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Are You Living in a Simulation?

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Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University Published in Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255. [First version: May 2001] [simulation-argument.com] pdf-version: [PDF] 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. Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let

Are You Living in a Simulation? Are you living in a computer simulation? by Nick Bostrom Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University Published in Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255. [First version: May 2001] [ simulation-argument.com ] pdf-version: [ PDF ] 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

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