Elon Musk is bad at math

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Apr 11, 2024]

Is Elon Musk bad at mathematics? The suggestion may not shock readers who remember him foolishly paying $44 billion for Twitter (now X).

For that I give him a pass. He wanted Twitter badly and to him cost was almost an after-thought.1

Instead I want to focus on an egregious example of Elon’s math illiteracy.

He has famously claimed that we almost certainly live inside a simulation (there’s only a one in billion chance that we don’t, he said). To my knowledge, Elon still maintains this.2

At Code Conference 2016, Elon presented the math this way:

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation—probably being in a simulation—I think, is the following. Forty years ago we had Pong—like, two rectangles and a dot. That is what games were. Now forty years later we have photo-realistic 3-D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. And people have virtual reality, augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Indistinguishable. Even if the rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is right now, then you just say, okay, let’s imagine 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing in the evolutionary scale. 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 and 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? … There’s a one in billion chance that this is base reality. … I think it’s one in billions.3

Well, actually, Elon, there’s a massive mathematical flaw in your argument.

No one spoke up because, well, you’re the richest (second richest?) man in the world. Yet you’re the Emperor with no clothes.

Red Herrings

The problem is this: Elon thinks the number of human-built computers running human-created virtual reality games “indistinguishable from reality” is pertinent to calculating the odds that we humans ourselves exist in a similar virtual reality.

That’s a math blunder.

He’s spewing numbers which have nothing to do with the proposition at hand.

If you took high school math, you likely encountered “word problems” with specious information—numbers thrown in which are immaterial to calculating the answer. That’s what Elon does here—obviously without realizing it.

Why is the number of virtual reality games indistinguishable from reality, whether running on set-top boxes, laptops, VR headsets, VR glasses, even AR/VR contact lens in the future—why is it immaterial?

Because the one sure thing we know about all these games—now or in the future—is that human beings created them, human beings are playing them, and although the games create an illusion of us being immersed within the game’s world and interacting with its characters, we nevertheless still exist outside it all.

Necessarily so, since we humans will have built (or at least purchased) the hardware and downloaded the AR or VR program running on it. Some of us will work in the data centers which host the servers necessary for simultaneous play, and so on.

After all, Elon’s claim is not that we will someday magically find ourselves trapped inside our own games because they have reached some critical level of realism—at least I hope no one reading this is so dissociated from reality.

Elon’s claim is that some superior, alien intelligence, unknown to us, has created this reality that we live in, just as we (now or in the future) create virtual realities which seem just like the world around us—and that the fictional characters we create in these future games will have consciousness and be alive just as we are.

And yet—whatever worlds we create will nevertheless exist within our world and its realities. For example, a power outage or battery failure will still bring the game to a crashing end. But the power outage will not end us.

Likewise, food we consume within the virtual reality will not actually end up in our stomachs, unless we concurrently eat in real life. If this is not clear, please see a medical professional (preferably IRL).

So the billion virtual reality games 10,000 years from now are a red herring. Not a single one of them will be an example of a virtual world within which we biologically exist or in which any fictional character in any fictional game biologically exists.

Thus it’s mathematically invalid to use them to estimate odds that our own biologically existence occurs inside a simulation.

To Be Clear…

If this is not clear, let me help you understand it mathematically, step by step.

Take an actual, biologically produced orange (one plucked from a tree or purchased from a grocery store) and put it on a table in front of you. What do you have?

A table with an orange (which you could peel and eat if desired) on it. How likely is it that the orange is not real but a simulation?

If you are unsure, peel it and eat it—was it a simulation or did something actually go into your stomach?

Okay, if you ate the orange, pluck or buy another and put it on the table.

Now let’s add the red herring. Or rather red apples. A billion red apples. More specifically, a billion simulated red apples. (You can use your Google Glasses or Meta Quest or Vision Pro to simulate the apples. And yes, you’ll need to make the table bigger.)

Math quiz: did adding the billion apples make it more likely that the original orange on the table is now not an orange at all but an apple?

Did the orange transform into something it is not because we imagined (or simulated) a billion apples?

No.

Does creating a simulated apple mean that all apples and all oranges and all tables and all people must be simulated?

No.

But what if we create a billion, tens of billions, hundreds of trillions of simulated apples?

No. The orange is still an orange.

All Elon has done is: introduce a billion red herrings and gob-smack himself with the large number of simulated herrings floating around in his head.

In Elon’s Defense

Wait.

Maybe Elon thinks the orange was an apple all along. Maybe he thinks all fruit, by definition, are simulated fruit. Oranges don’t exist unless simulated.

There is almost some truth to this.

When I see an orange on the table, my brain creates my experience—the roundness, the color, the citric smell and so on. These orange properties are produced by my brain to create a virtual reality “orange” which stands in for the physical whatever lying on the table.

Not only that, in similar fashion my brain created the table, the room, everything.

The simulation is inside me.

It’s my creation.

So wait—is there anything outside me, outside the virtual reality created by my brain? Is there a physical orange, a physical table, a physical room out there?

Of course.

But importantly, they are not of the same sort as the simulation. The simulation is a sensory, experienced construction produced by the brain to stand in for whatever real stuff is actually out there.

But maybe, just maybe, Elon doesn’t think there is anything real, that is anything other than simulation, out there. Maybe he doesn’t think physical stuff exists unless it’s created/simulated by a mind. Or a Mind.

In other words, maybe what Elon is guilty of is not bad math, but idealist philosophy.

Except—somewhere among the billions of simulated realities, he thinks there is one “base reality”. So strike that. We’re back to bad math.

The New Design Argument

As a matter of fact, if we step back, we see that the claim that we live inside a simulation created by some outside being is little more than the 21st century version of the Design Argument for God’s existence.

And like the Design Argument, it is not a logical argument at all, but an analogy.

And the analogy is this: like the characters that exist inside the virtual realities of our popular games, perhaps we too live inside a virtual reality created by some intelligent being or beings.

Well, it’s a thought. How do we evaluate its likelihood?4

Not the way Elon tries to do it.

Like the Design argument, its strength lies in misunderstanding what is going on when we know the world. If you buy into the core beliefs of supernaturalism, you might find the Design analogy compelling because it fits your worldview and your understanding of it. If you don’t buy into those beliefs, you will find the whole thing silly.

The original design argument drew its inspiration from the invention of clocks. These newfangled time-telling mechanisms impressed people during the middle ages because clocks operated automatically—at least until the spring needed to be rewound.

And this led to an idea: maybe earth is just one big clock designed by God. After all, every clock we know of is designed by an outside clockmaker: maybe the physical world was designed by an outside maker as well.

In Elon’s version, he would postulate billions and billions of clocks, as if large numbers made the analogy more convincing. Or more probable.

“There is only one chance in a billion that the earth is not a clock.”

Sorry Elon. This is math illiteracy.

Simulations, Simulations

Notice that the observation that humans might eventually create simulations that seem just like the real world is not something that matters much. It is, of course, where the 21st century version of the analogy gets its start, but the analogy doesn’t require that humans ever successfully create a convincing virtual world.5

Now, if we could create virtual worlds that actually contained sentient physical beings like us (rather than just fictional simulations of such), that would be both impressive and miraculous. If we could ever become such gods, well then others might have done so before us, and others before them.

But here’s the thing about simulations: they are simulations. They stand in for real things (even if fictional) and are not actually what they presumably simulate.

And we know this well, because hominids have been creating simulations for tens of thousands of years, starting with cave paintings and carvings.

A drawing of an object is a simulation of that object.

Horses on cave walls were simulations of horses, for all we know convincing enough to early hominids to make them believe the painting could control the living horse.

Perhaps a prehistoric Elon Musk looked at the Lascaux cave paintings and wondered if he and his tribe were themselves painted on the wall of some great cave somewhere, under the watchful eye of a celestial god. (Only one chance in whatever it wasn’t so.)

Paintings, frescoes, sculptures, carvings and masks were for thousands of years our chief form of simulating reality. And our simulations got better and better over the centuries. Painters got good at simulating at creating realistic pictures. Then we invented photography, followed by motion pictures, movies with sound, television, computer games and, today, 3D virtual reality.

But so far, none of our simulations of real things have ever turned into real things themselves, at least not in the same sense of existence.

There is of course a secondary sense in which a cartoon character like Mickey Mouse has real existence, at least culturally. But Mickey Mouse has never become a blood and bones biological being in the sense that we are.6 Nor does anyone expect this to happen—unless they are mentally ill.

Yet advocates of the simulation hypothesis seem to believe that if only we can make cartoon Mickey’s world realistic enough to become indistinguishable from reality, and do the same for Mickey’s virtual body—presto! He will become a real, experiencing physical being, just like us.

Somewhere, somehow, at some point in perfecting the illusion, magic will happen.

That’s right.

This is magical, supernatural thinking. A belief quite literally in picture magic. Call it “simulation” magic.

The Simulation Inside Us

There is also an intellectual confusion going on here about what reality is.

What is being confused with reality is the simulation (vision, sound, touch, taste, smell) of the world which our brain creates to “stand in” for the world. This biologically-created simulation, however, is inside us. We are not inside it.

Now, there is something important to note about the biologically-created simulation happening inside us: it is computational in nature, composed of objects with properties and information that can be sliced and diced. Thus our brains provide us with a simulation of the world which is “knowable”—and indeed we can’t “know” anything which is not simulation for this precise reason.7

But if the simulation—all simulations—are actually inside us, product of our brains, then it follows that we (the biological beings producing the simulation) cannot be inside it (though of course we can put a representation of ourselves into it). We are necessarily on the outside hosting the simulation on the inside, just as we are necessarily outside any art or craft or motion picture or computer game which is triggering a brain simulation of reality within us.

Which presents us with another way to look at how ridiculous Elon’s logic is here:

Human brains have been creating these realistic simulations of reality (which we almost always naively fail to distinguished from reality) for millions of years, and millions of years before us the brains of other species have been doing the same.

Long before motion pictures, long before Pong, these realistic simulations of the physical world have been in existence. Again, I’m referring here to the sensual experiences we each have every day, experiences created by our brains and interpreted to be the world existing around us. Recall what I wrote earlier,

When I see an orange on the table, my brain creates my experience—the roundness, the color, the citric smell and so on. These orange properties are produced by my brain to create a virtual reality “orange” which stands in for the physical whatever lying on the table.

Not only that, in similar fashion my brain created the table, the room, everything.

The simulation is inside me.

It’s my creation.

In what rational sense can this be conceived as evidence that some other species on some other planet has imagined earth and all its species into existence as simulations in their own brains, in their own computer programs?

At best, it is an off the wall brain-fart analogy, a silly “what if?”

What if???

It boils down to this: What if I’m trapped in a story someone else is telling?

After all, millions maybe billions of stories have been told. If there are aliens elsewhere, quintillions of stories have been told.

Wow! The odds that I’m nothing but a character in a story must be immense.

The more stories I can imagine being told or enacted somewhere, somehow the more certain it must be that I don’t have independent existence, I’m just a character in a story not my own.

“…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? … There’s a one in billion chance that this is base reality.”

We tell stores. We tell stories about others. What if they are trapped in our stories?

What if we only exist in someone else’s story?

Now imagine billions of stories—suddenly the off the wall brain-fart analogy magically acquires high probability in the minds of math-illiterates.

But the stories are so detailed!

They have moving pictures, and the pictures look and move just like us! Therefore they are living, breathing biological beings just like us—trapped in the computer story.

Uh-oh, we must be too!

Now, on top of all this silliness, Elon also believes that minds can be downloaded to a hard drive to achieve immortality8 (by “download” he doesn’t mean “writing books” either).

By definition, his is a supernatural worldview.9

Behind all his nonsense is the gullible belief that mind is primary, that mind must come before matter; that the other way around is unthinkable.

And Elon “proves” it with brain-fart math.

Footnotes