Life as a Computer Simulation

Vox has a piece on the argument that what we take for reality and the world might be merely a computer simulation, that is, we might just be characters in somebody's video game. Elon Musk, the high-tech billionaire, discussed the possibility, and he is not speaking merely conjecturally but believes it.

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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.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

-- Elon Musk, quoted in Vox

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In sum, at the end of this happy technological trajectory is a world of very realistic computer simulations, in which we are probably in one. Think of the movie "Existenz" starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. I am not a believer myself, but I do love the concept, and while I was reading the material and the links, I came across a Philip K. Dick novel that I don't recall seeing before. It's "Time Out of Joint", about a protagonist's struggling to break free of an artificially created bubble-reality. One hook that draws me is that in this bubble-reality, there is no famous Marilyn Monroe, but then a magazine article about her crops up, along with other tears and fractures in this bubble-reality. It looks like wild fun, rather in the vein of "The Man in the High Castle".

[Source: Vox]

Porn

I was thinking hard this evening about leaving pornography behind me. Maybe it was Colapinto's novel "Undone" that led me back to this issue. At best, porn is a weakness; at worst, it is at least suggestive of a sexual criminality. And I am in my fifties now: my libido should not be that over-powerful. Maybe my interest in chess can take the place of pornography now. I would delete my porn blog, throw away my video tapes, cleanse my soul. Okay, I would keep my DVD copies of "Expensive Tastes" starring Elaine Wells and "Oriental Babysitter" starring Linda Wong. Well, these are among the best of the classics.

Naturally, this idea exhausted itself before the evening was over. I was watching TV over my dinner, and I was scrolling through my DVR movies, and I noticed that I had Adrien Brody's "Detachment" recorded. I had to check out that scene near the opening, when that cutesy teen prostitute is sucking off the old guy in the back of the bus. She demands her money afterward, but she just gets punched in the face and is bloodied. She gets up and forgets about the money. She sees Adrien Brody sitting nearby looking at her, and she vamps it up, looking for more business, looking both super-vulnerable and ready for more nasty action, anything for twenty dollars, and this is just sooo hot for me that I realize I am not going to give up pornography, not today, probably not ever, even if I live into my nineties. I am a hungry man with no women, and I am just wired this way. It lights my fire.