That’s a really neat link. Thanks. That’s a paper by the director of FHI, Nick Bostrom, also one of the sponsors of LW. Just to summarize and to discuss, it essentially sets up three mutually exclusive possibilities. One, that post-human civilizations aren’t significantly interested in running earth-like simulations, two, that post-human civilizations just don’t make it (e.g., doomsday scenarios), or three, we actually live in a computer simulation ourselves. It doesn’t really argue that the third scenario is so likely, it just (roughly) establishes that these scenarios are mutually exclusive. This all comes under the main (fairly well established) belief that future computing power is capable of these sorts of large-scale simulations.
The argument and the paper is actually pretty reasonable, but the question of whether or not post-human civilizations would want to run earth-like simulations is the sticking point. Sure, it’s possible, but the resources required are huge, the upkeep involved, and so on...
I guess another main criticism you might make of the paper is that it relies pretty heavily on “Drake’s equation” type of reasoning where you don’t really know if you’ve gotten all the dependencies correct. It’s still valid it’s just highly simplistic and so somewhat suspicious on those grounds. And to boot, I think his N_sub(I) variable is actually mis-indicated… but maybe I was just reading a typoed draft or misunderstanding.
Maybe most interestingly, if you decide we’re in a simulation, then you have to wonder if there isn’t a long loop of father/grandfather/great-grand-dad/etc simulations, and the guys that are simulating us are just being simulated themselves. Anyways this is getting long so I’ll just recommend the article and leave it here.
That’s a really neat link. Thanks. That’s a paper by the director of FHI, Nick Bostrom, also one of the sponsors of LW. Just to summarize and to discuss, it essentially sets up three mutually exclusive possibilities. One, that post-human civilizations aren’t significantly interested in running earth-like simulations, two, that post-human civilizations just don’t make it (e.g., doomsday scenarios), or three, we actually live in a computer simulation ourselves. It doesn’t really argue that the third scenario is so likely, it just (roughly) establishes that these scenarios are mutually exclusive. This all comes under the main (fairly well established) belief that future computing power is capable of these sorts of large-scale simulations.
The argument and the paper is actually pretty reasonable, but the question of whether or not post-human civilizations would want to run earth-like simulations is the sticking point. Sure, it’s possible, but the resources required are huge, the upkeep involved, and so on...
I guess another main criticism you might make of the paper is that it relies pretty heavily on “Drake’s equation” type of reasoning where you don’t really know if you’ve gotten all the dependencies correct. It’s still valid it’s just highly simplistic and so somewhat suspicious on those grounds. And to boot, I think his N_sub(I) variable is actually mis-indicated… but maybe I was just reading a typoed draft or misunderstanding.
Maybe most interestingly, if you decide we’re in a simulation, then you have to wonder if there isn’t a long loop of father/grandfather/great-grand-dad/etc simulations, and the guys that are simulating us are just being simulated themselves. Anyways this is getting long so I’ll just recommend the article and leave it here.