You do realize probabilities can’t really go below zero right? (In some theoretical cases it might be possible, but not this wouldn’t make sense).
+1 lol
i think musk’s argument is that based us being able to reach the point of creating realistic simulations that mimic reality completely within a few lifetimes, or at most 10,000 years, that some reality exists already that has made us their simulation. it’s fairly simple and hard to refute. if we can do it, some version of us in some paralell universe or on some other planet in our galaxy must have been able to do this already given how quickly we were able to do it and thus it is highly probable that we are subject to some other being’s experiment. as a deist, this is how i see god. god is the creator of our simulation. his form is unimportant. science has a hard time explaining the start of our universe (i don’t buy hawking’s “unmeasurable” pre-time, pre-physics beginning as it is unprovable). i thought this is pretty much the conclusion for all rational beings…
i also agree that it doesn’t really matter except that if we accept this reality, could we potentially escape the simulation and think like our creators? similar to how AI could theoretically reach our level of intelligence? if we’re in a simulation, can we commuicate with its creators? that’s where the thinking gets crazy, and potentially important.
Everything Musk as ever suggested has been suggested previously, by somebody else. Reminds me of people thinking Apple is an innovator.
Not a fan of that guy. I’m going to laugh hard when everyone in his Mars colony dies a horrible, and predictably unpredictable, death. Nature will crush his ill thought thru “plan”.
Descartes provides an answer in Meditation. Even if the deceiver tricks me about everything else, he cannot delude me about my own existence. "Let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. "Of course, this “I” which exists for certain does not include the physical body, which may be an illusion, but it is simply thinking self or mind.
Descartes touched on this as well in the 17th century.
“The first Meditation begins the process by considering empirical knowledge, what is learned by experience by means of our senses. His most powerful argument relies upon the impossibility of discerning waking consciousness from sleeping. Who has not dreamt of “waking up” while still asleep? When I awaken, how do I know the “reality” around me is not just another layer of illusion, a “dream-within-a-dream-within a dream”?”
This would seem consistent with everything we’ve seen from you to date.
Yes. Nitche considered it a comparison in Geneology of Morals to “It is lighting.” perspective by independent author:
"For english speakers we might imagine “it is raining.” Though “it” seems to suggest some independent agent of the action, the phrase simply means that raining is happening. Rather than saying with certainty that “I think.” Perhaps Descartes should merely concluded “thinking happens.”
Perhaps it is just the Grand evolutionary cycle… we were created in another reality and we will ourselves breed offspring realities.
So does the self (‘I’) not exist if ‘thinking happens’?
Yup, forecasts that end up being right a very high percentage of the time. Probabilities!