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 An amusing, but fundamentally preposterous ''[[a priori]]'' argument which purports to prove by deduction, in the same way that [[Rene Descartes]] deduced the existence of [[rice pudding and income tax]], that either we are as good as dead, or we live in a Matrix.
-Spoiler: ''[[a priori]]'' arguments are conjuring tricks. They are fun and entertaining. but don’t try them at home. This one is practically impossible to try at home, of course, which is, perhaps, why apparently intelligent people who ought to know better, like [[Neil deGrasse-Tyson]], are sucked in by it.
+Spoiler: ''[[a priori]]'' arguments are conjuring tricks. They are fun and entertaining. But don’t try them at home.
+This one is practically impossible to try at home, of course — which is, perhaps, why intelligent people like [[Neil deGrasse-Tyson]] who ought to know better — fall for it.
 ===The argument===
-#If you accept a materialist perspective,<ref>i.e., that there is no God, or that our consciousness is not some manifestation of a non-material “spirituality” of some kind.</ref> and you have a sufficiently powerful computer, you can emulate human consciousness.
+#If you accept a materialist perspective [''i.e., that there is no God and that our consciousness does not manifest some non-material “spirituality” of some sort''] and you have a sufficiently powerful computer, you can emulate human consciousness.
 #If you can emulate human consciousness, you can simulate the existence of people like your forebears.<ref>It’s not clear why they need to be forebears but, okay let’s run with it. We suppose “forebears” to be wider than “ancestors” so will refer to any human beings who have actually existed, whether or not in a matrilineal line with the person running the simulation.</ref>
-#A sufficiently fine-grained, conscious, simulated human would be unable to tell itself apart from an actual biological human, and vice versa.<ref>There’s a God paradox thing here though: is a computer so powerful it can create such consciousness also so stupid it can’t ''tell'' is it a computer running a simulation? Can it be so clever it can fool itself, ''and'' so gullible it can be fooled by itself?</ref>
+#A sufficiently fine-grained, conscious, simulated human would be unable to tell itself apart from a biological human, and vice versa.<ref>There’s a God paradox thing here though: is a computer so powerful it can create such consciousness also so stupid it can’t ''tell'' is it a computer running a simulation? Can it be so clever it can fool itself, ''and'' so gullible it can be fooled by itself?</ref>
-#If your computers are powerful enough you can run a great many emulations of your forebears.
+#If your computers are powerful enough, you can run a great many emulations of your forebears.
-#If you ran enough emulations, simulated humans would vastly outnumber actual humans.
+#If you ran enough emulations, simulated humans would vastly outnumber biological humans.
 #If simulated humans vastly outnumbered biological ones and one could not tell whether one was biological or simulated, a rational human should assume itself to be simulated.
-To help Professor Degrasse-Tyson, here are some strong arguments against the simulation hypothesis:
+If this perplexes you, here are some arguments against the simulation hypothesis:
 ===We are the dead===
-To take the simulation hypothesis to its logical conclusion — a ''[[reductio ad absurdum]]'' — you needn’t travel very far. If you conclude intelligent life ''is not'' capable of creating a Matrix we are, therefore, dead — or at any rate well on the way to being dead.
+To take the simulation hypothesis to its logical conclusion — a ''[[reductio ad absurdum]]'' — you needn’t travel very far. If you conclude intelligent life ''is not'' capable of creating a “Matrix” of billions of fully conscious, naturally intelligent, emulated humans, we are, therefore, dead — or at any rate well on the way to being dead.
+If you conclude intelligent life ''is'' capable of creating a “Matrix” then — making the enormous assumption that computation power scales infinitely and in an inverse proportion to the energy required to make the necessary computations — there are likely to be countless simulations, only one of the real thing, so the odds are so close as to being certain you are a simulation, so you aren’t biologically alive either.
-If you conclude intelligent life ''is'' capable of creating a Matrix then, making the enormous assumption that computation power scales almost infinitely, there are likely to be countless simulations, only one of the real thing, so the odds are so close as to being certain you are a simulation, so you aren’t biologically alive either. This is a neat trick: it is not to say that your existence being material is impossible, but
+This is a neat trick: it is not to say that your existence being material is impossible, but just statistically vanishingly unlikely.
 If a Matrix isn’t possible, then — clearly — you ''can’t'' be in a Matrix, but you must also be incapable of developing a difference engine that could create a Matrix, so you wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.