Are we 'almost certainly' in a simulation? | Scott Wylie

Nick Bostrom, a Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University, wrote in 2001 that “we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.”

Bostrom’s reasoning is based in part on the idea that a future human civilization will have virtually unlimited computing power. This computing power would then we used to run what he refers to as “ancestor-simulations:”

“We can conclude that the computing power available to a posthuman civilization is sufficient to run a huge number of ancestor-simulations even it allocated only a minute fraction of its resources to that purpose” | Nick Bostrom, Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University

From buddhist concepts of ‘Māna’, to Abrahmic visions of Heaven and Hell, from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to Descartes’ Dreaming Doubt,’ most prophets, philosophers and thinkers are in agreement: our world is a semblance of reality.

Bostrom’s innovation is in taking this age-old conundrum and exploring it through the language of Moore’s law and computerized simulation.

In addition, his study demonstrates how a material technology based on science and observed phenomena can, when it reaches a critical phase of sophistication, lead to questions that involve a consideration of good and evil; the metaphysical and the mystical.

This approach is suggestive of a wider trend. When the questions presented by a sufficiently advanced technology affect what it means to be human, and how future civilizations will form, the artificial division of the sciences and arts into separate disciplines breaks down. Is technology unraveling the enlightenment? Perhaps.

So, how does the simulation work? We’ve summarized some of Bostrom’s key points, and flagged up three lingering questions, below.

i) What are Posthumans & are They Good?

Bostrom’s depiction of “posthumans” could be the weak link in the simulation argument. These beings are essentially humans from the future, with administrator privileges:

“the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its laws; and they are “omniscient” in the sense that can monitor everything that happens.”

So far so good. Yet if you and I are simulations descended from the “advanced descendants of an original race,” what is that makes our ancestors in the future ‘post-human’? How are they better than us?

For Bostrom, the answer seems to reside in the fact that posthumans will have access to ‘conscious computers’ which are able to “replicate the processes of the human brain’ at the level of ‘individual synapses.” The essay points out that this singularity maybe only ‘decades away.’

The capacity to birth consciousness in the cloud will no doubt change humanity, but will it really make our original ancestors post-human?

Isn’t it more reasonable to assume our ancestors will share the same Jungian drives that we do? Won’t the light and dark of the collective unconscious still exist in the future, regardless of how technologically advanced we become? And if this is the case, doesn’t it stand to reason that the flaws as well as the advancement of the administrator humans will replicate into the simulation itself?

If anything, the posthumans are you and I – imprints from the future, existing in silicon to be deleted at any time, rather than in the corporeal “carbon-based biological neural networks” of our future selves, who exist in the real. If the posthumans are so superior, why haven’t they birthed their ancestors in their own world?

Presumably because, this would be impossible?



ii) Do time, consciousness and memory exist in a simulation?

The physics of Bostrom’s digital Eden are not immutable. Instead, he seems to be describing a physics engine that approximates the world of the posthumans:

“If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe.”

As with the stories of ancient Greece, the systems in this world exist at the caprice of the gods. Free will can be bypassed; “should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation.” Time is a construct that can be reversed; “alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem.”

In fact, posthuman simulation bears remarkable similarities to the classical and Christian underworld. Because “virtual machines can be stacked” its possible to “simulate a machine simulating another machine, in many steps of iteration.” As in Dante’s nine circles of Hell, individuals exist on different levels; “if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility.”

Here you may also find the shades of greek mythology. In cases where a simulation exists for a single individual, Bostom writes, ‘the rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious.”

iii) How do we escape?

Where can we find the Bodhi tree, the apple of knowledge, the rabbit hole or the path the karma? How do we escape the construct?

The potential of the simulations to awaken, or attempt to escape or reject the reality around them is one Bostrom touches on, but only in passing. “A post human simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times.”

In essence, simulations are trapped in an invisible prison they can neither see nor touch. Entertainment for the gods.

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