Simulation Argument Goes Mainstream

OXFORD PHILOSOPHER NICK BOSTROM (simulated)

I first heard about Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument back in 2001, when he was still working out the details. It was then (and still is) one of the most mind-boggling and disconcerting concepts I'd ever encountered.

Over the last six years, many people within the small and relatively closed future-conscious community have discussed and debated the idea, but now it has hit the mainstream. From today's New York Times:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. . .

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. . .

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

Assuming Bostrom's hypothesis is correct, as appears quite likely, it would be nice to know how long we can expect our particular simulation to keep running. Is it possible that someday everything could just come to a sudden stop? If so, then wh

Comments

[Nato Welch]

"If so, then wh"

Hah! Cute.

"Peace is boring, Dude."

The thing about this attitude is that it's a mistake to make assumptions about who the simulators of our universe are, and what motivates them. We get the likelihood that we're simulated from the likelihood that we're going to be running lots of sims in our own future - but while we also have some ideas about what motivates us to run sims //now//, we have less certainty about the diverse variety of motivations that we could adopt to run sims in the future - especially the very deep future, thousands or even millions of years hence.

I wouldn't overstretch the argument to try to give us more information than it warrants.

[Jonathan]

If this is a simulation being run that is totally indistinguishable from reality, then there is really no point in wondering about it, is there? It has absolutely no impact or importance to our reality. Wondering about when they will stop the simulation is also a waste of time as I see it. None of this speculation changes any of our situations one way or another, although it is kind of fun to think about.

[Fredrik Josefsson]

We might have created this simulation ourselves. We escaped into our own MMORPG and forgot about the real real reality? And we might do it again—just for fun!

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Heh, thanks, Fredrik. I recently a terrific self-published SF novella by Simon Funk called After Life that follows a similar premise. Check it out!

[ed]

With quantum mechanics providing a basis for random events in a universe, you also have the means for interaction between the creator and the universe without the creator revealing themselves.