Opinion | Are we butterflies or computer games?
- Elon Musk says we are almost certain to be computer simulations, but a new paper argues we are statistically more likely to be living in the real world, after all
“Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.”
– the Zhuangzi
We are all nothing more than a computer game, according to tech billionaire Elon Musk. As he famously put it during a conference in 2016, “There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality.”
Personally, I prefer being a butterfly than a computer simulation. But with that kind of probability, can’t we just say with almost certainty that we are nothing more than computer sims? Is that why Musk often says strange things and behaves strangely? If you are convinced your life is just a clever lifelike simulation, would you behave differently from before? Or would that be part of your programmed awareness as well?
But before you go and make any big life changes, you may want to know someone has come up with a credible and very clever calculation that significantly – seriously! – lowers the chances of our being simulations to less than 50 per cent. Well, still quite high, still very disturbing, but a lot better than Musk’s odds!
The paper, “A Bayesian approach to the simulation argument”, is by David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, that was published last month in the MDPI journals.