Are We Living in a Simulation? By Roy Wood September 16, 2011 | Image by Wikipedia user "Was a Bee" (Creative Commons Licensed) The Philosophy Bites guys have posted a fascinating podcast interview with Nick Bostrom in regard to his writing on the Simulation Argument. Hold on to your brains, lest they explode, because this is the basic gist of Bostrom’s theory: If we assume some non-negligible fraction of civilizations at our stage reach technological maturity, and that some non-negligible fraction of those are interested in creating ancestor simulations, then we can show that each one of those creates astronomical numbers of them because it is so cheap for a mature civilization to create an ancestor simulation. If those two assumptions hold, then therefore there will be many, many more simulated people like us than non-simulated people like us. In other words, almost all sentient beings with your types of experiences will be simulated, rather than non-simulated. From that, we can infer that you are almost certainly among the very typical simulated ones, rather than among the very rare, original, historical, non-simulated people. So, if we accept that some non-negligible fraction make it through, and some non-negligible fraction of those are interested in this, then we get to the simulation hypothesis that we should think we are almost certainly simulated. Basically then, from a statistical point of view, it is far more probable for you, me, and everything around us to be a simulation than it is for us to be “real.” http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/09/are-we-living-in-a-simulation/