Do We Live in a Muskian Matrix?
Elon Musk's claims that we are probably living in a simulation don't add up.
Disclaimer: I don’t know what to make of Elon Musk. I admire his vision (open-source Tesla technology!), and I have no doubt that his IQ is close to twice what I'm working with. But all that just makes his recent comments about how we're all probably living in a simulation all the more strikingly absurd.
Here's his "strongest argument" (honed by many hours of hot-tub conversation):
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.
If that’s the strongest argument, it’s hard to imagine the weakest! Here is a major, somewhat obvious flaw in Musk’s thinking:
You cannot arbitrarily choose a segment of a trend and extend it into the future.Â
The progression from Pong to World of Warcraft may be impressive, but there's no reason to assume, as Musk does, that the rate will continue as it has in the past decade. That's not how reality functions (not even simulated reality). To take an example with which Mr. Musk is deeply familiar, space exploration went from virtually nothing to landing men on the moon in the decade between the early 60s and the early 70s. A Muskian projection made in 1973 would have confidently assumed we'd be in Alpha Centauri by now, given that rate of progress, or anything like it.
Charles Lindberg got up to around 100 miles per hour on his historic trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. Fifty years later, passengers on the Concord were streaking across the sky at ten times that speed. Fifty years further on, the fastest commercial flights have slowed to half the speed of the 1970s, whereas according to Musk’s logic, we should be approaching the speed of light by now.
My 14 year-old cousin has grown about a foot taller in the past six months. Will he be 100 feet tall by the time he gets out of college?
Video games are still just video games. Despite the progress from Pong to whatever the kids are playing these days, they're still looking at a screen, making images appear to move around in imaginary space. To my knowledge, there's been very little advancement in engaging the other senses, unless we're going to count very recent gizmos like the Oculus Rift, which mainly engaged my sense of nausea when I took it for a spin. No jasmine scent, no breezes in our hair, no silk through our fingers. It's still just light and sound. Hardly anything approaching a world.
I hate to throw cold water into Mr. Musk's hot tub, but let's get real. Of course, it’s possible we may be living in a simulation, but if this is the strongest argument an acknowledged genius like Musk can come up with, it's time for a reboot.
Musk is really just regurgitating what one branch of physicists have hypothesized. I'm no physicist but from what I gather its not that they have any proof of such a reality but that it can't be mathematically disproven.
I am always baffled how people find this so intriguing. If our universe is contained within the PC of a school boy in an advanced civilization, what difference does it make to us? From our perspective nothing changes. If it is indeed a simulation then our world is following a preprogrammed algorithm, i.e. our laws of physics, possible elements that can exist, etc., so nothing changes to our universe whether it is clustered within a multiverse or a school girl's computer.
Scientists would continue to try to understand the inner workings of the universe, religious people would continue to be religious, and flat-earthers would continue to be flat-earthers, although they would likely drool over the possibility that their flat-earth is nested in an even more advanced flat-earth.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ship in a Bottle" does a great job of exploring this concept (of a reality secretly within a simulation, not of flat-earth).
I see myself as something of a Gnostic and hence conceive this reality as a small subset of a unimaginably larger super-reality --people who survive near death experiences refer to them as "hyper-real" or "super technicolor" compared to the dullness of waking life-- but somehow I doubt Musk's logic is influenced by the Cathars and the library of Nag Hamadi.
I suspect the idea of us living in a simulation is so appealing to the likes of Musk, because that gives them in their minds free range to do what they please and damned be the consequences of their actions. Fire 100 Tesla employees during the pandemic? It doesn't matter because it's all a game anyway, man!
You see, Musk's arguments go counter with the "it's just a ride" argument Bill Hicks used to compel us not to take life so seriously, and the biggest evidence for this is the fact that Musk is still so hard-pressed in continuing the race to become the richest man in the history of the world. Why keep trying to reach all the gold achievements if it's just a dumb simulation anyway, Elon?