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ARE YOU Living IN A Computer Simulation?: at Least One

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54 views3 pages

ARE YOU Living IN A Computer Simulation?: at Least One

Uploaded by

Emrah Özaras
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

BY NICK BOSTROM

[Published in Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243‐255. (First version: 2001)]

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.

I. INTRODUCTION

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 us suppose for a moment that these predictions are
correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super‐powerful
computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their
forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great
many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as
they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine‐grained and if a certain
quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it
could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the
original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an
original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be
rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than
among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are
currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we
will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears.
That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully.

1
Apart form the interest this thesis may hold for those who are engaged in
futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The
argument provides a stimulus for formulating some methodological and
metaphysical questions, and it suggests naturalistic analogies to certain
traditional religious conceptions, which some may find amusing or thought‐
provoking.
The structure of the paper is as follows. First, we formulate an assumption
that we need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument
started. Second, we consider some empirical reasons for thinking that running
vastly many simulations of human minds would be within the capability of a
future civilization that has developed many of those technologies that can
already be shown to be compatible with known physical laws and engineering
constraints. This part is not philosophically necessary but it provides an incentive
for paying attention to the rest. Then follows the core of the argument, which
makes use of some simple probability theory, and a section providing support
for a weak indifference principle that the argument employs. Lastly, we discuss
some interpretations of the disjunction, mentioned in the abstract, that forms the
conclusion of the simulation argument.

II. THE ASSUMPTION OF SUBSTRATE‐INDEPENDENCE

A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate‐


independence. The idea is that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class
of physical substrates. Provided a system implements the right sort of
computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious
experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is
implemented on carbon‐based biological neural networks inside a cranium:
silicon‐based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well.
Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although
it is not entirely uncontroversial, we shall here take it as a given.
The argument we shall present does not, however, depend on any very
strong version of functionalism or computationalism. For example, we need not
assume that the thesis of substrate‐independence is necessarily true (either
analytically or metaphysically) – just that, in fact, a computer running a suitable
program would be conscious. Moreover, we need not assume that in order to
create a mind on a computer it would be sufficient to program it in such a way
that it behaves like a human in all situations, including passing the Turing test
etc. We need only the weaker assumption that it would suffice for the generation
of subjective experiences that the computational processes of a human brain are
structurally replicated in suitably fine‐grained detail, such as on the level of

2
individual synapses. This attenuated version of substrate‐independence is quite
widely accepted.
Neurotransmitters, nerve growth factors, and other chemicals that are
smaller than a synapse clearly play a role in human cognition and learning. The
substrate‐independence thesis is not that the effects of these chemicals are small
or irrelevant, but rather that they affect subjective experience only via their direct
or indirect influence on computational activities. For example, if there can be no
difference in subjective experience without there also being a difference in
synaptic discharges, then the requisite detail of simulation is at the synaptic level
(or higher).

III. THE TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS OF COMPUTATION

At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently


powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in
computers. But persuasive arguments have been given to the effect that if
technological progress continues unabated then these shortcomings will
eventually be overcome. Some authors argue that this stage may be only a few
decades away.1 Yet present purposes require no assumptions about the time‐
scale. The simulation argument works equally well for those who think that it
will take hundreds of thousands of years to reach a “posthuman” stage of
civilization, where humankind has acquired most of the technological
capabilities that one can currently show to be consistent with physical laws and
with material and energy constraints.
Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to
convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful
computers. It is currently hard to be confident in any upper bound on the
computing power that may be available to posthuman civilizations. As we are
still lacking a “theory of everything”, we cannot rule out the possibility that
novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be
utilized to transcend those constraints2 that in our current understanding impose

1 See e.g. K. E. Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, London, Forth
Estate, 1985; N. Bostrom, “How Long Before Superintelligence?” International Journal of Futures
Studies, vol. 2, (1998); R. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When computers exceed human
intelligence, New York, Viking Press, 1999; H. Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind,
Oxford University Press, 1999.
2 Such as the Bremermann‐Bekenstein bound and the black hole limit (H. J. Bremermann,

“Minimum energy requirements of information transfer and computing.” International Journal of


Theoretical Physics 21: 203‐217 (1982); J. D. Bekenstein, “Entropy content and information flow in
systems with limited energy.” Physical Review D 30: 1669‐1679 (1984); A. Sandberg, “The Physics

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