ONE IN A BILLION

Elon Musk said, the other day, that there is only a one in a billion chance that we live in a base reality.  It is almost certain, according to Musk, that we are surrounded by, not a base reality, but a computer simulation created by some advanced civilization.  

And Elon argues for the likelihood of this being the case.  He puts forward an 'irrefutable' argument; that if you look at the forty year evolution of computer games, from, say, Pong, which consisted of two rectangles and a dot; and then you move forward to contemporary games with photo-realistic simulation and millions of people playing them; and you project this growth moving forward for many years, even at a much slower rate; then, it is almost inevitable that we will be playing games where we will come to believe that our entire reality is a computer simulation.   And that, of course, makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Well, it certainly seemed to make sense to the rest of the panel and the audience of the talk show that he was appearing on.  But is it really sensible?  Let's consider.

First of all, what makes games real?  And how real can they get?  Games are made real not because of the realistic trappings of the game, but because of the involvement of the players.  If you 'really' want to win the game, then you accept the 'reality' of the game.  In the nineteen eighties I was a very good Ms Pac-Man player.  So much so that I had a more or less permanent callous on the inside of my middle right finger which was where I operated the joy stick that controls the Ms Pac-Man.  The highest score that anyone had ever received on any particular machine was posted on that machine. My goal was, always, to top that score; a goal that was rarely achieved.  But within the context of the game, I knew that if my Ms Pac-Man was eaten by any of the 'men' chasing her, (actually any of the men chasing her three times in succession) then the game would be over and I would not reach my goal.  

So, emotionally, the power of those chasing 'men' and my ability to outmaneuver them became very real for me, when I was playing; hence the callous on my middle finger.  And the opposite is also true.  If you have no interest in the game, any game, then the whole endeavor seems rather silly.  All those grown men running around in shorts and sneakers trying to get a ball to fall through a hoop seems ludicrous to someone with no interest.  As do horse races, and poker games and boxing matches and anything where there is a competition based on the arbitrary rules of a particular game.  

For a professional gamesman, like a professional athlete, the outcome of these games has some consequences in terms of one's finances and one's reputation in the real world.  And competitors on the basketball court or the football field can become real life enemies off the field.  Although, more often then not, that enmity ends some time after they stop competing.  If they were hugely successful they realize that their success was due to the interest that people had in these competitions and that was fueled by how closely matched they were with their competitors.  It turns out that the more fiercely your rivals fight or play against you, the more that motivates you to stretch to greater heights to defeat them.  So both your growth as a player and your success is due, in large part, to the skill and commitment and ferocity of your competitors.  Many rivals realize that long after they are finished competing and, like Ali and Frazier, and Magic and Bird, become good friends, or have a very affectionate relationship with the other, because they realize that, ultimately, although they were rivals, they were really playing the same game, and their fame and  fortune fed off each other.

So in the computer games that I know, the player is controlling a man or a woman or some kind of simulated being who is trying to win by avoiding a series of things that might 'kill' this being.  Although the involvement in this game, while playing, may get very intense and all consuming, so that you want no interference from the outside world,  you are still never confused about the basic fact that you are controlling your 'man' and not that you actually are your 'man.'  You are controlling your man by using your fingers which are connected to your nervous system and your brain which, in turn, are being controlled by your eyesight and your perception of what is happening on the screen and your perceptual and mental and nervous system response to what you are perceiving.  You never get to the point (do you?) where you believe that you are no longer the person that is playing the game but that you are actually the simulated character who is in the game?  And if you do, do you believe that your eyes and your retina and lens and optic nerve and visual cortex and brain and muscular system are also simulations?  What about the blood vessels that nourish these parts of your body?  Simulations also?  If we get to the point where these games are surrounding us and the game 'board' becomes a three dimensional environment; can we touch this environment? does it have any resistance to our touch?  If so, is this environment a simulation as well?  The materials that the simulation is made out of, do they contain atoms and molecules, or are atoms and molecules and the Periodic table, also simulations?

By Elon's logic, if we can advance computer games so quickly, isn't it common sense to suppose that some earleir society, more advanced then ours, created these super simulated games that we now have confused with base reality?  And if we, who are already living in a computer simulation, will undoubtedly become so advanced in fifty or one hundred years, won't we create computer simulations that will convince yet another society that they are living in a computer simulation, which will really be a simulation of our simulation?  And what about a simulation of a simulation of a simulation?  Where does it end?  And how did it all begin?

There is no known break in the history of humans on this planet where we suddenly became part of a computer simulation.  Was this done without our knowledge?  Or was this done before we arrived here?  Were dinosaurs, bacterium, the origin of the solar system, the Big Bang, were they also part of this simulation?  Or were the researchers and scientists that put forward this understanding of the universe and our understanding of our bodies, were they also part of the simulation?  So is this a fairly recent simulation and all the stuff about heredity and genetic backgrounds and evolution and geological formations was all that fabricated as part of a consistent simulation that would satisfy us intellectually about the logic of the simulation and has nothing to do with the real world?

What about birth and death?  Also simulated?  The fertilization of ova, embryogenesis, the replication of DNA, the differentiation of cells,  all of genetics, also a simulation?

This society of advanced creatures that created the simulation that we live in, what were they like?  If they were not simulations themselves but were the real, base reality,  (highly unlikely by Elon's logic) how did they, those creatures living in this base reality, how did they get born and grow and sense the world around them?  Were they not made of molecules and atoms? Did they not procreate and have bodies that were founded on the relationship between amino acids and nucleic acids?  And if they had another system, how do we know that that system was the real system, and not another simulated notion foisted on them by an even earlier, even more advanced society, that had yet another way of organizing their own biology?

To create a three dimensional simulation that has all the qualities of weight and density and color that we have, and to create organisms that have all the abilities and complexities that we enjoy; not just something that 'looks' real, but something that actually feels and tastes and weighs and behaves real, well that is no more simple than actually creating a universe.  If there is no way to tell the difference, then there is no difference. 

The most brilliant people, starting from faulty assumptions, wind up with the most preposterous conclusions.  In the world of computer games and simulations, the only source of those games are human, intelligent designers.  These human designers use their brains, which they did not design, and their intelligence, which they did not design, to manipulate electromagnetic laws that they did not design, and arrange materials like silicon and silicon carbides, whose chemical qualities they did not design, to give the illusion to humans, whose eyes they did not design, whose brains and nervous systems they did not design, that what they are seeing and hearing are, in the context of the game, real.  To go exponentially further, light years further than that, and get to what Elon Mosk is talking about, is simply not achievable in this generation or any generation.

And nowhere in Elon's speculations is the notion of consciousness even considered.  We may not know what consciousness is, but it is who we are.  It is what enlivens each of us to be able to experience and to desire to experience and to participate in things like computer games.  In fact, the ultimate, the base reality, what we really are, has nothing to do with simulations or non-simulations.  It has nothing to do with what we experience.  It is rather the ground, the context, of experience.  We are not what we experience.  We are the experiencer.  Consciousness, not physics, not chemistry, not computer simulation, not information, but consciousness, is what we actually are.  The base reality is consciousness. 

In a sense, but not in the sense that Elon Mosk is talking about, our entire existence really is a simulation.  The Periodic table, atoms, molecules, organisms, planets, stars, galaxies, those too are all simulations.   They are all made of configuring forces that give the illusion of matter.  Each organism, with its unique set of desires and its unique system of perception, defines this world of configuring forces in its own particular way.  This simulation was created, not by an advanced society of humans, but by the creator of humans and societies, by the Divine, by the Cosmic Consciousness, by God.  And we, in our essence, are part of that Divine.  We come from that Divine.  We, not as separated organisms, but as one Cosmic Consciousness, designed this simulation so that we could attach to an organism that interacted with and experienced this physical universe, from the perspective of a unique set of desires that are either fulfilled or unfulfilled in this 'game' of life.  And just as Ali and Frazier and Magic and Bird, realized that they were not rivals after all, but were playing the same game; we, too, will realize that our rivals, our enemies and our friends, are all here playing, each from their own unique perspective, the exact same game.  

To enlighten oneself about the true nature of reality has nothing to do with discovering the hidden projector behind the scenery, and unmasking the 'super-brainy' society that really controls us.  It has to do with getting to know one's self, which lies beneath and within this world of material illusion.  It has to do with being able to separate one's self from the desires that continually press our noses up against this material illusion and step back to see this world for the beautiful and painful, tragic-comic game that it really is.

Comments always welcome.