You’re lying if you say you never wondered whether your sims were actually conscious. When you’re watching your drowning sim flailing around in a pool with no ladders, and laughing at the fact that it can’t just 'think' to climb out, you can’t help but kind of believe. You wonder, deep down, whether you’re actually God to a little world of virtual people, who believe they’re just going about their lives and wondering why all of their friends die in terribly gruesome ways. But then the guilt is so intense that you dismiss the thought and continue to build a 1x1 room around the sim that looks like your ex.
Well karma is a bitch and it turns out we might actually be the sims ourselves. In today’s wtf news, two Silicone Valley billionaires are said to be funnelling money into scientific research to take us out of the virtual reality we live in. Yes, forget about world poverty and global warming – boring! – some tech moguls believe so strongly that we’re living in a matrix, they’re funding science to get us out.
The idea has gained momentum in Silicon Valley, with entrepreneur Elon Musk recently announcing that the chances we’re not living in a computer simulation are extremely low. In an interview, he explained that the rate of technological advancement at the moment is so high, if it continues (actually even if it slows), we’ll reach a point where there’ll be billions of machines creating virtual realities, with the beings in them toddling around unaware of the reality of their own electronic existence. He claimed that the likelihood that we’re the originals - the ‘base reality’ - is one in billions. It does seem a bit self-important…
Although it might be something you’d only take seriously three hours into an evening of sci-fi films and weed, the idea that everything around us might not exist is actually a well-established theory in Philosophy, going as far back as Decartes. The popular brain in a vat thought experiment (yes people in universities write essays on this) is actually kind of convincing.
Imagine that a mad professor wants to create virtual reality, and he sources a single brain (not going to think about how) which he puts in a vat of life-sustaining liquids. He connects the brain to a supercomputer, which stimulates the brain in the same way that our brain is stimulated in our everyday lives. Technically, the brain’s conscious could be made to think that it was living autonomously, but is really everything it experiences is virtual.
Just let that sink in. We could very well be lumps of meat in vats of liquid and Elon Musk could be our Morpheus. Now try and go about your day as normal…
You’re welcome grabs wine
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.