Elon Musk on simulation argument: what the evidence says · JRE #1169
“Well, the argument for the simulation I think is quite strong because if you assume any improvement at all over time, any improvement, 1%, 0.1%, just extend the timeframe, make it a thousand years, a million years, the universe is 13.8 billion years old.”
What the evidence says
Musk is restating philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2003 "simulation argument," which is a trilemma, not a proof that a simulation is near-certain: it holds that at least one of three propositions must be true, (1) civilizations almost always go extinct before becoming capable of running ancestor simulations, (2) advanced civilizations are unlikely to bother running such simulations, or (3) we are almost certainly in a simulation. Musk's framing, both in this 2019 conversation and in earlier public remarks ("the odds that we are in base reality is one in billions"), assumes the first two propositions are false without justifying that assumption, which is the weakest link in the argument according to philosophers and astronomers who have examined it. A 2024 Bayesian analysis by Columbia astronomer David Kipping formalizing the trilemma found the probability that we are living in base (non-simulated) reality to be roughly 50-50, not the near-certainty Musk asserts, and noted that Musk's confident claim only follows if propositions one and two are assumed false, an assumption he does not defend. The underlying premise remains a widely discussed but empirically untestable philosophical thought experiment rather than an established scientific finding, and no consensus exists among physicists or philosophers that we are, or are likely to be, living in a simulation.