Sunday Dreaming

Some famous minds think that we're living in a computer simulation. Elon Musk:

(Photo from glitch news)

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation, probably being in a simulation, is the following: 40 years ago, we had Pong, two rectangles and a dot…That is what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, the games will become indistinguishable from reality.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson [bold added]

(Photo from Atlanta Magazine)

put the odds at 50-50 that our entire existence is a program on someone else’s hard drive. “I think the likelihood may be very high,” he said. He noted the gap between human and chimpanzee intelligence, despite the fact that we share more than 98 percent of our DNA. Somewhere out there could be a being whose intelligence is that much greater than our own.

“We would be drooling, blithering idiots in their presence,” he said. “If that’s the case, it is easy for me to imagine that everything in our lives is just a creation of some other entity for their entertainment.”

If we are indeed living in a Matrix-like reality, then there are metaphysical implications:

But some were more contemplative, saying the possibility raises some weighty spiritual questions. “If the simulation hypothesis is valid then we open the door to eternal life and resurrection and things that formally have been discussed in the realm of religion,” [Maryland physicist James] Gates suggested. “The reason is quite simple: If we’re programs in the computer, then as long as I have a computer that’s not damaged, I can always re-run the program.”

And if someone somewhere created our simulation, would that make this entity God? “We in this universe can create simulated worlds and there’s nothing remotely spooky about that,” Chalmers said. “Our creator isn’t especially spooky, it’s just some teenage hacker in the next universe up.”

On the bright side, if we are players in a super video-game, then we can go back to the last save point and try again. Maybe next time we won't die so soon or maybe we can correct the poor choices we made. (It's not life after death but a reincarnation.)

Nevertheless, I hope that the universe is not a simulation. Our moral decisions don't have real value if they can be erased and re-done until gotten right (hey, Eve, stay away from that serpent!). And God as video-game designer? That's a limiting concept applied to the previously illimitable (on the sixth day He pulled an all-nighter until the code ran, then He slept in on Sunday).

I suppose we'll never really find out--if indeed we ever do--until we've passed on. You don't know you're in a dream while you're in it.