MU-9: The Ultimate Programmer

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of PayPal and Tesla, expressed his view on the simulation v reality debate:

“The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was 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. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality… So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?”

John Wheeler, the physicist who coined the term “black hole”, made this point in a famous lecture titled “Its from Bits”:

“Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions.”

(Yes, I know that sounds very much like the movie, The Matrix).

There were great comments on this simulation thing on Slashdot:

“Without ANY bugs? Really?”

Doesn’t matter, came the response:

“Even if there are bugs, you can just stop the simulation, fix the bugs and start it over.”

Is all this just another religion, asked another guy:

“We already have a billion or so people who believe that our reality is God's dream. How is this any different?”

That’s not true for all religions, countered someone:

“A major school of Hindu Philosophy believes that the whole universe is unreal (Maya).”

But is all this just pushing the argument back one step and explaining nothing? If our universe is a simulation, where is it running? On another computer or inside another simulated universe? To paraphrase that famous line, is it computers all the way down? Which is why Kevin Kelly wonders:

“Is God the Word itself, the Ultimate Software and Source Code, or is God the Ultimate Programmer?”