The bags under his eyes.... He looks like a man who hasn't had a good night's sleep in months....

I believe it

So, because it's possible, it's highly likely? We have the nuclear capacity to destroy the world several times over but we haven't done it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Planck length = universe's pixel resolution. It's HD.

This says quite a lot about Elon Musk, I feel.

I'd counter his argument by saying its only been 40 years since pong, too short a time to be extrapolating too far into the future. I believe we are approaching a very real physical limit to transistor size, so I don't think its necessarily a given that in another 40 years we will have moved on the same distance. Basically for all we know this could be a momentary blip for a century or so.

but yeah, if you agree that we will continue to create increasingly sophisticated and powerful computers, and that humans continue to be for a little while, then ok, I think it is feasible that we could create a virtual world, which would make me quite terrified that our reality might suddenly BSOD.

Not exactly. He's saying that, given his premises, there will be many many more simulated worlds. Therefore you're left without much likelihood your experience is in the real one and not a 'matrix'.

I don't know as much about this argument as I'd like, but my gripe with it is that it assumes that there is a more efficient way of modeling reality, with 100% fidelity, than reality itself. It seems a lot to implicitly take onboard. How could you model the exact position of some subatomic particle without involving at least one such subatomic particle?

Help me wrap my head around this... He's saying:

There is one in billions chance that our reality is base reality.

In other words, it is overwhelmingly likely that our world is someone else's simulation because of the presumption that eventually we ourselves will be able to create simulations as real as our world universe is (which will then eventually create their own simulations as real as their respective universe is, and so on)...

Briefly: if it will be possible to create realistic simulations, we must already be in one.

I don't know if I can buy into that. I'd better not get into a jacuzzi with Elon or things could get heated.

Ok, but in the future there will be a race advanced enough to create a simulation of a race advanced enough to create a simulation... and so on. Where does it end, and isn't that an appeal to god considering its unprovable and precludes any experiment to disprove it? No matter how you go about it, someone will say "That's what the simulation wants you to think!"

Basically we're back to the god problem - only this time our future computers are advanced enough to be indistinguishable from god in our own reality. We don't discuss god in science because it's the beginning and end of every hypothesis.

Any sufficiently lengthy simulation has a built-in checkpointing mechanism. So if there was a BSOD, we could just restart at the most recent checkpoint.

This also brings about the possibility of the universe being only 4000 years old, or only 0.001 seconds old - with all of reality and your memories implanted from that checkpoint.