NewsVideo

Elon Musk Thinks There’s a “One In Billions” Chance We Don’t Live In a Computer Simulation

What Musk and others miss in their calculations is that simulations become more and more indistinguishable from reality to their creators, not to the simulated beings which are nothing more than a set of instructions without any indication of actual consciousness. And if video game characters are posited to possess a consciousness, why do they need to be — to us — “indistinguishable from reality” to possess one? Why shouldn’t the ball and rectangle in Pong possess consciousness too?

IT SOUNDS like Elon Musk might have swallowed “the red pill.”

Part Bond villain, part Tony Stark, Elon Musk seems to be hellbent on pushing our world forward, technologically. Pretty bizarre, then, that he thinks there is a real possibility the world is just a simulation.

Musk – who founded SpaceX, Tesla Motors, OpenAI, and Paypal – took to the stage at Recode’s 2016 Code Conference and got philosophical about computer simulations and the nature of reality. On answering a question from journalist Joshua Topolsky, he began to explain how it’s very likely we’re living in the computer games of a more advanced society.

He said it’s fair to assume we’ll soon be able to create games that are indistinguishable from reality, considering the rate of technological advancement in computer technology has allowed us to go from the game “Pong” to photorealistic virtual reality in just over 40 years,

He concluded, “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.”

But if the thought of being a mere “Sim” in an inauthentic reality makes you feel blue, Musk says it’s actually a positive thing. In fact, he believes we should hope this is the case.

* * *

Source: IFL Science

Previous post

The Ethnostate: Some Problems Nobody Thinks About

Next post

The Congoid as Nature Made Him

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
3 Comments
Inline Feedback
View all comments
Bruce Arney
Bruce Arney
10 June, 2016 7:57 pm

Stretching the imagination and thinking outside the box are good constructive white mental activities.

Clinton Seeber
Clinton Seeber
13 June, 2016 9:24 am

Elon Musk is an idiot.

Old Aardvark
Old Aardvark
Reply to  Clinton Seeber
20 January, 2023 2:26 am

Musk is no idiot. Now Joshua Topolsky revealed himself to be an idiot, at least two or three standard deviations below Musk, and a vain and self-absorbed idiot, too.