THE SIMULATION ARGUMENT
What does it mean to be real?
MAIN TOPIC
"Are You Living In A
Computer Simulation?"
Nick Bostrom
It could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours... are likely among the simulated minds of an advanced race.
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.
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