Are you living in a computer simulator? On its face, the question seems ridiculous – the kind of philosophical gymnastics sometimes proposed during dull dinner parties or long car rides. But those who reflexively dismiss the question as nonsense quickly run into a conundrum as old as philosophy itself: How can you be certain that your reality is really real?
Last week, the idea that the world as we know it might in fact be a simulation created by an advanced civilization became something more than a parlor game when Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk weighed in.
“Given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality,” Musk said, “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.”
Not only did Musk say there was a chance that “our” world actually exists in an advanced society’s computer, he suggested it is almost certainly so.
Musk’s take is based, in part, on a 2003 paper strongly grounded in probability theory written by Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosophy professor.
The paper argues that “at least one of the following propositions is true: 1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage; 2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); 3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.”
The first proposition simply means that the odds are poor that humanity could survive long enough to develop such “ancestor simulators” – a truly depressing vision of the future. The second means that an advanced society wouldn’t have any interest in this level of simulation for ethical or other reasons – which seems unlikely knowing what we know about human intellectual curiosity. And that leaves the third proposition, the one Musk feels is almost certainly true.
But Bostrom isn’t so sure. He told Olivia Goldhill of Quartz that there just isn’t sufficient evidence to discredit any of the three possibilities. Not only that, he doesn’t think it would make much of a difference whether the world was in fact a simulation. As Goldhill writes, “the same questions about agency hold whether we were created by God, the Big Bang or an extremely sophisticated teenager on a futuristic Xbox.”
What about the somewhat smaller questions, though? If life is just a computer simulation, is there a more futile existence than spending so much time staring at phones, televisions and computer screens? A virtual life within a virtual life?
If the world that people see, hear, smell, taste and touch is the result of code painstakingly written by superior minds on super-powerful computers, why not explore this open universe rather than investing so much time in virtual escapes?
Whether you believe God or a “sophisticated teenager with a futuristic Xbox” created the world, the natural environment is the most beautiful bit of code imaginable. It’s too bad humans, real or simulated, would rather gaze at their machines.