Is Elon Musk Right, Are We In A Simulation?
Could the Matrix be real?
Elon Musk has some whacky ideas, I think by now that’s common knowledge, but one of his most outlandish is that we are most likely living in a simulation. In interviews and press conferences, he gives a quippy bit of logic to explain this idea, and everyone gets sucked in! But is he onto something? Or has Joe Rogan got him smoking too much of the green stuff?
This mind-bending bit of logic was first proposed by Nick Bostrom in 2003 who named it the simulation hypothesis. It goes as follows:
As computers are getting exponentially more powerful each year, future civilisations will have a level of computing power that vastly exceeds ours by orders of magnitude. We already simulate life in many ways through computers, from video games to art and scientific research. These future civilisations may simulate the Universe from the start up to their lifetime to understand the Universe and humanities past in exquisite detail. This means that there is another simulation within this simulation that simulates the first simulated Universe. But then this second one also has a simulation, and so on and so on. So there are billions of simulations within simulations, all of which host all of human history. This means there are billions of identical virtual yous that are living the same life…
