Weekend Thinking: What If None Of This Is Real?
What if none of this is real?
The smartphone, tablet or laptop you’re reading this on isn’t real. The sensation of its weight isn’t real. The Internet it came over isn’t real. You aren’t real.
What if it’s all a simulation, and you’re a pixelated piece in someone else’s game?
Sounds crazy right?
But a growing number of people are convinced that what we consider reality isn’t real at all. And they’re not all wearing tinfoil hats.
Look to real-life Tony Stark Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, as one example. The dude is smart.
“There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” he said recently.
Musk points to rapid growth of video game technology, from the rudimentary version of Pong (two rectangles and a dot) a few short decades ago to the incredibly complex multiplayer online games being played today. With advances in Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality just around the corner, we are on the cusp of another massive change in gaming technology.
That means it won’t be long until our minds think pixels are real.
“If you assume any rate of improvement at all then games will become indistinguishable from reality,” he said. “Even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now, let’s just imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing says Musk.
“If a civilization stops advancing then that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. Either we’re going to create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist,” he says.
Musk isn’t the first to make this argument. Oxford professor Nick Bostrom published an influential journal article in 2003 that argued at least one of these statements must be true:
(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage OR
(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof) OR
(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
Open door number three and, as Neo found out in The Matrix, there is no spoon.
“It’s important to understand that it wouldn’t just be in a metaphorical sense that we’re in a simulation, it would be in a very literal sense that we ourselves and all this world around us that we see and hear and smell exists inside a computer built by some advanced civilization,” Bostrom told Quartz.
“The simulation hypothesis could be very good or very bad depending on what you think the motives of the simulators are—what will happen in the simulation, what will happen after the simulation ends. There are obviously both optimistic and pessimistic possibilities for that.”
Feeling a bit less secure about your view of reality now? It happens when you take the red pill.