Member-only story
A New Kind of Famous
Ask a fan of the Simulation Argument to explain it to you, they’ll huff and say “It’s not like The Matrix,” and then explain that their worldview is basically like the plot of the hit 1999 film The Matrix, in which our reality is actually a high-fidelity computer simulation. There are crucial differences, and not just because we can’t all download kung-fu expertise: the simulation argument doesn’t assume that there are physical humans in vats, just that human experiences might be the result of software, not reality.[1]
This is kind of crazy, but it’s garden-variety Pascal’s Wager crazy. If you think it’s possible, in principle, for a sufficiently elaborate computer simulation to be as compelling as the real thing, and if you think that computers will eventually get powerful enough to run such simulations, then you’d have to assume that since there’s only one actual reality (citation needed?), but computers can simulate arbitrarily many, then any given subjective life is much more likely to be simulated than real.
For example, suppose there’s a 0.1% chance that we can develop computers elaborate enough to simulate reality. Why assume we can do that just once? Why couldn’t we do it a million times? That means there’s a one in a thousand chance that only one reality in a million is really real, leading to overall odds-of-being-in-a-simulation of about 1,000 to one.