Elon Musk never did Philosophy in University

and it shows.

For those who can't be bothered to click, it's a story on Musk getting up in front of an audience some place and doing some philosophy, badly: that we're all living in a video game in the future.

"If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?"

Thanks, Elon, I'll take it from here. If you've been hanging around the internet for awhile, you've probably seen these sorts of ideas before. And the fatal flaw in all of them is very simple: where's the evidence? Without evidence (and projecting past trends into the future while assuming we're actually living in the future is most certainly not evidence) then the entire argument is null and void. An interesting question on its own we could ask is "what would constitute good evidence for reality itself being falsified?" I suspect that the rabbit bites off its own head at this point, since if you could, in theory, have some evidence of a falsified reality, it seems to me the evidence would undermine itself, since any evidence in this [falsified] reality could, in itself, be falsified.

If you're still not convinced, let me rephrase the argument, but make it explicitly religious: "what if the rapture already happened, and this world we live in now is in fact heaven?" Does it still appeal? I'm guessing it doesn't.

So: Musk's argument (and all similar ideas) are stuff that, in short, you don't need to worry about. So why do these ideas kick about? I think it's part of a much larger story, where people act in a religious manner, even as the explicit references to religion are (heh) exorcised. When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his most famous quip, "God is dead" is actually meant a hell of a lot more (if you pardon the pun) than simply the nonexistence of a supreme being. He meant the death of the whole system of values that God and religion underpinned; a serious event in our civilization that went way beyond mere epistemology. Not only did religion give us our values, it gave us our ability to give meaning to human suffering. This is also why Nietzsche took the Atheists of his time to task: that if religion was a behavior, and not just one or a series of truth statements, you could easily behave in a religious manner without actually having explicit religious ideas. And of course, Nietzsche thought that Atheists did exactly that: condemn the belief, but still keep up the behavior. Given how many academics are atheists but still believe in objective morality today, I'd say it's still a relevant criticism.

TL;DR: You shouldn't be surprised that people with an abiding faith in technology to redeem the world start talking like a Renaissance monk. Nietzsche certainly wouldn't. And it certainly won't be the last time you'll see people take arguments that somebody like Rene Descartes would have familiarity with, add some math or science (numbers, typically) to fortify it, and then act like they've discovered something new.