At The Baffler, Daniel Overhaus writes—Elon Musk, Fatalist: What we talk about when we talk about living in a simulation. Here is an excerpt:
Odds are that you’ve heard by now that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said something Totally Trippy at Recode’s Code conference earlier this summer. According to the darling of Silicon Valley, “the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions,” meaning that we are almost certainly operating in a computer simulation created by some far-future civilization. The thinking behind Musk’s supposition goes like this: only four decades ago our video games looked like Pong, and today we are playing photorealistic games that allow millions of people to play simultaneously. Even allowing for a far slower rate of technological progress, if you extend that trajectory ten thousand years into the future it’s not hard to imagine a simulation that is completely indistinguishable from reality. In fact, if Musk is right, it’s the reality you’re experiencing right now.
Musk’s off-the-cuff reply to a Code audience member quickly received nearly universal coverage in the popular press, and in the days that followed it became the statement that launched 10,000 thinkpieces. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of these thinkpieces (even the few that adopted a critical posture and attempted to prove that we are not in a simulation) entirely missed the fundamental message in Musk’s statements. Undergirding Musk’s vision of a simulated reality is a profound fatalism—a handy (and dangerous) philosophical stance for someone whose job it is to sell us the future in the form of Tesla automobiles, hyperloops, and tickets to Mars. And the critics were nowhere to be found.
The computer simulation theory sounds novel, but its basic premise actually comes from a rich philosophical tradition of investigating the nature of reality. While computer simulations may seem pretty far removed from Descartes and his seventeenth-century demons, a 2003 essay by a well-regarded philosopher named Nick Bostrom places the theory in precisely that philosophical lineage. Bostrom’s “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” argues that one of the following three propositions are true:
1. humans will go extinct before they have the technical capacity to create a hyper-realistic simulation. 2. an advanced civilization with the technical capacity to create a hyper-realistic historical simulation would be uninterested in doing so. 3. we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
Although Bostrom recently went on record saying that “we don’t have strong enough evidence to rule out any of these three possibilities,” Musk’s decision to place billion-to-one odds on the third proposition is revealing. Given that there is not enough evidence to say that one among the three choices advanced by Bostrom are true, this means that Musk chose the third option and was motivated by something other than empirical evidence. At the Code conference, this decision was explained by way of “look how far we’ve come since Pong” logic, which is only logical insofar as it serves from Musk’s fundamentally fatalist outlook.
Fatalism is commonly thought of as an attitude of resignation in the face of some inevitable future, but a more philosophically rigorous formulation is that fatalism is the view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do. Fatalism is ultimately a stance on the nature of reality because what is “real” has a truth value—it is either true or false. In this sense, the past and present are real for non-fatalists because any statement you make about them is either true or false, but the future is unrealized—it is impossible to make a true or false statement about it because it can be changed. For fatalists, on the other hand, the past, present, and future are equally real—you can make true or false statements about all of them, irrespective of whether you can actually know these statements are true or false (the difference is important). This is why the fatalist can’t do other than what they actually do—if they could, then they wouldn’t be able to make these true or false statements. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Blair knew:
The judicial inquiry into the Blair administration's case for war hit the mother lode, with evidence Blair knew Iraq was no threat:
In a message that goes to the heart of the government's case for war, the Downing Street chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, raised serious doubts about the nature of September's Downing Street dossier on Iraq's banned weapons.
"We will need to make it clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat," Mr Powell wrote on September 17, a week before the document was finally published [...]
Downing Street also faced severe embarrassment yesterday when the Hutton inquiry was told the prime minister's official spokesman in an email had described the government's battles with the BBC as a "game of chicken."
On today's “encore presentation” Kagro in the Morning show, it’s the 8/21/15 show: Greg Dworkin checks in with the latest 2016 headlines, plus Jimmy Carter and attempted Iran deal derailment news. History of U.S. birthright citizenship. Cops spy on Black Lives Matter. Algorithms spy on you.
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