This Cartoon Explains Why Elon Musk Thinks We’re Characters in a Computer Simulation. He Might Be Right.

What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them.

It’s a simple probability, then, that tells us, since there are many more beings in simulated worlds than the physical real world, that the chances that we are simulated beings in a simulation is very high.

“Nobody thinks, ‘Well, if we do a simulation of a rainstorm, we’re all going to get wet,’ ” he said. “And similarly, a computer simulation of consciousness isn’t thereby conscious.”

Since the 1950s, discussions about AI have largely revolved around a big, tantalizing question: What can machines do, and where might they hit a wall? Will they ever truly think, understand, or maybe even become conscious? Could they reach the so-called “heights of human intelligence”? And then there’s that shadowy question looming in the backgroun

From this perspective, life is biological hardware running survival software.