Checks and Balance newsletter: Silicon Valley’s simulation idea is old and dull

When talking to our editor-in-chief recently, Elon Musk remarked that we might be living in a simulation. At least he is consistent on this point. The film “The Matrix” popularised the idea that humanity was trapped inside a simulation created by intelligent machines. But it gained a veneer of intellectual respectability after Mr Musk’s appearance at a Recode conference in 2016. There he argued that we could well be living in a video game. Around the same time, Sam Altman, who was then the boss of Y Combinator and now runs OpenAI, also advanced the idea that we might be living in a simulation. Both were, consciously or not, echoing a playful paper written by Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, titled “Are you living in a computer simulation?” which was published in 2003.

Perhaps it is no surprise the idea that the world could have been written by a programmer resonated with people who spent their days churning out code. It imbued well-capitalised nerds with godlike importance, putting a whole new spin on the “creator economy”. In any case, by the middle of the last decade “maybe this is a simulation” had become a thing to say to sound clever. Part of the appeal was that the people advancing it were so successful in other fields, so maybe they were right about this too. And partly it was that this seemed like an exciting new idea. In fact it’s a very old, rather dull one. Gorgias was already making similar arguments in the fifth century BC. His work is only known second-hand, through later references to it. But these give a flavour of how he liked to argue. Here is Sextus Empiricus, who was around in the second century AD, summarising Gorgias (the summary is by Bruce McComiskey):

“In what is titled ‘On Non-Existence or On Nature’, Gorgias develops three sequential arguments: first and foremost, that nothing exists; second, that even if existence exists, it is inapprehensible to humans; and, third, that even if existence is apprehensible, nevertheless it is certainly not able to be communicated or interpreted for one’s neighbours. And so Gorgias concludes that nothing exists in this manner, for if anything exists, either existence or non-existence exists alone, or existence and non-existence exist together. However, neither does existence exist alone, as Gorgias will suggest, nor does non-existence exist alone, as he will demonstrate, nor do existence and non-existence exist together, as he will also instruct. Therefore, nothing exists.”

Hopefully that’s clear now?

Gorgias and his fellow Sophists have a bad reputation, for good reason. Plato thought the Sophists, who travelled round the Greek world getting paid to teach people how to argue, were not philosophers at all. There’s a reason people don’t call themselves Sophists and the term has become an insult.

The Gorgias argument is a kind of extreme scepticism. Later philosophers advanced a different claim, that only one’s own mind is certain to exist (solipsism). If you were a committed solipsist, you would have to believe that your mind created the Washington Monument, or the Pacific Ocean, or even this newsletter (in which case, come to think of it, you are responsible for any shortcomings you detect).Silicon Valley solipsism is then a twist on this. Instead of your mind creating the world, the world around you is created by semiconductors engraved on silicon wafers. It is impossible to disprove, so that makes it appealing to disputatious people who love to argue but don’t hold any convictions on the big, and far more relevant, questions about how we should live together that philosophy and religion grapple with. As a guide to life, solipsism is shiny but vapid. We have known this for over 2,000 years, so it’s a bit depressing to be constantly reminded that this crowd has such a limited grasp of what the species has already figured out.