This will do your head and brain in....... Nick Bostrom is a professor at Oxford University, where he directs the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and also the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Center (SAIRC). Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 2003 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. (See the attachment simulation.pdf only 14 pages, push through it) Nick Bostrom - The Simulation Argument (Full) Why Elon Musk says we're living in a simulation This cartoon explains why Elon Musk thinks we’re characters in a computer simulation. He might be right. Elon Musk thinks it's almost certain that we are living in a computer simulation. In short, we are characters in an advanced version of The Sims — so advanced that it creates, well, us. I understand the instinct to treat the idea as absurd, and to ignore people who suggest these things. It’s what happens when you challenge the common beliefs about reality, kind of like Aristarchus of Samos, who first thought the Earth wasn't at the center of the universe — almost 2,000 years before Galileo. But these ideas push us to think more rigorously about what we accept as reality. We are reminded, time and again, that what we see and what we know are quite limited. And we have to devise increasingly clever experiments to see more of the unseen. This cartoon is about laying down the logic of the simulation argument. Understand it first, and then dismiss it — or, better yet, don't. It doesn't argue that we are necessarily in a simulation. It just says it's one of three possibilities for the future of humanity. Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote the definitive paper on this, so we're essentially walking through his piece.Let's go back 40 years! In the early 1970s, the most advanced game was Pong — two rectangles and a circle, bouncing around. Fast-forward to 2000, and we have The Sims — animated characters that interact with each other, with objects, and with their own feelings. Now we have 3D headsets, like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift. You are the character, and your body can interact with the simulated world. We've tricked our minds into thinking that pixels are real. With modern computing, we're also able to forecast weather and simulate how chemicals in our body work, among many other complex things. We’ve come a long way in a short time So let's fast-forward 10,000 years! We went from Pong to headsets that transport our minds into fantasy worlds — in just 40 years. So even if our speed of technological advancement slows down, in 10,000 years we should be able to run simulations of ourselves. (That is, if we're alive, of course. But more on that later.) It's not just that the graphics will be better or the mechanics will be better. No, it's that we'll be able to simulate the individual synapses in the human brain, much like The Sims kept track of how hungry your character was. We can simulate these things because, according to scientific evidence, everything that makes us human is physical processes. Presumably we will understand all of it in 10,000 years and then recreate these processes in a computer simulation, much like how we can recreate the way a ball bounces. So in 10,000 years, computers could simulate the entire world. (This dome is only a representation of these simulations, which would occur computationally — not inside domes. But it’s a great visual, right?) And how do we get the computing power for this? Bostrom says we can send tiny robots to other planets, which will self-duplicate and turn the planet into a huge computer.
