Molehill Mountain Episode 4 – Is Life Just One Big Video Game?

[Andrew Eisen]

On this week’s episode of Molehill Mountain, Andrew and EZK give a few E3 predictions (8:20), continue Kicking the Bucket List (34:23), weigh in on El
[See the full post at: Molehill Mountain Episode 4 – Is Life Just One Big Video Game?]

[Infophile]

Elon Musk is actually far from the first to come up with the possibility that we might all be living in a simulation. There are a lot of problems with this idea, many of which you brought up. A couple other key ones are:

–It ignores the possibility that there might be insurmountable limits to technology (eg. the speed of light limit, which we’re already starting to have problems with in computers). Technology might keep increasing asymptotically to some limit, and never get good enough to do these simulations.
–A simulation is always going to be more complex than what it’s simulating, so there’s no way a simulation of our universe could exist within our universe, unless it made some gross simplifications.
–It violates Occam Razor to a ridiculous extent. The simplest explanation for the existence of our universe is that our universe is real and exists. To say that no, a more complicated universe exists which simulates ours is coming up with a much more complicated explanation that isn’t merited by the evidence.
–It’s unfalsifiable. There’s nothing that can’t be explained by it, so it has no predictive power, making it fundamentally useless.

Sure, it’s technically possible, but it’s also technically possible that this internet comment was brought to you by a monkey pounding randomly at a keyboard. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s worth considering and is anyone going to give me a banana? I was promised a banana.

[Andrew Eisen]

“Elon Musk is actually far from the first to come up with the possibility that we might all be living in a simulation.”

Hopefully we didn’t give the impression that this idea was a Musk original.

Andrew Eisen

[Infophile]

I don’t recall you explicitly saying he came up with it, but I also don’t recall you mentioning that it was an old idea.

[Andrew Eisen]

Probably didn’t clarify as such (although I did say something about looking up the Simulation Theory on Wiki for those interested) as it didn’t occur to me that anyone would think this was a new idea 15 years after the extraordinarily popular The Matrix.

Andrew Eisen

[MechaTama31]

Of course, there are plenty of people of commenting age who are too young to have seen it when it came out. And the sequels certainly didn’t do the original any favors, as far as cementing it in place as a must-see classic (which I think it is, even if it’s not as “deep” as the Wachowskis seem to think).

[Author]

Posts