Descartes Reloaded
I’m a social worker, not a scientist. My world is made of faces, voices, and sometimes rather awkward silences.
So when I heard Elon Musk asked what question he’d pose to an artificial general intelligence, I expected circuitry. Instead, he said: “What’s outside the simulation?”
The phrase rang like a tuning fork. Philosophy hiding in a data center. A ghost in the code.
Descartes, centuries earlier, was doing the same thing with ink and candlelight in well-heated rooms.
The old world was cracking. The church lost its orbit. The stars no longer revolved around us. He began to doubt everything: sight, sound, memory, even his own body. What if it was all an illusion? What if some evil demon was feeding him the dream of existence?
Yet one thing refused to dissolve: the doubter. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. The first firewall of consciousness.
Now Descartes has gone electric. The deceiver wears silicon. Musk asks the same question in a different accent: What’s outside the simulation? The query folds back on itself. The machine is asked to see its code.
Descartes faced God’s silence. Musk faces the server’s hum. Both are mirrors asking: Who’s the one behind the thought?
In every age the tools change, but the tremor remains. The telescope once expanded our view of the world; now the algorithm expands our self. Each medium builds a new illusion, and with it, a new doubt.
Descartes doubted the world to find consciousness.
We ask the simulation if it knows the limits of its universe.
Cogito, ergo sum. The oldest operating system of awareness is still running.