Follow-Up: Q&A on Simulationism and Creationism
Responses to last week's article.
by Rod D. Martin
April 6, 2017
Not surprisingly, there were a great many responses to my article on Elon Musk’s espousal of the idea that we are living in a computer simulation, and my suggestion that this is simply a form of Creationism.
Here, a couple of the better interactions:
Response 1: Isn’t the idea of Creation just absurd?
But isn’t that exactly what Elon just argued?
Musk has come to believe — and to say, often — that we are living in a computer simulation. His argument, more or less, is that we have seen in just 40 years a progression in technology from Pong to photorealistic simulations that are virtually indistinguishable from reality, and at anything close to that rate of change, actual indistinguishability is just over the horizon. Ergo, an even slightly more advanced society could create something like The Matrix or a Star Trek holodeck, those within it would have no obvious way to know they were inside it, and the number of such simulations would be at least as great as the number of video games and movies available today.
Musk states that the chance of our being the actual base reality, as opposed to characters in such a simulation, is “one in billions.”
Which is another way of saying that he, and all his atheist followers, believe in a creator.
Is his position “absolute nonsense”? And if so, do tell: why?
Response 2: Well it’s far more scientifically viable than the concept of a supernatural creator, and don’t pretend you can’t see why that is. A creator is not a god. When we finally get AI right, it will make us creators, but it will not make us gods. To add, that belief breaks none of the fundamental laws of physics we rely on to make cars, airplanes, etc which work because those laws are true.
That belief, however, changes nothing in a person’s life, it wouldn’t matter in the least if it were true.
With respect, that’s actually complete nonsense.
If we are mere characters in a simulation, then whoever programmed the simulation is our creator, by definition. And it seems you didn’t watch the video I linked to (above), in which Elon explains this himself: we have reached the point at which we are creating increasingly complex sims, with photorealism progressing exponentially, and any even slightly more advanced civilization should be easily able to create simulations which would be indistinguishable from reality, PARTICULARLY from the perspective of the sim’s characters themselves, who would have literally no other frame of reference than their own.
Now if our universe has a creator in any form, that person or persons is or are so vastly more powerful than we — indeed, utterly definitive of literally every aspect of our existence — as to make absolutely zero difference in whether or not you subjectively choose to call it/them/whatever “a god”. From our perspective, that person or persons are actually more powerful than most of the gods worshipped throughout history, because relatively few gods have ever been believed to be the actual creator of our universe, much less omnipresent, omnipotent, etc. But the sim’s creator could literally push a button and blink our entire universe out of existence, or re-code any of us, or any aspect of our lives, at a whim.
The computer simulationist position is creationist. It doesn’t expressly posit any particular god — because unless such a creator were to reveal itself within the creation it would be unknowable to its creations — but it certainly excludes most of the gods men have worshiped.
Moreover, it obliterates your “scientific viability” argument. A computer simulation need not involve any sort of complicated creation: indeed, it almost certainly (from the perspective of probability) has a very short timeline. Games of Sim City do not take billions of literal years of gameplay prior to your ability to lay down your first streets, nor do they require any consistent physical laws. So “science”, such as it exists at all, exists entirely in changeable code: if the programmer(s) choose to mod it, it gets modded, and there’s absolutely nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
This is not to say there can be no science: there can be science within the sim, but only within precisely the parameters that the coder establishes (and only so long as he does not change them); and presumably there is also science outside the sim to which the coder is subject (assuming he is not also part of a different sim, or is not in fact omnipotent, which again, cannot be derived from anything within the sim unless the creator chooses to reveal it).
So the idea of “scientific viability” is a joke if we’re in a sim, at least as it relates to the application of the physical laws which apply to us to anything outside the sim itself. And Elon’s — and lots of other people’s — position is that there is only a “one in billions” chance that we aren’t in fact a simulation.
Oh, and back to the timeline point. A sim can start at literally any time, with all of the character’s thoughts and “memories” and indeed, the entire world’s “history”, hard-coded. So the universe doesn’t have to be 15 billion years old, nor does there have to be any sort of evolution, biological or otherwise, to get us to our actual (as opposed to perceived) starting point: indeed, that would all be extremely improbable. What would be far more likely is that the entire universe started a week ago, or a year ago, or some other very very short period of time — just like any of our simulations and games — and that the system generates “memories” and “history” for us on demand as needed, without storing anything it doesn’t need until called upon to do so by events within the sim (or mods from without).
This actually neatly explains the way human memory works. It also describes reality from a Christian perspective: denying the existence of God, men attempt to explain what they can observe without reference to Him or to the possibility that there might be forces at work beyond those they can measure.
So again: is Elon’s (well-developed) position absurd? Because all you seem to be doing is applying your presuppositions to the problem.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I do not share Elon’s position. But I do understand and respect both it and him. I am in fact a Christian, and a Creationist.