Chris Johns
A friend of The Other Hand recently compared the current state of affairs to a Monty Python Sketch
He could be right but another explanation is that this is all a computer simulation. The New Yorker Magazine ran a piece a while back on what is a familiar trope for science fiction devotees - but itโs also an idea that has been explored by serious philosophers and Elon Musk.
As the above Tweet explicitly states, itโs not necessarily a fringe loony-tune idea. Some argue that the logic is inescapable. As Artificial Intelligence grows, replication of human brain activity gets closer, as does the self-conscious machine. As a species, or at least one subset of humanity, we display fondness for gaming: itโs inevitable that all human activities will one day be replicated in a game or simulation.
The New Yorker reports Elon Musk, billionaire wannabe spaceman, bitcoin-tweeter extraordinaire and boss of Tesla, as saying that the chances of this - our universe - being really real, as opposed to a simulation, are vanishingly small,
Things get really weird, if not totally anti-existential, if we imagine computers, with power trillions of times greater than even todayโs nascent quantum machines, creating simulations within simulations.
Lots of people have weighed in on this over the years. Hereโs a recent headline from the respected journal Scientific American
And again, that reference to Mr Musk. And we should take note of the not entirely irrelevant date on that article. It isnโt just the Tesla founder or, necessarily a joke.
Anyone looking into this somewhat peculiar field of enquiry inevitably come across the work of Oxford philosopher Nick Bolstrom, who has speculated that we could indeed be living within a computer simulation. Perhaps one designed by our descendants very far into the future. It could be just a simulation of their ancestral history (that is, us) or something else, perhaps an unimaginable (to us anyway) something else.
Another oft-quoted scientist, physicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, puts the odds of us being characters in some future Call of Duty-esque game as being 50-50.
Bolstrom is better known for his work highlighting the dangers that future Artificial Intelligence just wipes humanity out for one reason or another, most probably because it sees us as some kind of threat. Or we set AI a puzzle that necessitates our elimination, either as a result of the direct consequence of solving that puzzle or as an unfortunate sort of collateral damage.
Bolstromโs most basic idea is a sort of reverse logic. If we are not participants in a universe-scale simulation, we have to assume that humanity in the future has lost interest in gaming and ancestry. Given the scale of computing power available to people thousands of years from now, it would likely only take one of them to set up a simulation that would look like todayโs universe. Itโs most unlikely that not a single future teenager hasnโt thought this up. Hence, todayโs universe. A future youngster playing todayโs game of pulling the legs off a spider. Albeit with orders of magnitude more cruelty.
Of course, the idea that โlife is but a dreamโ has a long history predating the invention of the microprocessor. There are songs and even Beyonce films.
Now, this all looks plain daft to this simple man. Itโs a good job we have universities into which we can confine academics who would otherwise be doing great harm in the real world. And Elon Musk is off to Mars soon.
Surely the truth is obvious? Occamโs Razor suggests that we should look for the simplest, if not the most obvious, explanation. The rise and possible/probable comeback of Donald Trump; Brexit; Covid; Sinn Fein. They all point only one possible thing.
This is all a game-show, not a simulation, hosted for the benefit of aliens. And this, all of this, is the Christmas Special.