The trippiest conversation you will hear all day

I am not a science-fiction fan. I’ve never seen an episode of Star Trek, or any of the Star Wars movies, or the Matrix, or any virtual reality Sci-Fi show. I’ve never had any interest in anything with a Sci-Fi theme. I don’t know why.

That’s why I’m fascinated that this topic intrigues me so much — virtual reality. The question of whether our lives are actual reality or just part of a video game.

A new study from Bank of America surveyed “leading scientists” who say that there is a 20-50 percent chance that we are living in a computer-simulated virtual reality. I’m kind of a face-value person and I don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this. I tend to be dismissive of it. But I spent a lot of time listening to people trying to articulate this notion.

Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk is among those people. He argues that we are not in base reality, but some product of some very advanced computer simulation. And he’s not joking. The compelling part of his argument starts by pointing to the first Pong game that was released in 1972. It was a blip with a couple rectangles. Look at what we have now — virtual reality. With that rate of advancement, reality, it would be indistinguishable from a computer simulation — or virtual reality. My former boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy, also seems to embrace that same line of thought.

I spoke with Dr. Rich Terrile, a NASA scientist who has developed missions to Mars discovered moons, who explained the theory to me. It’s a trippy conversation and you should definitely listen to it in its entirety. But here are the highlights.

Virtual reality and our lives

Explain the theory in layman’s terms:

“If we look at where we are today technologically and where we are going to be in the very near future, we are, computationally, with our super computers at the stage now where we can build machines that are comparable in speed to what the human brain does.”

“Now these machines aren’t conscious. We’ll say that right off the bat. We believe consciousness is an artifact of the complexity of the architecture of our brains. It is an emergent property of that. There is nothing supernatural about self-awareness or consciousness. That’s the premise we make. In science, the premise we make is that everything follows from the laws of physics.”

“Think about if I had a machine that could simulate realities for you – a virtual reality machine. You put on the goggles and you’re experiencing a virtual reality world absolutely indistinguishable from the real world. Then you take the goggles off and you come back to the real world. How do you know you’ve really actually taken the goggles off or that’s not part of the simulation. There’s kind of a blurring of lines between what is real and what is a simulated environment.”

You are saying it’s possible that we are currently in a computer simulated environment?

That’s based on the fact that in the very near future we are going to be able to create billions of individual virtual environments. If we populate them with billions, even trillions of artificially intelligent entities – game units. Right now our game units we play with behave like humans but they’re not conscious. It’s likely in the very near future we can make those units have consciousness.”

Who created this?

“Us”

Us? But we are in our present day reality?

“You think you are. Now here’s the mind blower: We have this assumption and it’s kind of built into our thinking and we don’t even think it’s an assumption, but the assumption is that we are the first. That everything that’s happened to us in the universe – evolving from chemistry, evolving biology, evolving consciousness — happened to us. But what if it didn’t? What if we are a subsequent generation, we are a simulation of some generation that did this years ago – maybe millions of years ago.”

Last Wednesday was really boring for me. Why would they make it so boring if they could do anything they wanted with me?

“Well, because they are in control and you’re not.”

Do you really believe this? Do you agree there is a likelihood that that’s the reality we live in?

“I do, actually. The statistical argument … is based on the fact that there will be many more opportunities for living in a simulation in the very near future than there are today. So what’s to say we’re not already there?”

Are we sentient beings? Do we have free will?

“It’s not clear. We appear to have free will but if you talk to neuro-biologists, it’s not clear at all that we have free will.”

You don’t believe you have free will?

“It appears that I do, I feel like I do but it’s not very clear that we actually do have free will.”

So somebody chose you to accept this interview?

“That’s right. Or I did. We don’t know the answer to that.”

You are an Atheist, right?

“That’s a very, very interesting question. I used to be. One can ask, what does it take, what do you have to believe to be an Atheist? You have to believe that there is an origin story of the universe that is independent of a God. If the origin story of our universe is actually one of simulation, then there really is a God. The simulator has every property that we attribute to a God.”

Are you an Atheist?

“It’s not clear.”

Do you believe there’s a God?

“If we are in a simulation, then there is a higher level of consciousness, there is a so-called after-life or above life or something. Some other layer above ours and that’s a very, very interesting concept. I’m not sure that doesn’t qualify as a religion.”

I’m a Christian. I assume you’re not a religious person in the Christian sense?

“No, not in any practicing religion that you’re aware of.”

I’m trying to understand how it’s easier to believe we’re an iteration of a far-advanced civilization than thinking of a religious God?

“Because I’m a scientist and I believe in what we can experience. I believe in the laws of physics and everything we can test in science. And my idea of this actually fits into our world and our universe. You can actually construct the kind of situation I’m talking abbot in our world without invoking magic or miracles or supernatural or anything else. Religions all require something that is beyond science.”

Human emotions like love and empathy: How did they evolve in your view? Where did the mysteries of life come from?

“We believe emotions and things like that, they are emergent behaviors that occur when you develop self-awareness.”

Doesn’t self-awareness, at some level, suggest something beyond what can be explained scientifically?

“It’s no more complex than having a collection of atoms and then, all of a sudden, from a collection of atoms you get something like fluid dynamics and pressure and temperature and things like that. That’s not inherent in a collection of little particles but it emerges from it. The complexity of self-awareness and intelligence and all of these other things that are inherent in it – love, possession, fear, not wanting to cease in existence – all of these things could be emergent properties.”

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