Monty Python sketch or simulation?
Just a game show. (And a repost)
I first posted this article nearly four years ago. It began with references to mask wearing and other things that today read like ancient history. Older readers might vaguely remember a time of Covid and the really strange stuff that was happening all around us. The piece tried to explain the root causes of all that weirdness. There is a lot of mention of Elon Musk. It was a piece intended to be light, funny and not to be taken too seriously. A bit of fluff during dark times. Accidentally, it now looks prophetic.
Here is that post:
Musk believes that we exist inside a computer simulation created by a bored teenager some time in the future. At the end of the post I come up with my own, far more plausible suggestion.
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 it’s also an idea that has been explored by serious philosophers and Elon Musk.
As the above Tweet explicitly states, it’s 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: it’s 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 today’s nascent quantum machines, creating simulations within simulations.
Lots of people have weighed in on this over the years. Here’s 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 isn’t 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. Ask AI to solve climate change and it may come up with a simple solution: net-zero is easily achieved if humanity is wiped from the face of the earth.
Bolstrom’s 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 today’s universe. It’s most unlikely that not a single future teenager hasn’t thought this up. Hence, today’s universe. A future youngster playing today’s game of pulling the legs off a spider. Albeit with orders of magnitude more cruelty.
Of course, the idea that ‘life is but a dream’ 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. It’s 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. [editor’s note: via the White House].
Surely the truth is obvious? Occam’s Razor suggests that we should look for the simplest, if not the most obvious, explanation. Putin, Farage, Orban, bond yields, house prices, Wales, Donald Trump; Brexit; Covid; Sinn Fein. They all point to only one possible thing.
This is all a game-show, not a simulation. A game-show staged and hosted for the benefit of aliens. And this, all of this, is the Christmas Special. I can almost hear them laughing.
Ah lads!
Sadly pure wishful thinking!
No mine could think up the bizarreness of world we live in … thus it must be real!
So, who came up with the simulation? – did everything they created for our universe exist in their world or did they imagine up things like trees, TVs, carbon credits and teaspoons? If everything in our simulation already exists/existed in the reality outside the simulation, what exactly is the argument that implies we are in a simulation? The suggestion has never really struck me as just a bit of harmless fun, because I think it is harmful: it’s another stupid example of humans doing anything they can to avoid facing the actual reality we live in, while at the same time being another opportunity for us to choose simplicity over complexity – “Our world is so preposterously effed that it can’t possibly be real - it simply must be all a game or simulation, etc…”