Follow the white rabbit...

Just finished reading Nick Bostrom's thought provoking paper - Are you living in a computer simulation? He makes a terrifying case for the possibility that we might be simulations in a computer run by our posthuman descendants. I didn't really take this possibility seriously until now, but his arguments are quite compelling.

Basically, he claims that at least one of the following is true:

1. A very small fraction of all human level civilizations eventually reach posthuman levels.
2. A very small fraction of all posthuman civilizations are interested in running ancestor-simulations.
3. The fraction of all people(real or simulated) with our kind of experiences, that are living in a simulation, is very close to one.

Excuse the mathematical style, but the argument hinges on a nice little equation, which produces these three possibilities. Basically, the gist of the idea is that a super advanced future civilization(the posthumans just mentioned) will have a mind boggling amount of computing power available to them. If they do decide to run ancestor sims, then chances are that there will be a much greater number of simulated ancestors than real ancestors. Thus it is overwhelmingly likely that we are living in a simulation rather than the *real* world...If this isn't the case, then chances are that very few posthuman level civilizations really develop, in which case we either die out, or fall back to primitive levels. Finally, it may be possible that posthumans simply don't want to run ancestor simulations. We can't say why this is so - trying to understand their intentions is comparable to an ant trying to figure out ours...Frankly, it's hard enough today to figure out the intentions of our elected representatives, let alone future humans with expanded minds...

Now here's a really interesting concept which most readers who survived the last paragraph should have seen coming - how do you know that the chaps simulating you are not simulations themselves? Their level of *reality* may just be another simulation run by an even more advanced civilization...and so on. Russian babushka dolls, anyone?

BTW, a really interesting take on this is David Brin's short story Stones of Significance. I highly recommend it.

Time to get back to Halo...