Elon Musk thinks that it's almost certain that we are living in a computer simulation. He mentioned that humans are some advanced version of the SIMS. Musk is echoing the same sentiment as Nick Bromstrom.

In his paper, Nick Bromstorm argues that:

the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage

any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof);

we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super‐powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine‐grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea.

For some time, higher education has been the target of criticism without many solutions. Tuition has increased significantly, disturbingly outpacing inflation, which has caused millions of students to take out loans in order to fund their education. By the time they get out, they are shackled to their debt and the majority of the students owe student loans. We are talking about something little over 1 in 7 people that are not only burdened with debt so early in their lives but will have trouble contributing to the economy in the future. It shouldn’t be a surprise that what was seemingly in reach a few decades ago such as home ownership, new business entrepreneurship, family-building and more are now down significantly. Ironically, pushing the meme that everyone should go to college for a better life, regardless if one can afford it, has created a modern class of indentured servants who will be stressing more about paying off debt than motivated to create solutions for it.

Let's go 10 000 years into the future

It's possible that civilisation would be extinct due to factors like global warming, self replicating robots or the zombie apocalypse.

Assuming we never go extinct. We will keep advancing and assuming that everything in the physical world can be simulated, eventually we will simulate ourselves. However, Getting enough computing power to run billions of simulations could be a problem. It will allow us to send tiny robots to other planets, who in return will be able to turn the planet into a computer and create simulution that can create other smaller simulations,

In this scenario, there will be other universes which are indistiguishable from our own. Therefore chances are we will be in one of the simulated universes.

What if I'm not into futuristic simulations ?

It would suggest natural analogy to traditional religious conceptions. Post image In other words, if we are living in a simulation, there is a higher being, but it's some version of us. This leads to a million other possibilities. Hence Elon Musk has rules when we can talk about such topics.

There’s Evidence We’re Living in a Simulation

Hence Elon Musk has rules when we can talk about such topics. There’s Evidence We’re Living in a Simulation Yanny/Laurel made us doubt the fundamental sanity of ourselves and others. The internet discovered and subsequently lost their minds about an audio clip that some people hear as Yanny and some people hear as Laurel. Some folks even hear both names at the same time.

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Nothing you’ve ever seen in your whole life has been objective reality.

We live inside our mental model of the world. We live in it so fully that it’s hard to appreciate that there is a world outside of our simulation. The Yanny/Laurel clip breaks your brain because our brain wants to tell us it’s got reality sorted out. It says you hear all there is to hear and you see all there is to see. Yanny/Laurel destroys that illusion.

Our brains are cooking the books.

Our brains do the best they can at making meaning from sounds. The Yanny/Laurel recording works as it does because it’s low quality. What’s shocking is the degree to which our brains fill in the gaps of the sensory data. We don’t notice there’s a gap between the raw sensory information and what our brain rounded up the data to mean.

The same things happens with our vision. The data comes in from the retina and travels into the thalmus. Here’s the wild discovery from the recent neuroscience — the thalmus multiplies the raw data by 5x. FIVE TIMES more visual information comes out of the thalmus than went into it! Where did all that extra information come from? Something scientists call “priors.” Everything you’ve ever seen prior to this moment is used in your ability to see.

Infants can’t see when they’re first born because they don’t have enough prior experiences of seeing to be able to make sense of the visual data. Infants have to learn how to see. Which means… you too had to learn how to see. You had to look at the world and gather many experiences of environments and emotional contexts.

Most of what you are seeing in this moment isn’t here. Your visual systems are constructing the scene based on what you’ve seen both immediately before and in similar contexts. Your visual cortex is cooking the books and filling in a lot of what you are perceiving.

If this is a simulation, then we can hack it.

If you’re a golfer, you can hack your perception to increase your confidence so that the holes look physically larger. All pro athletes know how much of their performance is a mental game. White guys can hack their perceptions to reduce their fear of black men which causes them to see them as more threatening than they actually are.

These processes are happening automatically, but that doesn’t mean they’re unchangeable. Our brains are constantly updating their simulation of the world. If you’ve been considering any of my arguments, you are updating your simulation right now. It’s turtles all the way down.

Parts of this article first appeared on Hackernoon

Images: Google Images