THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS
Is life just a game where we make up the rules?
“There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality,” said Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor behind the Tesla car and SpaceX rockets, and founder of PayPal. Talking at the Recode Code conference, he said he thinks we’re almost certainly computergenerated creations of a more advanced civilization’s simulation—a video game.
Musk pointed to the advances in video games technology over 40 years, from Pong to “photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously… virtual reality, augmented reality.” He pointed out that we’re “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 settop boxes, so it would seem to follow that the odds we’re in base reality is one in billions.”
This thesis was first created by philosopher Nick Bostrom, and is a combination of concepts from two 17th century French philosophers. The first is René Descartes, and his concept of the Evil Demon (malingenie). This is the possibility that we’re being deceived about the world around us by an all-powerful creator— in this case, a video game programmer.
Then Blaise Pascal’s Wager says that, however small the probability is that God exists, the huge threat of being wrong, missing out on heaven and landing in hell, means it’s rational to believe in God. Musk turns that into a tiny probability that computers could replicate reality, and a huge amount of time.
Bostrom is less certain. He thinks it’s impossible to determine whether human-level civilizations will reach the point where we can and want to run convincing simulations. We don’t have any way of knowing whether such civilizations ever get to run these simulations —or whether they want to, if they can. Not that a simulated individual would know.
Nick Whiting is more impressed by the implications of the theory. “The fact that the theory even exists is a testament to our desire as humans to be able to create and play with reality. We’ve always sought to bend the rules, and harness them for our own progress. That’s the ambition that drives scientific discovery, and I think is part of why so many people see so much potential in VR. VR is a world that we can create and manipulate as we see fit, and there’s a lot of fun in that!”