Are we living in a simulation? | Bill Nye, Joscha Bach, Donald Hoffman | Big Think

Are we living in a simulation?
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Elon Musk famously believes we're living in a simulation, that constant technological improvement means we could be trapped inside a video game console created by a more advanced civilization.

In this video, Bill Nye, CEO of The Planetary Society, Joscha Bach and Donald Hoffman, both cognitive psychologists, all weigh in on whether this is base reality or a realistic fiction.

What insight from these three thinkers gets your mind ticking? Let us know in the comments! We're stunned at the thought that, if this is a simulation, humans might not be the central purpose of it; we may be an accident of a larger experiment.
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BILL NYE:

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life.

In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle’s home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live.” This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®” was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate.

While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children’s books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.”

Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries” airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye” airs on PBS stations across the country.
Bill’s latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens.” It’s about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you’ll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There’s also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It’s fun for him; he’s an engineer with an energy conservation hobby.

Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.
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JOSCHA BACH:

Dr. Joscha Bach (MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics) is an AI researcher who works and writes about cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. He is founder of the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the interactions of emotion, motivation, and cognition of situated agents. Bach’s mission to build a model of the mind is the bedrock research in the creation of Strong AI, i.e. cognition on par with that of a human being. He is especially interested in the philosophy of AI and in the augmentation of the human mind.
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DONALD HOFFMAN:

Donald Hoffman is professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. His writing has appeared in Scientific American and Edge, and his work has been featured in the Atlantic, Wired, and Quanta. He resides in Irvine, California.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Bill Nye: Are we living in a video game? Are we actually part of a giant simulation?

Joscha Bach: The question of whether we are living in a simulation is more related to something more narrow, that is: Is this computer program that we're living in intentionally created or is it just a natural occurrence?
Bill Nye: It seems to me it's a hard question to resolve because it's easy to imagine a game designer, a simulation designer, making it so sophisticated that you can't tell.

Joscha Bach: There is this argument that, for instance, Elon Musk made that we can build game consoles that create virtual worlds that look a lot like simulations to us...

[bigthink]

Hey Big Thinkers! Do you think that we are living in a simulation? if so, why do you think that?

[fmproductions]

I just noticed, the assumptions and hypothesis people made are grounded in rules and concepts found in this universe.
If this was a simulation, the laws of the "real" universe might not be different than the laws of our possibly simulated universe, and a lot of assumptions about how a simulation would run might be invalid then.

[jazznblues]

I am not even going to waste time thinking about this. We don't know, we probably will never know. So I am just going to make the best out of my "code".

[wisdom-for-all]

The beauty of all this is that Nothing is certain, and so Anything is possible. It is said that the only certainty is uncertainty. A practical question would be what could be “the best strategy” to live our lives irrespective of whether we live in a simulation or not. 🖖

[MCCABEWORLD]

The thing is, it really dosen´t matter because we don´t know it and maybe we never will know. So we live our life as good as we can and it will make no difference because life will be the same for us.

[azdjedi]

Bach's detail argument seems super weak to me. There's no evidence whatsoever that those distant galaxies are as detailed as planet earth. They only need to be rendered when measured.

[WordUnheard]

In January, I found out that I have a brain tumor. A glioma, they called it. After performing a biopsy, I was informed in February that it's a grade IV glioblastoma, and that I had 12-14 months to live. Then in March, I was prepared to get out there and live my life to the fullest, once I was finished with my chemo/radiation, the entire world shuts down. One day before my birthday. If we are in a video game or a simulation, my character was most definitely designed by someone or something that hates me.

[ProjectPetri]

you take for granted that "base reality" is anything like our reality.

[Cosmodjinn]

A simulation created by a programmer is similar to the question of a creator. It's a question which cannot be approached scientifically. The lack of evidence can always be claimed to be due to the degree of sophistication of the simulation. Unless evidence presents itself, the question is not science, but belief.

[Dia-Gnosis]

I find it to be one of the most convincing explanations. I wouldn’t have as hard a time considering the possibility that the incomprehensibly complex human organism is merely a futile mistake that was randomly generated in a material cosmos that sprang out of nothing if it wasn’t for my psychonautic investigations but the fact is, that consciousness with its myriad capacities for holding the devine ideas it does, is a massive spanner in the works as it is, let alone consciousness with the ability to simulate realities far more detailed and artistically advanced than this one.

[Lokityus]

There's only a great amount of detail when and where we're looking carefully. You wouldn't have to simulate all of quantum mechanics. That would even explain the double slit experiment.

[earlofdoncaster]

The amount of detail is not restricted if you use procedural generation.

[ContraryMary]

This is like that story of 4 blind men feeling different parts of an elephant. Each one describes the animal from their own perception of the part they're touching - the trunk, the foot, etc. Physics is saying the same thing as metaphysics with different words from their perception and language.

[awadheshjha]

Josha Bach made the most sense here of the three

[nikibronson]

Future humans are going to look back at us like we're silly children lol

[vd]

5:32 Mr.Joscha Bach says that the way we observe the world and the space around us cannot be a simulation as its far too sophisticated but what if the simulator itself is not complete which is why we are just able to observe it through telescope and not physically be there. So think of it like a preview of features yet to come in this simulation. The code for that is yet to be completely written. The probes we send in space to explore could be returning data the simulator feeds it with.

[kalash_nikov]

This video:
Donald Hoffman - given 1 minute to introduce his main claim about the nature of objective reality
Bill Nye - rambling on the level of 1st year philosophy student
Joscha Bach - main guest, actually had a bit of time to present his general view on the simulation theory

[philipcervenjak]

The probabilistic argument that we are in a simulation is fallacious. This is because the probability that we are in a simulation has not been shown to be dependent on the number of simulations we create. In other words, the fallacy is in taking a property of things inside the universe and extrapolating them to the universe itself.

Think of it this way: we are either in a simulation or we're not. We do not (and perhaps cannot) have the prior probability for either hypothesis, and both hypotheses equally explain the number of simulations we create, so we cannot say that one hypothesis is more likely than the other.

[mykobe]

They're assuming the base lvl reality is the same as ours. Same or similar "detail" lvl, etc.
That's a completely ridiculous assumption.

[spinning-around]

throughout all of my life I've never observed any glitches, except one which i attribute to teleportation between universes