Elon: Simulation Theory was Debunked in 1637

Whether in a simulation — or the mind of a demon — we cannot doubt our doubts.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Elon Musk regularly claims we live in a simulation. Others have followed his lead, like the scientist a couple weeks ago who claims we “choose at birth to become characters in an Ai” world. This same fellow quotes John 1 as proof. Others this month pointed to The Matrix and Plato. I suppose if you’re

David Bentley Hart

, you might make an argument for The Gnostic Turn. But Gnostic fairy tales are not, as a rule, what men like Elon mean when they posit things like this because they’re never stopping long enough to contemplate the really real as it pertains to the shadow. They’re focused on the shadow. Weaving it like Shelob. However, the analogy may well run upstream: one could argue that films like The Matrix and shows like 1899 make for great gnostic fairy tales.

As early as 2016, billionaires asked scientists for help breaking out of the computer simulation they’re trapped inside.¹ No, that’s not an Onion headline. In 2018, Musk went on a popular podcast and talked about it more. In 2021, the Scientific American claimed to confirm what’s utterly unconformable: that allegedly some of us living in a simulation had somehow supernaturally stepped outside said simulation to observe the rest of us living within it, only to condescend back into said simulation to report it to, of all possible newspapers, the Scientific American. Of course, as one commenter pointed out below, that seems to have been an April Fools’s joke. What they did do in 2020, however, in the original article I intended to cite is agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson and a comedian on the 50/50 coinflip — whether we’re in a simulation or not.

Then, again recently, Jack Dorsey thinks deepfakes will take us towards a simulated future to which Musk responded, “How do we know we aren’t already there?”

That one question is probably the most honest Musk has been about all of this nonsense. We’ll get to that question at the end.

The canary in the coal mine comes in this quote from the first Daily Mail piece:

Professor Vopson – whose research focuses on experimental and theoretical studies of applied and fundamental physics – stresses that these three scenarios are speculation and not something backed by scientific research.

The other word for “speculation” is where all science begins and ends, both in the hypothesis stage and the conclusion stage: philosophy. At either end, science is bracketed by syllogisms which border the land of ignorance. Wonder. Wonder is what you experience when you discover a new arena of your own ignorance.

Said in a negative way: this is all quite stupid of Elon.

Why?

Because simulation theory was debunked almost four hundred years ago, if not prior. In 1637, there was a groundbreaking text that, for better or worse, has come to define our age. The text was entitled Meditations on First Philosophy. I’ve talked about this text often in relation to the simulation theory in private conversations with Dr. Anthony Cirilla, the Boethius scholar, and with

Kendall Bates

of this newsletter. The best ideas and kindness to follow come from Anthony’s mind, not mine. Everything subpar or offensive? Blame me.

In any case, Meditations was written by the Frenchman René Descartes. In the first meditation, Descartes decides to “deceive himself” with a “false and Imaginary speculation.”

What does he speculate?

…not an Infinitely perfect God, the Fountain of truth, but that some Evil Spirit which is very Powerful and crafty has used all his endeavors to deceive me; I will conceive, the Heavens, Air, Earth, Colors, Figures, Sounds, and all outward things are nothing else but the delusions of Dreams, by which he has laid snares to catch my easy belief; I will consider my self as not having hands, Eyes, Flesh, Blood, or Senses, but that I falsely think that I have all these; I will continue firmly in this Meditation; and though it lies not in my power to discover any truth, yet this is in my power, not to assent to Falsities, and with a strong resolution take care that the Mighty deceiver (though never so powerful or cunning) impose not any thing on my belief.

Try it. Follow the hypothetical, Descartes’s speculative fiction. Deceive yourself for just a moment and imagine we live not only in a simulation, but in something infinitely worse than a mere simulation: a universal, worldwide, demonic hallucination of every observable phenomenon — anything to which we might possibly apply any scientific method, any observation, any test, any eye witness. Imagine we all, to a man, have been horribly, utterly bewitched and enchanted in our touch, pain, temperature, and two-point discrimination, proprioception, deep muscle pain, vibration sense, hunger, nausea, visceral pain, smell, vision, hearing, taste, equilibrium, detection of noxious or potentially damaging elements in the environment, or the feeling of damaged tissue. The list goes on of the ways we could be deceived — Descartes’s genres cover them all.

In this case of the Cartesian demon, we probably can't prove we're not in a simulation. It’s likely impossible, especially since you can’t prove a negative. What metric would you use? What observable datum?

You of course couldn’t prove it the other way either. Again, with what datum would you even begin?

At the end of the meditations, the final conclusion of the Cogito is to believe that no matter how steep the illusions:

1. It still says something about your identity if you kill a hologram and don't know for sure if it's a hologram and

2. If there is a fact of the matter to the universe it will be discoverable by some means.

Because Descartes was using classical terms for ultimate reality that wise guys like Socrates, Newton, Maimonides, Ibn Sina, Einstein, Aristotle, the authors of the Vedanta, John Polkinghorne (the Cambridge chair of physics), and Aquinas used, let’s restate it in his and their theological language:

1. The soul remains accountable to God for what it does in reference to what it can know and

2. The soul can trust God has revealed enough for life to be lived in a manner pleasing to God through grace. No deception is so powerful that it can shut out redemption fully. So even if we're in a simulation, I should still not beat up old ladies for their candy.

Otherwise, and this is key: how could you ever come up with the idea that you're in a simulation?

No deception is so powerful that it can shut out your redemption fully. So even if we're in a simulation, you and I should still not beat up old ladies for their candy or wallets or (in the case of stock brokers) retirement accounts.

And you and I and Elon should all still seek ultimate reality. Ultimate truth, beauty, and goodness.

Said in another way, it says a lot about the reality of the human mind that the idea of the simulation bothers you. And it does bother you. It bothers the billionaires. Why else would they seek help escaping the simulation they cannot prove they’re inside?

The awareness of the simulation means that there is a deeper reality beyond it that therefore does not negate your very real existence. Consciousness for Descartes, as I understand him, was sufficient.

Stated formally:

1. Either we are living in a simulation or we are not.

2. If we are not, then we are real.

3. If we are, we are aware of it by virtue of this conversation.

4. If we are aware of it, part of us is fundamentally outside the simulation and therefore really real.

5. So seek the really real, not the simulation theory.

Here’s why this is important:

Because Elon Musk even admits as much when he asked Dorsey, “How do we know we aren’t already there?” He thinks he’s being cute in trying to push Dorsey towards simulation theory, but the form of his question actually implies that we cannot possibly know if we are. This is precisely where Descartes’s evil demon comes into play:

We still doubt our doubts. If you doubt that you doubt your doubts, as Elon has, then you’re utterly lost with nothing to contribute to the conversation or the theory itself. Your doubts admit that reality exists and can be reasoned towards. But how would you know reality if you yourself weren’t real?

Should that have any bearing on our lives today?

Well Elon Musk has taken to calling those who disagree with him NPCs — non playable characters. As if he himself is the arbiter of real and unreal within his simulation, he’s judging these human beings as not really real in any sense — part of the delusion, the demonic hallucination, the simulation — instead of fellow players like him. If you’re looking for a sociopathic lack of empathy, there it is. This language parallels the dehumanization of the apartheid he now clearly fully embraces (sorry, Nelson Mandela) as well as the dehumanizing creation of “nonpersons” throughout the various gulags and pogroms of the last century. To claim his exclusive access to First Person Shooter access — or Main Character access or even game developer access — while disavowing his own religious or political or business enemies as Non Playable Characters is precisely this dehumanizing move. It’s also, coincidentally, why metaphysical debates are engaged, historically, in an open forum agora as opposed to private, privileged insight for a cult of some specific singular personality. One of the easiest ways to curb a cult is to check inner/outer doctrine in the public forum. The questiones disputates were, if nothing else, literally publicly disputed questions.

Said in another way, however much Elon would love to privatize the entirety of civil society and our great commonwealth, Elon cannot privatize his actions. The consequences of the actions that his own mind choses to manifest in this world, however much he’d like to try to privatize them and label dissident humans NPCs, have public consequences that radiate out into eternity as they do for every one of us. In the cosmic sense of the consequences of his actions upon humanity at large and upon the humans in his life, Elon Musk has never met a mere mortal. Simulation or no, Elon will still be accountable to Ultimate Reality for creating a debtor’s colony on Mars, building the world’s largest propaganda machine, cheating on his wives, exploiting the poor, the list goes on.

Elon, if you truly believe this is all some cosmic game, there’s only one way to win the simulation. I’ll tell you right now. Here’s the secret. Ready?

It’s one step:

1. Sell everything you have and give it to the poor and then you’ll have treasure in the realm of the really real.

Elon, you claim all the time that talking about solving our world’s problems is insufficient — that we need big dreams and bold vision to inspire humankind. But the problem, Elon, is if you destroy the world en route to saving it — either through your philosophy or through the means you use to achieve your ends — what is there left to save?

Elon, if you kill the humanity on the road to saving humanity, you’ve lost before you begun, my man. What good is it a man who gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Forfeits his life? Not merely his biology. I mean the good life. The meaning of life.

For he’s not the first to ask this question, if the mythology has the right of things. It’s an old story. If the old story is true, this question was first uttered by a dragon:

"Did God really say that or is this just a simulation?”

That’s a paraphrase.

Of course, for the rest of us mere NPCs, good luck getting a dragon to divest of power and money in order to face the really real. You really have to render a dragon down to the finest motes of its being — kind of like stripping a camel down to its hair and sinew in order to thread the strands of its self through the eye of the needle. Wasn’t Eustace Scrubb first clawed clean out of his scales?

If a dragon doesn’t choose to do this of their own accord, it typically happens anyways upon their death.

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1. This was also covered in The Conversation, Vice, The Week, Space, etc.