So the other day, Elon Musk, the guy who wants to put humans on Mars to evade the extinction of mankind and also taxes, said that we probably live in the Matrix.
As if I didn’t have enough to deal with.
Mr. Musk, who really missed his calling as a seller of manly perfumes, said in response to a fan’s question that the odds of our reality being a computer simulation are pretty much a couple billion to one. I understand his reasoning. There are a couple things that give away our reality as fake. Chief among them? Chris Hemsworth. You can either be funny or pretty, pal. Pick one.
Stop that.
On a (slightly) more serious note, this whole we-live-in-virtual-reality thing is a pretty old idea. And there are some pretty good arguments out there for its feasibility. Mr. Musk (I’m telling you, manly perfume) is in good company: philosophers, mathematicians, thinkers of all kinds —heck, even America’s kooky science uncle Bill Nye spoke out about it, so you know it’s legit.
Our friend Elon offered this argument for our 1’s and 0’s fate: we’ve gone from Pong to super-realistic video games with millions of simultaneous players in the past forty years. If we keep going on at this rate, he says, or even a significantly reduced rate, the games will soon become indistinguishable from reality — some say that they’ll even have the same level of soul-crushing existential angst, but I’ll believe that when I see it.
Given how realistic these simulations will be and how many of them will be running at once, Musk says that the odds that we’re in “base reality,” as in, the reality that isn’t simulated, is one in billions. So, yeah, we’re probably in somebody’s Zelda game.
The game thing is only one argument, though. Consider this: scientists run simulations all the time, to determine population rates, decay of particles, how it’s humanly possible that you’re so lame, what have you. Science is getting to the point where we need to understand some fundamental things about the universe before we can answer some important questions — like what the universe was like at the second of creation, or what the probability of life forming on other planets, for example.
Well, the most reliable way to answer those questions is to study the universe — and failing that, study a simulation of the universe. It could be that this universe is a simulation that scientists in the base reality are using to prove a hypothesis — and when they’re done with it, they’ll shut it off.
On the more philosophical side, let’s turn to Rene Descartes, inventor of the Cartesian coordinate plane, which, no, is not a fancy 747.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, he imagined a demon that had complete control over his mind (he didn’t go so far as to name the demon his mother-in-law but the subtext was there). The demon could make him think he was in a different, illusory world — that he was swimming in the ocean or flying through the air. But the demon, despite its powers, cannot make him think a certain thought. And because he is thinking, he must exist — that’s his famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” Even if appears to him that he’s prancing through Coventry, all of his own thoughts come from him and no one else.
So, how does this put us in Oculus Rift land forever? Well, a couple of thinkers in the mid-20th century took this idea and ran with it, most notably philosopher Gilbert Harman. Harman came up with the “brain in a jar” thought experiment, which goes thusly: the brain is a machine that processes stimuli, things that happen in the world that it observes with the senses, like a man falling down. The brain will respond based on how it was taught. Say a brain was taught to have a sense of humor, it will point and laugh at the fallen man and his catastrophic failure to function in society.
Harman figured, hey, if the brain was just hooked up to a computer, the computer could just feed the brain stimuli in the same way that the eyes and such do and the brain would be none the wiser. It would react the same way as if the stimuli were given to it by the eyes et al, so if the computer told it that it saw Trump, it would scream and run away — like any rational disembodied cranium.
So yeah, you could be a brain in a jar. Put that on your résumé.
And the kicker to all of this stuff? There’s no way we could know if we’re living in a simulation. Anything that happens in the simulation that follows the laws of the simulation, we’ll take for “normal,” so this universe could be radically different than the base reality. For instance, scientists in the base reality could have created our universe as a simulation to test what would happen if there was this crazy thing called “gravity,” which was absent in their world.
We wouldn’t be able to determine if this universe was artificial unless we saw something that radically goes against all understanding of the world, a “glitch” if you will, like if all soda cans spontaneously turned into deer, or one of these articles ended without an appropriate and well-timed joke.
Don’t worry, Neo. I’ve got you covered.
