Episode #095 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope you all love the show today.

So, something we haven’t talked about for quite some time on this show are the questions that naturally arise if—well, if you’re the kind of person like me, and you do the sort of masochistic things I like to do for fun. I’ll wake up in the morning. I’ll beat myself with reeds. Sometimes I like to light my torso on fire just to see what it feels like. And after a long day of that, I like to close out my evenings by doing a very similar sort of activity. I like to question the deep, philosophical problems at the root of epistemology, you know, all the fun stuff. How do we know what we know? How do we know we know that’s what we know? You know, all the really fulfilling questions to ask.

But, you know, these kinds of questions definitely have their uses. The process of asking these kinds of questions that may at first seem like they’re completely pointless oftentimes lead us to some of the most revolutionary ideas in philosophy. Like, what about Descartes? Descartes’s sitting around one day in his stove, and he’s asking himself a question that may seem like it’s a complete waste of time: how do I know that any of this stuff around me actually exists? I mean, I see it. I can touch it. But how can I really know that any of this stuff exists? How can I know for certain that I’m not a brain in a vat somewhere, you know, that actual reality is somewhere else, and that this reality is just being created and maintained by some sort of evil demon that’s constantly trying to deceive me? May at first seem like a pretty crazy idea. But, really, if it is so crazy, shouldn’t I be able to come up with a way to prove that it’s not the case?

These kinds of questions, to the average person, they’re not just confusing to ask. They can actually be kind of annoying to them. “Like, what’s the point of asking stuff like this? What’s the point of asking if the world exists? I see it right there. Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for thinking about stuff more. But when you start to ask these questions, I begin to think you’re angry at your dad and you want to make everyone else’s life miserable. Why are you doing this?” But it’s only by asking this sort of pedantic, seemingly pointless question that Descartes arrives at his idea of cogito ergo sum. Maybe I don’t have a knock-down argument proving that what I’m seeing and touching is the fundamental base reality. But, as we know, even if an evil demon is sitting around, constantly planting deceptive thoughts in my head, I’m still thinking, therefore I must be a thinking thing. I think, therefore, I must exist.

But just thinking about what Descartes’s doing in this thought experiment of his. He sets out to try to prove this thing that seems really obvious to everyone, that the stuff in our conscious awareness of the world actually exists. He does that. He runs into some roadblocks and ends up not being able to. In other words, he starts from a position of total doubt that any of this stuff is real, tries to prove that it is, and because of certain inconsistencies is not able to.

What does that mean? Does that mean the world doesn’t exist? Does it mean we should be suspicious of the idea that it doesn’t exist? It’d be very easy at this point to say, “What does it mean? It means nothing. Look, whatever Descartes said over there, this stuff is reality. It’s right there. I see it, okay? The fact that we can’t prove this is fundamental reality is not that Descartes’s making a good point or something. You can’t prove this is base reality any more than you can prove there’s not a Rumpelstiltskin. This is reality.”

But is that really true? Is it really so obvious that you’re not a brain in a vat somewhere or someone hooked up to some sort of Matrix-like apparatus just living out your life? Or I guess the better question is, is it really so obvious that we shouldn’t even be considering it as a possibility? I mean, think about it this way, what if a philosopher took the opposite approach to Descartes? What if they started from a place of total doubt, just like he did, but instead, when they ran into these inconsistencies, they tried to sort of use them against themselves? What if instead of trying to prove that this is reality, what if they tried to prove that the only world we’ve ever known—this realm that we all navigate our lives through—what if they tried to prove that this is not base reality, that what you see around you is an elaborate simulation, and that any inconsistencies that we find in science or epistemology can really be explained by the fact that this is an artificial world created by something else for some purpose that we’re not aware of?

Now, look, I get it. This whole idea— “Hey, man, what if it’s not real, man? It’s a simulation!”—that whole idea in the last five years or so has really made its way into the minds of the average person and just how they talk about things that happen to them. Right? I mean, you hear it all the time. “Oh, I was at Walmart the other day, and this guy came in. And he didn’t have any pants on. And I was like, this has to be a simulation! This cannot be real.” Or any example of somebody that references some coincidental or strange thing that happened to them, and people will point to it, and they’ll say, “How can you not think we’re living in a simulation when stuff like this happens?”

And we’ll talk more about this kind of thing later. But I guess the point I want to get across is that the idea that we’re living in a simulation is far from just random conjecture by psychedelic adventurers on Facebook. There’s actually a very solid philosophical grounding to it. Now, there’s a lot of books out there that people might point to as the philosophical ground zero that they build these theories from. But one of the most interesting arguments ever written about simulation theory isn’t a book at all. It’s a short paper from 2003, about 5,000 words long. You can read it on the internet right now. It was written by a guy that was working in the philosophy department of Oxford University at the time. His name is Nick Bostrom.

Nick Bostrom’s paper changed the way that the public looked at simulation arguments because his paper really isn’t an argument at all. See, prior to Nick Bostrom’s paper, people talked about the world being a simulation. It’s just, most of the time they were giving an argument for why it’s plausible to assume that we might be living in a simulation. Nick Bostrom takes a different approach, a more disinterested approach.

All he’s saying is, no matter what you believe about the nature of reality, given what we know so far about the rate of the progression of technology, one of three things has to be true. Maybe I should expand on that. Given what we know about Moore’s Law of exponential growth, given the fact that we’re currently in 2017 simulating worlds with VR headsets that people are getting lost in, and ten years ago we were making stuff that looked like, you know, Spyro the Dragon—given the rate at which technology is maturing, one of three things has to be true, to Nick Bostrom. Number one, human beings as a species go extinct before we’re able to develop the technology to simulate reality. Number two, there’s some sort of convergence, as he puts it, or in other words, for some reason human beings lose interest in the process of creating these kinds of simulations. Or number three, human beings do reach the level of technological maturity where they can simulate reality, and in that world, just statistically speaking, if this is the case, it is much more likely that you are living in a simulation right now than not living in a simulation.

What I want to do in this episode is step away from the conjecture, step away from the unverifiable speculation that we’re all living in some guy’s Xbox in the future. I want to step away from that, and I want to talk about the philosophy that’s at the root of each of these three possibilities that Nick Bostrom lays out in his paper, the hope being that by the end of it we’ll understand that us living in a simulation is actually a real possibility, and that maybe the key to understanding as much as we can about this place that we live in lies in understanding that it may have been created artificially for some purpose or maybe for no purpose. Who knows?

So, let’s start with possibility number one: the human species goes extinct before we can make one of these simulations. Okay. Maybe an interesting place to start is to talk about something called the Fermi paradox, which is made much more interesting when thinking about it in relation to something called the Drake equation. The Drake equation is something written by a guy named Dr. Frank Drake in 1961. He wrote it because he was trying to get people to talk more about the possibility of there being alien life in the universe. But what the equation does is, it looks at a number of different criteria—number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, number of those stars that have planets, number of those planets that might support life, and so on and so forth—the ultimate goal being to estimate the total number of intelligent species that might be trying to communicate with us out there. Well, as it turns out, there’s a lot of stars out there. Just so happens, there’s a lot of planets out there as well. Some of these planets were formed billions of years before our planet was formed and have the conditions that allow them to harbor life as we know it.

Now, one natural question that follows from this is a mystery that’s often referred to as the Fermi paradox. Okay, so we have billions of stars out there. Millions of them have earth-like planets orbiting them. Where are all the aliens at? Shouldn’t there be tons of aliens on our doorstep with a Bundt cake saying, “Hey! Welcome to the galactic community.” Why aren’t we being contacted?

Now, there’s tons of possible answers to this question that people have given. Maybe the aliens don’t want to talk to us. Maybe they’ve ascended to a level of being that’s just so far advanced in comparison to us that the idea of communicating with us—it’s not even on their radar. Maybe they see us like we’re insects or something. I’m sure many of us can understand. Like, how many of you out there are dying to embark on an expedition deep into the Amazon jungle so you can make contact with a colony of ants and introduce yourself? Probably not many of you.

So, why else might we not be being contacted? Maybe we are. Maybe they’re communicating with us right—maybe they’re watching us right now! But they’re just using some frequency or some method of communication that we aren’t looking for. It seriously could be anything. It could even just be location. You know, we live near the outer edges of the Milky Way galaxy. Maybe the same way when a new iPhone comes out that technology starts in the city centers and then eventually makes its way out into the more rural areas, maybe there’s tons of communication going on where things are more clustered together; they just haven’t gotten around to coming out to the boonies where we live.

There are many answers is the point I’m trying to make. But one of the most interesting answers—and really one of the theories people look at and think it might be a real possibility for explaining the Fermi paradox—is that before any life form can ever get to the stage of technological maturity where they can traverse these vast distances in space, be it physically or with a signal, before they can ever get to that place, something happens to them. They destroy themselves, disease, radiation, solar flare knocks them out, asteroid kills them. The reason we aren’t being contacted is that before anything can ever develop that level of technology, the species goes extinct.

You know, there’s no shortage of ways you can come up with for how we humans may eventually kill ourselves one day or be killed. You know, you have those doomsday preppers on TV, some dude waiting around for the world to end with his hoard of bananas, that guy. We pass judgment on that guy, right? When that guy says, “The poles are shifting next week, and I’m gonna be prepared for it,” we watch him on the TV, and we scoff, don’t we? “Poles aren’t going to shift. What are you talking about? Here, now, give me a banana.”

But something interesting to consider is that there are people out there that dedicate much of their lives to predicting the likelihood of the human species going extinct. And the people that do that sort of thing, they not only look at you and me; they look at the doomsday prepper, and they think even that guy is drastically underestimating the likelihood of us dying off in the next hundred years. Oftentimes they’ll reference something called doomsday theory. Doomsday theory—for some reason, whenever really smart people talk about the probability of something happening, they always use urns in their examples. So, I’m going to try to do my best impression of one right now.

Let’s imagine we have an urn in front of us, and inside of this urn are a bunch of numbered balls, kind of like the Powerball. But instead of it having however many that thing has, this urn has either 10 balls inside of it or 1,000,000 balls inside of it. Now, let’s say you reach your hand in this urn, and you pull out a ball. You look at it, and you pulled out ball number 7. The fact that you pulled out ball number 7 tells you something. It tells you, just statistically speaking, that it’s much more likely that there are 10 balls inside of that urn than 1,000,000 balls. Reason being, it’s much more likely for you to have just pulled a 1 in 10 chance than a 1 in 1,000,000 chance. Now, are we absolutely certain there are only 10 balls inside of the urn? No. There certainly could be 1,000,000 balls in there. You just happened to pull out ball number 7. But if for some reason you couldn’t ever know for certain whether there were 10 or 1,000,000 balls in there, and you’re trying to find some method to calculate what’s most likely to be in there, again, after pulling out ball number 7, odds are, there’s 10 balls inside of that urn.

Now, think of the total number of balls in the urn as the total number of human beings that will ever live. And think of the individual ball that you pulled out as your life. The number on the ball is the number of human being that you are in the grand succession of human life. I mean, everyone’s got a number, right? If there are around 60,000,000,000 human beings that have lived so far since the dawn of woman, then let’s say I’m number 60,000,000,001. That’s the number on my ball when I pulled it out of this urn.

Doomsday theory would suggest that, sure, it may be the case that human beings live on for a very long time. You know, Donald Trump may very well unite this world and usher in an age of peace that lasts for 10,000,000 years, and we’ll have hundreds of trillions of human beings that eventually exist. But it also might be the case that in 10 years some Steve Jobs-looking guy at MIT is going to try to make a time machine in his dorm room, and he’s going to open up some vortex that sucks everybody into it. Doomsday theory suggests that, given all the ways we already know about that might exterminate the human species one day, not to mention all the unknown things that we have no idea about, it may feel really good to think about us flying to the Andromeda galaxy shaking hands with some aliens, but in keeping with the urn example, it is much more likely for you to have pulled a 1 in 60,000,000,000 chance than a 1 in 500,000,000,000,000 chance.

So, again, real quick, one of three things has to be true about simulations if you’re Nick Bostrom. Number one is that human beings go extinct before we can ever make one. Number two is that we do develop the technology, but that there’s some sort of convergence that prevents us from making them.

Now, there’s tons of different things that fall into this category. One of the big ones that Nick Bostrom points out is that once we can actually make one of these simulations, maybe there’ll be some sort of ethical consideration that prevents us from actually making one. For example, well, let’s say Donald Trump unites the world, and he creates a global alliance. And we all come together as a planet, and we decide that we’re in agreement: the intrinsic good that we’re all going to strive for from now on is the elimination of human suffering. Now, in that world, let’s say not only do we have the ability to simulate a universe with conscious agents navigating it, let’s say that ability is available to everyone through an app on their smartphone or something.

In that world where we’re trying to eliminate suffering, certain questions start to arise. For example, would you say that it’s morally justifiable for somebody to create one of these simulations and then immerse themselves in it for whatever reason they want? I mean, are these simulated, conscious people and animals that suffer the same way that you do, are they just fodder for your amusement? Is that right? Billions upon billions of years of species coming and going out of existence, trillions of creatures have been born, lived out their lives, passed on their genes, and gone through untold amounts of abject suffering simply so you could immerse yourself in a world and have a certain experience that you enjoy. Is that morally justifiable?

Then again, on the other hand, yeah, all these creatures are suffering, but they’re also alive when they never would have been otherwise—along with that, no doubt, many positive emotional states. Maybe instead of looking at these simulations as fodder for our amusement, maybe we’d see it almost as like planting a tree, bringing about new life. Maybe we’d see it as a good thing.

I mean, either way, this ethical question quickly becomes pretty daunting to solve. I mean, you’re essentially making a decision about whether another conscious being should exist or not. And you’re doing it when that conscious being has no say in the matter as to whether it wants to exist. Now, on the surface that might start to sound like the abortion debate, and it may be tempting to think we can just take all the arguments pro and against and sort of just transfer them over to this question. But it’s actually a much worse ethical dilemma than abortion because at least in the abortion debate you can have the option of saying, “Well, I have a certain level of autonomy over my body; I should be able to choose.”

But in the case of the simulation, it’s not a part of our bodies. So, what do we do? Where does that leave us in terms of arguments? You can’t use all the other arguments on that side of the abortion debate. You can’t say, you know, “Based on my extensive research on the internet, I have come to a conclusive decision about exactly when life begins.” That doesn’t really apply when it comes to the simulation. What’s another one? Like, the argument that, pragmatically speaking, we’re better off as a society when people can terminate unwanted pregnancies. That one doesn’t shed any light on this either.

Also consider the fact that when we’re making this decision, it’s not just one little ball of cells that we’re making this decision on behalf of, but every creature that’s ever lived on planet earth. And in the extremely likely event that we aren’t the only life that exists in this fractal, possibly infinite universe, think of the potential magnitude of being able to decide whether people can create simulations on their smartphone or not. This isn’t the abortion debate. This is the abortion debate times infinity plus cable news. It’s a big question that we might be dealing with soon.

Nick Bostrom’s saying, maybe this is why we never create simulations. That maybe this question or another question like it will eventually spark some sort of global debate where we either arrive at a gridlock and can’t do anything or in a place where we’ve deemed simulations to be ethically wrong, so we never end up making them. Now, this is one example of why we might not make a simulation. There’s tons of other ones. Maybe we just lose interest. You know, maybe the human beings of the future are just so different than we are now that, yeah, right now it seems pretty awesome to have your own simulation; maybe they won’t care. Maybe there’ll be something ten times better that we have no idea about.

Another popular idea is, what if it’s not transistors and processors that prevent us from making these simulations? In other words, what if it’s not the hardware that’ll hold us back in the future? What if it’s us not being able to write the software? Philosophers that talk about simulation theories are pretty split on this one. Some of them will say, well, if we’re ever going to be able to simulate reality in an accurate enough way where it’s useful to us, part of that is having an exhaustive understanding of the inner workings of nature so that we can program them. Seems like a pretty big roadblock.

They’ll say things like, you know, something like 70% of the universe is this stuff out there called dark energy, this stuff where we really have no idea what it is or what function it serves—70%. In other words, the vast, vast majority of this universe, we don’t even know what it is! In fact, if you put together everything we’ve ever looked at through a telescope or a microscope, everything we even can potentially know about the universe, all those planets, stars, galaxies—all that makes up less than 5% of the universe. These philosophers would say, how can we possibly simulate a universe when we have no clue what it is really? Or at least be able to simulate it accurately enough for where it’s useful to whatever’s doing the simulating?

Now, there are other philosophers out there that would say that, no, we don’t necessarily need an exhaustive understanding of nature to have a simulated universe. That all we really need is enough of an understanding to bring about certain emergent properties that are the purpose of the experiment. So, if the purpose of the simulation is to study, for example, how intelligent life interacts with certain variables, then all you’d really need to know in that one is how to bring about intelligent life and those variables. That’s what they’re saying. But wherever you fall on this one, the point I’m trying to make—the point Nick Bostrom’s trying to make—is that we can at least see how a lack of understanding about the complex inner workings of nature might be something that prevents us from simulating things in the future.

So, the first option is that human beings go extinct before we can simulate things. The second option is that there’s something that prevents us from developing the technology. And the third and final option is that we do develop the technology, and in that world, it is much more likely that you are in a simulation right now than not in a simulation.

Now, this is a pretty big statement. So, let’s clarify why they say this has to be the case. There are people out there that look at things around them, and they try to give an argument that proves we’re living in a simulation. Nick Bostrom’s not doing that, which is kind of what makes his position unique. What he’s saying is that if we ever do reach a level of technological maturity that allows us to simulate consciousness, there’s only one base reality. And potentially trill—untold numbers of simulated realities, each of those may be harboring their own simulations, all of these harboring untold numbers of simulated consciousnesses. But there’s only one base reality.

So, given the fact that we don’t know how to distinguish between simulated consciousness and base-reality consciousness—I mean, we’ve only ever had access to what’s inside of our own heads—Nick Bostrom’s just saying, what’s more likely? If you were a gambler, what would you put your money on, that you’re in the one base reality or that you’re in one of potentially trillions of simulated realities? Hence the claim that if anything in the universe, not even humans necessarily, does develop this level of technology, it is much more likely that all of us are in a simulation right now than not in a simulation.

So, I guess, one of the obvious questions that follows from this is that if this is in fact a simulation, why are we being simulated? Kind of an interesting question to ask, not that we’re ever going to know. But what might the function of this simulation be? And look, if there’s anything I’ve learned as I’ve looked into this topic over the years, it’s just how much complete garbage surrounds this entire topic when you start to look into it. I mean, I don’t know if you guys have checked it out, but 99% of the stuff you can find about simulation theories on the internet are people making completely unverifiable claims that are just based on, you know, “I think this seems to make sense.”

“Oh, the other day, you were randomly talking about Pokémon, and then I walked in the room with a Pokémon shirt on. We never talked about Pokémon before. How do you explain that coincidence? It has to be some sort of glitch in the matrix!” Because we all know if this was the real world, coincidences would never happen. What can we do other than make a sweeping accusation about the nature of existence? You talked about Pokémon. What am I supposed to do?

You know, many of these theories that get constructed about the purpose of the simulation, people often refer to them as the religions of the 21st century. And sometimes it really does start to mirror the Abrahamic model. I mean, think about it. We’re all living in this temporary world, created by something that did so for a purpose, and they have a way that they’d like you to behave in order to better bring about that purpose. I mean, really, if you just replace “God” with “the scientist in the distant future that has brought about this simulation,” not much changes there. If you’re into some sort of polytheistic one, you know, “And the waves crashed against the boat. It was the wrath of Poseidon, god of the sea.” No, actually, that’s Ned. Yeah. He works in the ocean department. He’s the guy that programed how the waves work and everything.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is, if you end up looking into this more, be very cautious of the people that do the whole, “I’m a human being, and love is very important to me. Therefore, the entire universe is a simulation where love is the meaning of everything.” These simulation theories can easily become bastions for people that like to think that the purpose of 14,000,000,000 years of galaxy upon galaxy is me right here in 2017 with my Pokémon shirt on. That said, there are some pretty interesting theories out there.

I think by far the most common one is the classic black box theory. That in the base reality where the simulation was created, there’s something we want to introduce—maybe it’s an invention. Maybe it’s an economic theory, whatever—something we want to introduce, but we want to test it out first. We don’t want to jeopardize the operation at a base-reality level. Let’s make this simulation over here, and we’ll just kind of see how it goes. Things go well, we’ll do it. People start to look like extras from The Walking Dead, well, at least it wasn’t us.

Now, the first thing you got to think when you hear this sort of theory is, seems pretty inefficient to make this entire universe, billions of years, mass extinction after mass extinction just so that we lucky bipedal primates can find out what it’s like to have an iPhone 12. But on the other hand, what if that’s the way life emerged in base reality, and that’s the only way to run an accurate experiment? Hard to say.

You know, earlier in the episode we talked about the possibility of us as a species arriving at the conclusion that the abolition of suffering should be an intrinsic good. A theory I’ve seen before is that something out there could just as easily arrive at the idea that bringing about as much conscious life as possible is an intrinsic good, and that we aren’t part of some grand experiment here; our job is just to be, to exist. Then again, another common theory is that the purpose of this simulation isn’t intelligent life, but for some life form out there—almost certainly not a human being—this is to simulate gravitational anomalies or even just things that seem to be constant in the universe: laws of physics, things like that.

You know, there are scientists out there that say that one reason to suspect that we may be living in a simulation is that it seems possible. Kind of a weird statement, but what they’re saying is that there seems to be a very finite nature to things—things that almost look like they were programmed as built-in limitations: you know, cosmic speed limit, time, energy, e=mc2. Look, I’m not a physicist. I’m just saying there’s people out there that claim to be that say these limitations might mean that it’s possible for us to be in a simulated reality.

But I guess one thing we’ve got to talk about is the question probably everyone’s been wondering since I started talking about this: why does any of this matter to me? Sure, let’s say we’re living in a simulation. Let’s say we find out tomorrow. It’s certain. It’s a simulation. How does that change my life in the slightest bit? I mean, I still got to go to work. I still got to buy a rake down at The Home Depot. Why does this change my life at all?

Well, let me tell you something, person. It doesn’t, not even a little bit. I mean, barring you being at the top levels of the scientific community or any area where you’re trying to measure and study reality in the most accurate way possible—certainly is useful to them—but for most of us, finding out that you’re a simulated consciousness really doesn’t change your life at all. But maybe that in itself is a really profound thing to consider. I mean, think about it. You’ve ostensibly lived every day of your life up until this point believing that all this stuff you see around you is real, that it’s the fundamental reality. To question that reality is to be like Descartes, some pedantic guy from the 1700s, probably just a waste of your time.

Consider, though, something as fundamental to your existence as whether any of the stuff you see around you is actually real or not—finding out that you were totally wrong about that this entire time really doesn’t affect your day to day at all. I mean, just think about that. How easy would it be to go your entire life not ever really questioning that sort of thing, to feel such conviction about the fact that what you believe is true, to even question it is to be pedantic? How easy would that be? Now, how easy would that be to do with many of your beliefs, all of your beliefs?

Look back at what people have believed throughout history. How many people can you think of that lived this exact situation with almost everything they believed just because they happened to be born in the 1400s? What if all of them and all of us are not so different?

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.