[P2P-F] Are We Living in a Simulation?

[ideasinc at ee.net]

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/