“Kipping then showed that even in the simulation hypothesis, most of the simulated realities would be nulliparous,” Scientific American's Anil Ananthaswamy writes, meaning the simulations cannot spawn their own additional simulations. The next part requires a bit of a deep breath. Then, Scientific American explains, Kipping assigned “the principle of indifference,” which is the most nonspecific and non-assumptive “prior probability” you can use. And since Bostrom’s first two criteria both posit there is no simulation, he condensed them into one criterion. Kipping began with Bayesian analysis, which lets the calculator include assumptions as a way to aid in the modeling. This led Columbia University astronomer David Kipping to run his own numbers using Bostrom’s argument as a guide. If a computer existed that could hold our entire universe inside, we likely wouldn’t recognize its workings.īostrom’s claim is both philosophically and probabilistically bold, with considered outcomes he has placed almost on a pure binary. It doesn’t have to be supercomputers the way we imagine them today-think of proposed galaxy-scale superstructures like Dyson spheres, or even the imaginings of Star Trek writers. Information Could Be the Fifth State of Matterīut Bostrom’s simulation theory in particular pivots on computing power. I discuss some consequences of this result.” It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we shall one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.
It’s worth reading Bostrom’s brief abstract in full: “I argue that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to become extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history (or variations thereof) (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
Scientific American cites the landmark 2003 paper “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?” by philosopher Nick Bostrom. The 50/50 probability is rounded from a calculation whose outcome is more like 50.22222 to 49.77778. The coin flip depends a great deal on science we may uncover in the near future, they say. If real life in 2022 seems like just too much, take comfort in some breaking news: scientists say odds are even that we’re living in a simulation.
Scientists and philosophers meet at the bleeding edge of simulation theory.
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