Saturday, June 14, 2003

God, I hope so. Will someone please reboot? Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?. Nick Bostrom, a transhumanist, poet, philosopher, and Oxford Research Fellow has been generating a lot of interest in the computational underpinnings of reality with his web site to investigate whether we may be living out our lives in a computer simulation. Slashdot and other media have been pointing to his Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, published in Philosophical Quarterly: ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 'posthuman' stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed. A more digestible summary article accompanying this paper, The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High, was recently published in Times Higher Education Supplement. [JML :: Science Fiction] 5:06:19 PM    comment []

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