Philosophers and stoned college students have long been intrigued by the idea that we could be living in some kind of simulation but I was surprised to see this idea mentioned in the New York Times ¹. The NYT article summarizes this paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom who has also created a webpage with links to background reading, depictions of simulation scenarios in the media² and even someone’s wiki about ’simulism’³. The paper, while interesting and notable for getting into the New York Times, doesn’t say anything really new. It merely fleshes out the argument that if we believe that simulated individuals would have real experiences and that it is likely that humans will create many simulations of humanities past then you should assign a high probability to the proposition that you are actually being simulated.

While my intuition is that the idea behind this argument is correct I think the argument Professor Bostrom gives isn’t quite right. In particular the focus on what human civilizations are likely to do and ancestor simulation seems all wrong. There is no reason why totally alien beings could not simulate people nor to believe that our simulated universe resembles the real one in which the simulation is running much less that we are an earlier stage of the simulators history. Later I might think about how to fix this point but what made me want to write this post was the comment in the NYT that you could get out of the argument by either denying strong AI (a simulation wouldn’t be conscious) or by assigning a low probability to the chances that human beings will progress far enough to run such simulations.

This reminded me of the post I wrote a year ago about Sleeping Beauty in The Matrix arguing that a widely accepted solution to the sleeping beauty problem also implied we should believe the universe creates infinitely many individuals with the same memories and experiences as we have. Of course intuitively I think the conclusion of this argument is total crap but it’s tough to figure out why it’s wrong⁴. In short I think there is something very subtle going on in these sort of arguments that I don’t yet understand. If I ever figure it out I will post but until then I’m remaining skeptical.