,000 years from now it'll still be glitchy and we'll still be moaning about pings
sag
The science to build computers, games and VR does not drop out of thin air. The same is true for the technology. You need a complicated economic structure to accomplish all this and to date we pretty much destroyed this planet Earth to create such a society.
Mankind will have failed long before Musks VR games are a fact.
Paai
Plato said that in his Allegory of the cave thousands of years ago; and eastern spiritualism is all about you being a stimulus receiver thru' 5 senses (like 5 RJ into a computer). Very likely we are all in an infinite ladder of experience spaces, like different levels of a video-game. You finish one level and graduate and go to another level and keep playing forever (again forever means time and that may not exist in other domains). Again is there any proof for this? no..in fact asking for proof itself is a sign of immaturity because proof is a tool which makes sense only with in a logical domain and there are domains outside logic.
A thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself. It is an asymptotic goal. Like the speed of light, it would require more and more energy and effort the closer you approach the goal. That is what is wrong. Elon Musk makes straight-line projections into the future, which are almost always wrong.
E Proelio Veritas.
Space and time-travelling Sasquatches. So THERE!
Let's say you have a computer program with 10,000 lines of code in it..
Why would we say that? Simulations often have very little code. Everything is emergent.
"His name was James Damore."
Elon's argument has a lot of integral logic, but I wonder if it has one significant gap - a failure to demonstrate a causal relationship between what we know with certainty due to historical evidence or current measurement, and a potentially uncertain future.
Put another [entirely inaccurate] way: "From Earth, the moon looks to be pale blue and crumbly with craters. Blue cheese in pale blue and crumbly, with craters. Therefore, the moon is made of blue cheese..."
Even if the first two statements are correct and factual, there is no demonstrable causal relationship that links the third statement in an irrefutable way.
As evidence for an alternative, I would suggest "the coin toss". If you take a coin and toss it a bunch of time, in the vast majority of cases it will result in a coin landing with heads or tails uppermost. But there is an (incredibly narrow) realm in which the coin may land and balance, perfectly, on it's edge. So if we extrapolate that to the observable universe and if we look at all the "coincidences" [such as the rate of the expansion of the universe], for a bunch of reasons what we see might be the equivalent of the universe's coin landing on it's edge.
Problem is, we just don't know how many times that universal coin could have been flipped *before* it landed on it's edge - i.e. before it generated a set of universal laws that has resulted in the mostly-stable universe we occupy. I'm not for one moment suggesting that Elon is wrong and we are living in an extremely-low-probability iteration of a universe, just wanting to make the observation that there are a range of different "configurations" that could result in what we observe today.
I am not sure if it is entirely relevant to the topic [or, if it is, how best to apply it] but perhaps Occam's Razor [given two broadly competing explanations for the same observed phenomena, the simplest explanation is usually correct] has a role to play here. Or, if that doesn't work, how about Bloore's Corollary to Occam's Razor [given two broadly competing explanations for the same observed phenomena, pick the one which is funnier]...
Lovely theoretical debate, just not sure how knowledge of the actual truth is going to affect us as we believe we exist today...
Elon's mistake (among many others) is to assume an oversimplified exponential model of growth. This looks correct when studying a small enough period of time but there are serious issues with this assumption:
I'm not saying that we are entirely limited by things like the limit of lithography and atomic width of interconnects, of course we will find ways around... however those breaking points in hardware development are where the growth model breaks, it's no longer continuously exponential, we have to switch to developing parts of the system that have different physical or practical limitations or even change the underlying physics of the technology entirely which will give us a varied and undulating history of growth over longer periods of time with stages of plateau when we exhaust one approach and switch to another.
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.
If we make the assumption that it is possible to simulate this reality multiple times, it follows that the odds of living in the "top universe" are practically nil.
That first part is already a huge leap, but it would make much more sense to estimate: "how likely is it that we will (eventually) be able to simulate this universe", and just assume that we are living in a simulated universe if and only if this is possible.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
A bug is just deviation from defined behaviour. If you do not know how the behaviour is defined, it is hard to judge whether a behaviour is as intended or not.
For example, when a process attempts to access a region of memory, the operating system will terminate it. This may be a discrepancy from desired behaviour, but it is not a discrepancy from how a modern computer works.
That sucks if you happen to be that process. But within the rules of the system there is a perfect explanation for that. When you attempt to load data from a memory address that cannot be translated a page fault is raised, which is passed to your operating system. It then realises what you are trying to do and will end your life.
So when you happen to be a cat in a dark box, being unsure whether you are alive or dead - it simply is how the universe works.
Doesn't this defeat Elon's argument of why he wants to go to Mars? He keeps saying we need a plan B in case some catastrophic event destroys Earth, what's the point of that if it's all just a simulation anyway?
I just want to know what the energy source is for the large scale simulation we're in.
I see it as a dual-use ploy
1. Free Advertising
Works something like Donald Trump's campaign - using media as his free ad launchpad for his business endeavors
Tone of ad can be ridiculous but as long as it is not overtly ridiculous, people / fanbois will buy it in droves
2. Insurance Policy
Both is electric car business and his space vehicle business carry risks, BIG RISKS so this will become his insurance policy when things come crashing down ---- 'after all, it's a simulation as we are all inside a grand simulation'
Clever chap
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Typical talk of a cokehead... And even if we live in a 'simulation', who cares; it's OUR REALITY... get sober Elon!
Did you spot the flaw?
Technology advances to the physical limitations of the universe, we are not quite there. A civilization at those limits, will have atomically precise nano-robots and real AI. They will also probably live forever. Putting those together, along with the fact that this is probably the most interesting time to live in (much before this, people usually died in the same hospital they were born, much after this, nanobots and AI will make crime, dating, disease, getting resources and other of today's hardships a non-issue) means that this particular time will probably be simulated in games and historical research an infinite number of times. They say science requires a 5 sigma for proof, the likely hood of us being in a simulation is 0.99999... with an infinite number of 9's after it.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
Fact that you questioned the system in itself is a BUG as there shouldn't be anyone or anything asking such kind of question
But as a given system goes, when there exists a bug a patch is always nearby ... lots of patches, actually --- look at the people around you, try discussing with them about this universe being a computer simulation and you got .... blank stares , as the patch is designed such that questions that aren't supposed to be asked will never be answered
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Or it could just be this is the umpty infinitillionth run of this particular simulation, where the bugs have, for the most part, been fixed?
Why, because he does not believe in a mystical being floating somewhere that refuses to confirm or deny 'the rules' but will judge and punish/reward every single human when they die based on those rules?
Or because he takes a more pragmatic path to considering a little further away from the normal 'on no, we are going to die, but we dont want to, god!' crowd, but still wants to perhaps believe in some purpose, therefore considers this to be a possibility?
Or perhaps because he is willing to openly state what he HIMSELF may think, rather than hiding behind the skirts of an organised religion?
Or because he is not making a claim that would lead to greater power for any particular involved group?
Or, most likely, because he does not agree with your own personal worldview?
Right or wrong, good on him for talking about it.
Isn't the entire purpose of SpaceX to get to Mars? The rocket launch business is just to fund things and develop the technology.
Not in its current incarnation. Oh, Elon has talked a lot about Mars, but as a business there is nothing structural about what SpaceX is currently (publicly) doing that solves most of the huge pile of technical challenges in getting a human safely to Mars. SpaceX is currently 99.999% about lowering cost to space. And that is hugely important and a vital first step to the future of exploring space. Without substantial economic improvements in cost to orbit a trip to Mars or anywhere else in space could never be more than a very expensive vanity project for a nation state.
So maybe SpaceX has a long term goal of getting to Mars but it's going to be a while before they get humans there no matter what bold claims Elon might make. I think it's achievable but I don't see it happening in the next few decades unless a new cold war starts up. My guess is the earliest we would see boots on Mars would be somewhere around 2050 without a crash program.
You can use the exact same logic to prove we're living in a dream or characters in a book like Gumby.
"There are so many stories in books, imagine a universe full of books with the characters within unaware."
Someone posted this is just a fancy solipsism. Here's a good reply to solipsistic people... "You're all just characters in my dream" .... "Actually, you're a character in MY dream" (slap them hard) "Notice how you didn't wake up?"
Oh and if you're going to accept this simulation argument you may as well also accept the ontological argument for the existence of God. That's an equally absurd "if I can imagine it" sort of argument.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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.
If we are a simulation, then we aren't bound by the rules and laws of the 'physical' universe in which we were created. So the fact that computing power has progressed so rapidly in OUR world serves as no evidence that the same level of progress is possible in the REAL world, so you can't use our advancement as proof for anything.
It makes no sense why anyone would put all this effort and energy into building this simulation. Energy is a limited resource. Whatever beings are harvesting the energy will use it to keep up and spread out themselves.
This thought is the result of the current abundance of resources on Earth, but this is just a temporary state. It has always been, and the end is already in sight.
It's simulations all the way down.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I have trouble seeing the justification for sustaining the matrix. It seems to ME that Elon's argument only makes sense if the ground truth universe (simulation) does not have energy / resource constraints similar to my own perception.
Argument from ignorance. It's a pseudo-religious approach.
Could we be in a perfect simulation without knowing it? Yes.
If we were, could we prove it? No way to know, depends on its complexity and our technical sophistication.
There is no point to the premise.
The whole point to the philosophies of Mathematics and Science are to prove what we can prove through statements which can be verified and proven true or false in order to build a firm foundation of understanding.
More rich people need a minion (slaves are sooooo uncool these days) to follow them around and remind them they are only human. Memento mori.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
This is an ex-post fallacy -- just because something will [likely] become possible, does not mean that it already has happened. I have direct, personal experience of the past, and have examined artifacts from much further back. If what Elon postulates is correct, some future advanced civilization has VRd 2016 and erased all traces of 2017+, ala Matrix. It badly fails Occams Razor.
per-occupied
#Dear Divine programmer, please fix above bug.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
1. He assumes computing power will continue to scale. There are rather strong indications that it will not. And no, we are still very far removed from "fotorealistic" (and may never get there) and we do not have "millions" of people interacting on the same servers. At best, we can manage a few thousands and that not in real-time.
2. He assumes there is such an other civilization, completely without any basis for it. At all.
3. It is very likely that there are other problems than computing power and software for the necessary degree of immersion to be feasible.
4. He assumes a physicalist world model without any scientific basis to that assumption. The scientific state-of-the-art is very much "we have no clue" on that question,but there are some rather strong indicators that Physicalism may be the wrong model.
In short, his statement about the likelihood is unmitigated nonsense. It _is_ one possibility, but one among a great many others.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
probably a third of all the philosophy courses I have taken started with Descartes' Meditations, which I think makes it the most basic and read philisophical text of modern times. Elon must (heh) have read it at some point. The takeaway is clear and I have yet to encounter a convincing refutation.
It is impossible to accurately speculate about the nature of an external world which we are not able to percieve. The nature of things in the world as we know it may or may not bear any relation to that "true" external world. We cannot claim to truly "know" anything about that which we can percieve, it is absurd to claim that we have knowledge of that which we don't. Descartes himself tried, and to most readers failed, to rescue our knowledge of the external world.
The point is that claims either that we are or are not in a computer simulation are meaningless because they must always be built enitrely upon assumptions about the claimed "real" world. In this case, there is a further problem that in Elon's world there must be a near infinite regression of simulations because the same logic that he uses to prove that we are in a simulation must apply to the society which created it as well.
Further, he is ignoring the issue of whether or not somebody would WANT to create this simulation. That is another giant assumption. His argument is assumption upon assumption, and his premises are by definition untestable because they are about a world which we cannot even demonstrate the existence of.
Seriously, read Descartes and just replace God with a pantheistic entity. It's one of the best things a person can do for their intellectual development.
Summarized: computers are getting better. Therefore, we are in a computer simulation.
I can't exactly explain why, but somehow it feels to me that we wouldn't have self-awareness if we were part of a simulation. Something to do with it not actually being us thinking, but some external entity. Cogito ergo sum.
Humans are too stupid to do anything by themselves, so something something POOF and here we are!
Wrong. It seems a little like a replacement religion.
But its wrong. For all of our shortcomings like a seeming need to kill each other, humans are actually pretty clever, and have done some pretty impressive things over the years.
If we are merely a computer simulation of some advanced intelligence, is the advanced intgelligence a simulation in a yet more advanced intelligence? On and on
In other words. is it turtles all the way up?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If all humans are just a figment of a computer simulation then we wouldn't actually 'be' here in the sense that we experience life from within our bodies and minds rather than observe them externally (as we observe a computer simulation).
Since I am experiencing my life, I am either 'real' or I am an external entity who is busy playing a very very very long and immersive computer game (in which case everything else around me is possibly a simulation). But if this were a game, why does it suck so bad? Surely the external me would have had the sense to choose a more fun game or at least change a few settings before starting. Sorry Elon but no, I think I'm real. Or some green tentacled creature who doesn't read game reviews.
Not senile, maybe naive.
There is a different but related statement to be made. If we are able to create strong AI (including consciousness as we experience this ourselves), there is an extremely small chance we're not living in a computer simulation.
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.
The simulation need not be complex, merely large. You could have a simulation that merely applied (relatively) simple rules then simulated every particle, photon etc. It would not be possible to differentiate between a bug that was consistent (and in a simple ruleset, it probably would be) and an intended rule.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Programmed SlashDot??????
...When you consider the possibility that he is a virus and leftism throughout the globe is crapware, bloatware, ransomware grinding the simulation to a halt.
Anytime someone starts in with this "simulated reality" bullshit, I now ask them their opinion on Roku's Basilisk. Because the same personality is also likely to believe in that, freak out, and finally shut up/run away.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Hey, if it is considered reasonable to believe in a grey-bearded guy in the sky who controls everything, why can't Elon believe we are living in a video game?
Bugs are a function of cost. Not of LOC.
Most teams I worked with never had any bug in production code. As far as I can tell I myself had never any bug in production code either (unless it was found long after I left the team and I got not informed about it).
The question basically is how much efford do you want to put into the QA part of development before you ship.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/R...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Remember: the first rule of Roko's Basilisk is you must never tell anyone about... oops, my bad.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
... is that it is basically the same thing as Intelligent Design, since it does not even attempt to address the nature of whoever designed the simulation we are living in, does not offer any predictive power, and is absolutely no more scientifically testable, since absolutely anything that we could try to do to test it would be part of the same system that it is trying to test, and that system cannot be isolated in scientifically reproducible contexts.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Read and UNDERSTAND this science fiction book and related works, without any sentiment-related emotion, only with thinking. And maybe, maybe ..... you can understand nothing because you don't know which version of your life is running now, and in which simulation universe, and if is in realtime, slower or faster ...
Written 10+ years ago, the people say that "this is only for hackers..." now ... the truth is ... ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.antipope.org/charli...
Case and point: If Trump had said this, the Interwebs would be all over him as batshit crazy (which he probably is, but for different reasons). Why does Musk get a pass? I can't believe some of the favoritism I'm reading here.
Just because Timeless Decision Theory says it is so, doesn't mean that's actually the case. *sticks out tongue at Roko's basilisk*
Perhaps his argument is even valid, from a probability standpoint, but it's also unsound. There is no such advanced civilization that we know of. The fact that a thing *could* happen does not mean it *did* happen.
It seems to me he's been watching What the Bleep Do We Know too much, and focusing mainly on what "Ramtha" says instead of the scientists.
I understand creating video-game simulations so real they're hard to distinguish from reality but why bother giving the characters sentience?
If you *do* give your creations sentience, then aren't they as real as you?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
And the necessity of thinking that we're living in a VR world is? I've read about hypotheses from reputable scientists that the universe is actually a massive simulation running on some unimaginably immense computer, so Elon Musk's musings at least have predecessors. But again, what is the necessity of thinking this? What question is otherwise unanswered except by imagining that this scenario is actually true? It's an interesting thought, but I think "The Matrix" was there first.
Yeah, but what if bugs are the result of living in simulation? What if "base reality" is so much more such that it is possible for mathematics to be both complete and correct and has solutions for the halting problem? That would actually make it possible to eradicate all bugs in a system.
That's way out there. Once you have that, just ask the question you want answered, why bother with a simulation at all?
Also, the incompatibility between Einsteinian, classical and quantum physics is a pretty big "discrepancy" in the universe, and there may be more exotic physics to be found to explain Dark Matter and Energy.
This applies equally to all reality, though, so it's not a bug, it's a feature. Just because your user cannot understand a feature doesn't mean you didn't intend it to work that way. A bug is a thing that the creators of the software don't understand and didn't intend, and invariably you have a ton of bugs which don't happen uniformly, and thus are really challenging to fix. Reality doesn't have those.
He is forgetting the fact that the advanced civilization that can create simulations of this magnitude had to evolve FROM where we are today, thus making the odds practically ZERO.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
How many bugs have we seen in reality?
Given the percentage of a population that are about to vote for someone who's running on a platform of building a wall around the country, I'd say the bugs are in the 100s of millions :)
They all arrived at their decisions using the same underlying systems of operation. Just because one chaotic system has different emergent properties than another doesn't make it a bug.
Singularities could be a bug.
Singularities are a feature, because it is generally agreed that they work pretty much the same wherever they exist throughout the universe. A bug would be if you could prove that one super-massive black hole was a singularity, but another was _not_ a singularity.
General relativity is a workaround/bugfix that preserves the old behaviour.
Is your argument that before Einstein formulated general relativity, the universe worked differently?
A bugfix would be where a creator changed something, not where the contents of the simulation changed their understanding of things.
Then what is the advanced civilization living in? Takeaway from this: there are no easy answers, Elon.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's not that we have to fight so much that bothers me, but I demand medkits, transporters to other parts of the level and respawn 30 seconds after getting killed!
I think he picked the wrong example. And it may just be me getting into the semantics of it, but he talks about how everything looks, not how everything thinks. Our versions of AI are not all that great in mass produced form. Current games and those MMORPG simulations that get referred to have terrible AI. Maybe not 'terrible', but compared to a human or real thought they are terrible. Just this morning I watched a companion in a video game attempt to run through a wall to get me, then ran the wrong way around the building. It looks really good, so I agree that before long we will be able to have photo realistic games, but I doubt they will think much better. Now on the galactic scale, I might be splitting hairs, in that it won't be 1000 years but maybe 10 or 100 thousand years before we can get AI to that level. And if the naysayers have anything to add, they'll tell you we'll blow ourselves up or poison ourselves or INSERTCATASTROPHYHERE.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Elon Musk should read this comic:
https://xkcd.com/605/
I mean clearly he is a smart guy and an astute businessman, but either this was out of context, off the cuff, or not a clearly thought out comment.
Just about everything follows the same general premise. In the beginning there is a lot of advancement, because there is a lot to discover, progress is rapid. Eventually things get a bit tougher, as generally speaking the low hanging fruit has already been picked. Near the end, as whatever it is we are talking about matures, there is less and less to work with, advances are small and subtle, and grind to almost nothing as you go.
Add to this, typically the reason we do things, capitalization, there comes a time where sure you can make something go 1/100ths faster or whatever, but due to costs which unless they go down (which there is also limits to), makes the incentive to advance any further increasingly diminish. Law of diminishing returns in general. Sure if you take that particular diminishing curve as it approaches infinity, you can predict pretty much anything. However that is an abstract concept and construct, not a real thing in reality. In reality things are not so simple and mathematical. The spherical cow joke for example.
Yeah we have come a long way with AI and VR, etc... in the last 20 years, I've seen it. Yes I agree we have ample room to grow with these technologies. However to assume that the last 20 years of growth is representative of the next 20 years, let alone the next 10,000 is silly. Indeed extrapolating that far out considering all the factors and variables that could occur in that period is literally nothing more than fantasy.
If the odds are high that we're living in a simulation, then the odds are almost as high that there's a simulation that is running that simulation. Just how far down do the turtles go? It's a useless belief that can lead to nihilistic thinking. Plus it isn't scientific until we can test for it.
-Bob-
Just curious if they're the same person, or if there's a different person getting their hair brained ideas posted here for no reason.
... is that God's a gamer. (And, no, I do not intend to imply any defence of that hypothesis.)
the bugs are in the 100s of millions
Sorry, was that a typo? Did you mean "borgs"?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
If this is a game once we get to Alpha Centauri is it game over?
Believe one to be in a simulation Is not significantly different from believing there is a God that created our universe and talks to you. It's an irrational assumption that cannot one cannot proven or disprove and cannot be scientifically tested. The model of the universe that one constructs for religion or for simulation universe is such that it neatly ties up any possibility of rational debate because the answer to everything is "God/simulation did it".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's closer to 6 or 7 billion.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Actually you're right. I guess the inputs to our simulation were given by a bunch of team fortress players. What the world is going through at the moment seems very like the kind of thing some 13yr old would come up with while playing Civilisation and threatening to teabag his opponent while exclaiming over and over again how good she was in bed.
The world could just be a giant troll for the lolz. It certainly is getting like that.
Philosophers have been talking about this idea for a REALLY long time. The idea is called "Simulated Reality": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and many philosophers have mused over it over the years... including big names like Descartes.
Here is a nice little interview that describes some of the basic ideas of how VR relates to philosophy: https://aeon.co/videos/new-rea...
It's funny to me that so many people here are dismissive of the idea or think Musk is off his rocker... you just haven't taken enough philosophy classes (or thought long enough about the ideas!) :-)
:^D
Actually it technically goes all the way back to Rene Descartes and his "deceiving demon" scenario. The principle is exactly the same, but Descartes is at least grounded in reality...he recognizes that there's a consciousness/experience issue, and that while one cannot assert that reality is not a fabrication/illusion, you can assert your own personal existence (cogito ergo sum). The computer simulation is just the latest feasible model for suggesting we cannot trust our experiences to represent actual reality. For this to be a computer simulation, knowing what we know, it implies at least the following: 1. the simulation can not only simulate the physical world, but can also simulate consciousness 2. Our definition of consciousness as simulated excludes the existence of external awareness, suggesting we're all part of the program. But if the program is being experienced by programmers/users anyone reading this who is not a progammer or user is likely not "real" in the conventional sense 3. However, since we know we are conscious, or programmed to think we are, then it raises questions about the definition of both this awareness and actual sentience. In fact it cascades into a whole mess of questions that soon leads to the same line of thought about how our universe works, how we relate to it, and where it came from. It is almost tautological, in fact.... 4. Leading to the notion that if a simulation is sufficiently indistinguishable from "the real thing" then how do you recognize when you're in the real world vs. the simulation? 5. And if it is a simulation, all it proves is that there's an operant higher level of reality which we haven't ye developed an empircal method of detection for, and may never be able to due to programming issues 6. And if that's true, then we're back to square one, with Descartes' demon, realizing that the only certainty we have is that we are able to perceive our self-awareness --even if that self-awareness could be a simulation, it is still something we each indelibly hold in our personal experience to be the point of definition for who we are, regardless of our sensory experiences. ....So yeah, from the philosopher's view all Elon Musk has done is reframe the question Descartes already posed with a more contemporary framework.
If you are really interested in this topic than probably the best place to review the current thinking is: http://www.simulation-argument... .
Personally I don't find it useful to spend much time thinking about it. The idea we are in a simulation is pretty much the same as "everything is a dream." Even if it's true it's untestable with no clear implications for how we relate to the world or make decisions. As William James said, "A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all."
The World version 2.5.11.4 (codename "TRUMP and Musket"):
- Agent update: Change the Trump's wig with real hair.
- Agent update: Upped Trump's mysogeny index to 267 again.
- Agent update: Allow the junior gamemasters to control the Musk's public announcements.
- Fix: A sanitisation flaw in player_dream() could allow a player to glimpse date from the world's state and/or allow remote code execution.
- Fix: A null dereference in player_create() could allow births to fail unexpectedly.
- Fix: mutated the AIDS pathogen again to thwart player's latest medical advances.
Signed, "The Author"
This kind of argument has been around for awhile, and its almost religious in that you can't really ever prove whether its true or not from the inside -- which I suppose is comforting, since it also doesn't matter whether its true so long as we can't know. If we did break through, talk about existential crisis!
What's an even more interesting conclusion to me, is that if you assume an advanced technological society has pulled this all off for a first time, it would follow that eventually this capability would become commonplace. You'd assume at first blush that our simulation *must* be running is some grand institute of science, but you'd be foolish to assume so. If you accept the argument on premise, its much more likely that our simulation is running in a mass-produced plaything, or is their version of a college freshman's D+ work.
You can't even assume that they think our simulation is anything special. There's no guarantee of a body that holds the ethical duty of keeping our simulation running, no five-nines, or even proper backups. We'd never be able to observe from the inside anyways, but it also follows that, eventually, the simulation will run so fast and be such a commodity that this original society doesn't think anything more of creating and destroying simulations than we think of turning our televisions on and off.
Or what if our simulation is a virus -- they may curse us and actively seek to wipe our simulation out.
And whose to say that our creators are the origin. Maybe our existence is just an experiment into their own. Its turtles all the way down until its not.
Nothing can continue to expand at a geometric rate forever -- that's what's wrong.
Now that you have proposed this concept, your next task is to develop a way to test it. If there is no way to test it then it's a meaningless distinction.
We are bound by reality, the nature of reality is a moot point as it's unknowable, you can't step outside of reality to examine it. Anything outside of reality is, by definition, unreal. So your theoretical simulation is, by definition, unreal and therefore does not exist. QED.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
For each atom simulated, the simulator would have to have at least one atom. So a universe simulator could be no smaller than the size of the universe. How does that make any sense?
Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future [...] So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to [...] Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?"
Malthus called. Wanted to have a word with you.
Every end has half a stick.
You would have to be able to harness the break down of reality in a black hole to pull it off or otherwise violate the laws of physics as we know them for /our/ universe to be able to generate another full universe like a video game.
Thermal limits among other things prohibit what he is saying. Just because we haven't hit the limits doesn't mean there isn't a limit.
IF we are in a game, one can only gain points by not treating it like one. Because you lose points for anything that dulls your survival edge... be it that angst that arises from loss of your cherished sense of existential uniqueness, or anything that softens the sharp tang of death.
IF this is not game, same rules apply.
Ergo, there is no game.
And there is no spoon.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Well, you're restricting your imagination somewhat. The clock inside a simulation is self-referencing. It doesn't half to self-heal. The operator could run a single cycle, see what happens, then make adjustments before continuing. It doesn't matter how long it takes to calculate or process the physics of the universe, since the referential time-frame of the subjects of the universe is part of the simulation itself. One second in the simulation could take 10 seconds, 10 years, or a hundred million years to process in the "outside world", but it wouldn't make any difference to the operation within the simulation.
A lot of commenters have posted arguments like the scale being impossible (why? our simulated universe could be 10^200 times smaller than the universe one level above us, there's no reason to think it'd contain the same amount of information), or that things like quantum physics would break the bounds of the computer running the simulation (sincere lack of imagination - if it's a simulation, these quantum physics don't "exist", the simulation of them is part of a running program), and other such arguments which keep forgetting that they're talking about a simulation, not something physically real.
It's basically comes down to this - if we postulate that given enough time (billions of years? trillions of years? pick a number) and sufficiently advanced technology, we could eventually simulate the entire physics of our universe (the nature of the physics) and accurately simulate a universe (even if much smaller than our own) right down to every aspect of the physics, then it immediately becomes more likely that we're in such a simulation than not.
Why? Because if we were able to have an accurate simulation of the physics, then it would be possible for the inhabitants of our simulated universe to also do the same, on a smaller scale. And so on and so forth. There's an analogy in computers in that we can write an emulator which accurately emulates in software the hardware of a computer. Then, in that emulated computer, we can write another emulator which accurately emulates in software the "hardware" of the simulated computer, etc etc. The limit of this recursion is only the processing power of the initial "seed" computer. However, each computer in the chain acts as if it is the seed computer, and its processing power is the first step.
Likewise, in a universe simulation, the inhabitants of each universe would think they're the top level "seed" universe. As it's a simulation, there's no way they could ever escape the bounds of the simulation as they don't "exist" outside of it. Thats what makes this simply a thought exercise, because even if simulated, it's still our "real", as you mention at the end of your post.
But, if we accept the initial premise that we'd eventually be able to produce such a universal physics simulation, that makes it logical that we're in such a simulation, and by no means the "seed" universe. After all, if we could run one such simulation, why not multiple. And why would the inhabitants of those simulations once they too were able to do the same (given they have the same physics, it would be possible within the simulation), also not run multiple simulations? If we accept the initial premise, then we have to accept that there could be an uncountable number of simulated universes, only one seed universe, and no way for the inhabitants of any simulation to ever know if they're the seed or a simulation.
And it doesn't matter. If we're in such a simulation, we could never know. Even if the operator decided to program the simulation to be aware of itself, it would still only be operating within the bounds of the simulation. What we think of as self-awareness would just be part of the physics simulation running its course, meaning that although the inhabitants of the simulation would 'act' self aware to an observer, they're only doing so because of the accuracy of the physical simulation.
It's all a fascinating thought exercise, but has no real world applications. For us, the simulation and reality would be one and the same.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
If executing a step of simulation in our universe (U) takes some nonzero amount of effort, E, in the universe one above us (U'), then there's an upper limit to how many universes U' can simulate. If U' is also a simulation in U'', then all that effort lays upon U''. The E amount grows exponentially.
This doesn't disprove the hypothesis, but it does mean that U' (or U'', or up to infinity) is at some point *fundamentally* different. Our ability to simulate universes is definitely finite, but to make Musk's argument compelling (that since we could maybe simulate a universe, we are likely to be inside of a simulation, or a deeply nested one) to the "one in billions" number, something above us needs to essentially have infinite energy, or not even have the concept of energy.
The idea that we are being emulated by an entity or realm with endless energy does not seems as appealing or interesting- that's pretty much positing something so alien and all powerful as to be a technologist's take on a divine realm.
If we discard the idea of infinite energy / no need for energy, then the odds of us being a simulation could still be large, but not massive. All of this assumes that such a simulation is possible, would be able to have consciousness or the illusion thereof, and qualia- all big assumptions given that, based on the materialist worldview, all this should be testable, should be provable, but that has not happened.
If we are simulated, and our universe uses data compression (say, not determining state exactly until interaction calculus need be performed), then maybe we could test it with some effect that generates a lot more decisions-per-moment in a space than the universe normally supports. Maybe when they see the sim taking longer, or drawing more power, they'll pull us up in a debugger, eh?
Anyway, the whole idea makes a bunch of assumptions. These could be true assumptions, but they are not proven, and many could be tested, and haven't been. I think it is too early to say it is overwhelmingly likely, or even possible at all.
hahaha
I had thought about this fairly lately. Seemed suspicious to me that the universe seemed to be composed of tiny tiles, which it is, if I am understanding Planck's constant correctly. This makes things seem very like the design of a video game, where it is possible to lay out all the tiles and calculate them sequentially and then assemble the grid. It also seems suspicious that there is no evidence of other technological species. It occurred to me that, if one wanted to give the simulated species complete free reign, you would have to allow computational power for it to create multiple simulations of the evolution of the universe it found itself in. Each one of these could eat up quite a lot of computer time, but if one limited things to one species, you might be able to manage things. It would also allow one to render the universe to perfect detail from the one point of view, but allow the rendered resolution to be reduced the farther you looked from this view point. I expected we would be living in the social model of a grad student. If he were a professor, he would have more computer power available.
Ok, so we have definitive proof that Musk isn't a scientist if he thinks that's proof.
The current cottage industry in philosophy departments of speculation about our living in a simulation stems from a conversation I had with Hans Moravec at the Artificial Life conference in 1987. (I was invited because I knew the organizer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... when he was a volunteer at the L5 Society.) Hans was rapping about the ever falling cost of computation and waving around a two inch thick paper draft of “Mind Children.” On the spur of the moment, I stopped him and said, “Hans, do you realize how unlikely it is that this is the first time we have had this conversation?” Hans gave me this really blank look, rare on one of the brightest people I have known. I explained that, given the ever falling cost of computation, we would eventually simulate history, including this conversation. And like Civil War reenactments and SCA, we would do it many times, making the chances of this being the first time virtually zero. Hans went away sandbagged. He later wrote “Pigs in Cyberspace,” references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We also discussed the conversation and the topic on the Extropian mailing list in the early 1990s.
Thinking back, I must have had in the back of my mind a book, Simulacron-3, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that I read many years before.
Elon Musk doesn’t take this speculation seriously because he consistently works hard to make our world a more interesting place. You can’t take a chance that this is not the base reality.
On the other hand, perhaps making the world more interesting is a way to keep the simulation sysops from turning it off. :-)
Keith
PS Speaking of making things more interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Shorter version that was shown at the White House recently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
Here's a worse one: you can't even make the assumption that they know about us. We might just have evolved off-screen, in some part of the sim that nobody is ever going to look at.
Wow, So happy that this thread is here. Finally something nice to read and ponder. I think about this stuff all the time, but it's nice to know there is more to talk about than the normal boring day to day stuff. Glad to read everyone's ideas on this.
Not necessarily. You can have a bug that causes undesirable behavior, but that undesirable behavior would still be consistent everywhere. Like if the creator had fat-fingered a physical constant or something. Since we have no idea what the value is *supposed* to be, we'd have no idea that the value we observe isn't what was intended.
And even if we discover something like that some super-massive blackholes are not singularities, would we be like "A ha! We are in a simulation!" or would we assume it's a natural phenomenon and we get to work on coming up with new physical theories to try to explain it? I mean, a lot things in cosmology are pretty strange and there's no obvious reason why things are that way. Things like the Hubble constant and dark energy could be explained as a physics simulation that was created to model a solar system being scaled up way beyond what it was designed for.
It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Really, how do you identify "bugs" in the physical reality when you don't know the intent? QM is incredibly complicated, but we assume it's just working as intended.
A couple of points:
1. There is no way to disprove the claim because it's based on a hypothetical metaverse that is presumed to follow Moore's law, like our own.
2. There are many possible implementations ranging from simulating the perception of a single person (me, of course) to simulating the entire universe in total. The first is far easier (to which my friends could attest), and thus far more likely. This makes it likely that I'm very special. Certainly good news for me!
3. If one accepts the assertion the simulation is wide-scale, and that the metaverse hosting our simulation obeys Moore's law, and further posit that Elon is right, then it follows that:
a. There is a one in 1 in (10E9 - 1) chance that that metaverse is also a simulation inside a yet higher level metaverse with the chance of 1 in (10E9 - 2), etc.
b. So then we would almost certainly in a long, long chain of simulations,
c. The chance of any one of those losing energy, funding, or interest is certainly much, much greater than the chance of it being a simulation. This is especially true given the inefficiencies of running a virtual machine (which would mean that optimistically we are running at 10E-81 of real time).
d. So the fact that we still exist means almost certainly that it's either a) not a simulation, or b) one with a simulated history that's about to end soon, so it doesn't matter. Unless, of course, it's just me being simulated.
I was hesitant to post for a few seconds until I realized that none of you are at all likely to exist anyway (least of all Elon), so I have nothing to lose :)
How about it's simply ridiculous. Can't believe I'm even wasting time commenting on this. Wait - maybe this IS a simulation......
I get where he's coming from but I think to say that there's a 1 in a X number of billions chance we aren't in a computer simulation is a bit off. For example, the rate at which computer game development can in fact be traced back to computers. In fact, our advancement in the past 50 years or so in most fields has been very fast. Cars, Computers, Engineering, Medical. All of these fields have been advancing rapidly and computers are the cause. Each generation of computer is being used to build then next. The result is better miconization. Fitting more data in the same physical space. More processing. Faster throughput. Each advancement is directly used to make the next and these computer advancements bleed over into other fields. So which is more likely? Video games are so advanced because we are in a computer simulation or the rampant video game development is simply a byproduct of computer design leap frog?
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
Kind of like, "That's not the giant hand of the server admin, that's swamp gas kicked up by a weather balloon trapped in a thermal pocket and reflecting the light from Venus."
If things get too out of hand, the server admin may just restore the last good reality from backup tapes/turtles/thingies.
Table-ized A.I.
Why can our universe can be characterized by two sets of rules that are mutually incompatible, yet are each fantastically precise (15 digits of precision!) My core belief is that the real universe operates by one set of rules and one set only. As people have noted in other posts, inconsistencies (bugs, if you will) in the way our universe works would be evidence that there is a different reality than the one we observe.
That our two most successful theories of how the universe operates are mutually exclusive is one such bug in my view. There are other bugs. Like the fact that there are 19 unknown (read: underivable) dimensionless constants that we have to plug and chug into our theories -- they just exist and none of our current crop of theories can provide a reason for their values. (String theory does, yes, but ST is still religion at this point -- no testable hypotheses.)
The kluges and the hacks we have to deploy to patch the two existing mutually exclusive frameworks that we do have also argue that there is something we are fundamentally missing. GR's cosmological constant, and QM's mathematically regrettable renormalization are two such kluges.
Finally, there's the almost inescapable conclusion that reality is discrete -- there seems to be a limit to what quantities we can observe about systems. Recent data from the LHC suggests that Heisenberg's initial intuition about complementary attributes of physical systems is alive and well at every energy level we can measure. That physical systems even have complementary characteristics (e.g. position/momentum) is a pretty strong argument for a discrete universe, and a good sign that whoever designed this particular simulation wanted to makes sure the simulation couldn't bootstrap itself into their universe.
There are other annoying things that we've observed about our universe that could be explained by it being a simulation. Right now, we have to appeal to either the weak or strong anthropic principles to account for the distribution of energy in this universe that produced objects (us!) capable of existing long enough to formulate questions about the universe. Even the multiverse theory relies heavily on anthropics to account for why a universe with an inverse square law for gravitation would be favored over one with an inverse cube law. And we simply don't know why the matter/anti-mattter ratio in the universe is what it is.
All of these things, and a few others (why is the universe so damn homogenous?) could be explained most simply by it being a (flawed) simulation.
Hey ebv, I have an update on our global mean temperature bet. Last month was the hottest May on record. The year-so-far average global temperature is a whopping 1.15 C, well above the hottest full calendar year we’ve yet seen, 2015’s record-breaking 0.86 C. - https://tamino.wordpress.com/2...