From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about it?<\/p>\n
Today’s example of this is Nick Bostrom<\/a>‘s Simulation Argument<\/a>.<\/p>\n How could I have missed this? It’s so completely in my wheelhouse, and it’s been around forever in Internet time You can follow the link over to the Simulation Argument page<\/a> for the original paper<\/a>, a myriad of related information, and some commentary. <\/p>\n The argument essentially says that if you assume that our society has a decent chance of surviving to the “posthuman” stage, and that you assume that posthuman civilizations (or at least some small number of members thereof) would be interested in running a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history, then it follows that the odds are very good that you are actually living in a simulation. (Actually, he kind of makes the reverse argument that if you don’t think it’s likely that we’re in a simulation, then you must believe that either we won’t make it to posthuman, or that no posthumans would be interested in doing simulations, but the forward case will work for starting a discussion.)<\/p>\n The logic is pretty inexorable: a posthuman civilization has access to adequate processing power to run a very, very large number of simulations very easily, even if only one individual is doing it (and obviously, a larger effort at the simulations would mean a correspondingly larger number of them being run). The number of simulations rapidly outnumbers the number of actual people, and suddenly it’s more likely that any given experience is that of a simulation than an actual ancestor. <\/p>\n In the source paper, Bostrom goes into some detail on this, but if you don’t want the whole paper, but can take a two page summary to make this clearer, Bostrom has provided one<\/a>.<\/p>\n I don’t know how I missed this: probability theory, the old “brain in the vat<\/a>” thing, posthuman\/post-Singularity speculations, etc. It’s right up my alley. Hell, you could argue that it’s tangentially related to Russell’s travels through phenomenalism<\/a>.<\/p>\n Oh, and my favourite bit of the original paper?<\/p>\n It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Such computers would be \u201cvirtual machines\u201d, a familiar concept in computer science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine \u2013 a simulated computer \u2013 inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it\u2019s possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s like a PKD<\/a> short story in one paragraph.<\/p>\n I’m definitely going to have to chew through the rest of Bostrom’s stuff<\/a> now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about it? Today’s example of this… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[92,238,197,159],"class_list":["post-1154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-academic-papers","tag-philosophy","tag-singularity","tag-thinking","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-iC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}