The Simulation Hypothesis Explained by Nick Bostrom

I like the freedom I feel outside the limitations of the real world but computers are also mirrors reflecting back who and what we are in the choices we make the worlds we build imagine a world where the line between reality and digital world blurs where the images and videos you see are so lifelike you can't tell if they're real or generated by artificial intelligence this is not a distant future it's happening right now this person looks real doesn't she but she's completely computer generated in today's rapidly evolving technological landscape innovations that would have seemed like

science fiction just a decade ago are becoming a reality over 20 years ago I first played the character Thomas Anderson in The Matrix trilogy this blurring of the digital and real world extends far beyond static images and videos picture yourself immersed in a hyperrealistic virtual reality game or even an entire simulated world so detailed that it becomes nearly indistinguishable from our own as we approach a future where technology and AI transform our world a profound question arises what if our reality itself is a simulation the simulation hypothesis proposes that the reality we know might be

an artificial simulation similar to a highly Advanced video game or computer program imagine if our universe was created by a superior civilization running on a powerful computer while this idea has gained prominence in recent years it has roots in ancient philosophical questions about the nature of reality Plato's allegory of the cave is a powerful metaphor that illuminates the concept of the simulation hypothesis imagine a group of prisoners chained inside a dark cave from birth only able to see Shadows cast on the wall in front of them they believe these Shadows to be the entirety of

reality in a sense they were living in a simulation of reality this allegory serves as an ancient precursor to Modern discussions about reality and perception for a modern example think about putting on a virtual reality headset a highquality VR simulation can feel extremely real tricking your brain brain into thinking you're somewhere else this shows how what we perceive as reality is based on the information we receive through our senses philosopher Nick Bostrom has a compelling argument for why we might be living in a simulation He suggests that if a civilization becomes Advanced enough to create

highly realistic simulations of reality they would likely create many of them statistically any individual is then more likely to be living in one of the many simulations rather than the one original reality to understand this imagine you have a bag filled with 1,000 red balls and only one blue ball if you randomly pick a ball it's much more likely to be red than blue similarly if there are many simulated realities but only one real reality chances are we're in one of the simulations a lot of people have propos that there's a possibility in the whole

premise of Matrix or anything like that is that just as we can build s virtual realities today with simple simulated creatures living inside them maybe in the future with vastly more powerful computers you could build more complex virtual realities with more complex simulated creatures inside them maybe these creatures could be complex enough that they would actually have brains like ours simulated down to the level of individual neurons and copses such that the inhabitants of these simulations would be conscious but what the simulation argument adds to that is that instead of just stopping at the question

of how could you ever prove with certainty that we're not in a simulation ourselves the simulation argument tries to establish a constraint about what we can believe and it tries to show that one of three possibilities is true although it doesn't tell us which one of them it is now in a sense this sounds more radical even perhaps than some of the Multiverse theor in another sense it's less because it doesn't presuppose any unknown physics so we're just assuming that it will be possible to build computers that are much much more powerful in the future

so what the simulation argument tries to show is that one of three possibilities is true the first one is that almost all civilizations at our stage of technological development go extinct before they become technologically mature technologically mature meaning having developed all those Technologies we can currently show our physically possible given only uncontroversially obtainable physics big computers the size of planets and stuff we can calculate what performance they would have we can't build them now but so first possibility is people at our stage they just fail to get through to that level of technological maturity maybe

they destroy themselves on the way second possibility is that almost all civilizations that do reach technological maturity lose interest in creating these kinds of ancestor simulations as I call them these would be detailed computer simulations of people like their historical predecessors so they have these powerful computers they have the ability to program them but they have better things to do with their computers and their time and the third possibility is that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation and the argument in its full version it requires some probability the but the gist of

it can be grasped quite simply and intuitively so if you imagine that the first two possibilities do not obtain that means some non- negligible fraction of civilizations at our stage do reach technological maturity and some non- negligable fraction of those you know are interested in creating these ancestor simulations they devote some non-trivial fraction of the resources to this end you can then show that there would be many many more ancestor simulations than there would be original courses of History because if you calculate the computing power that a technologically mature civilization would have and the computing

power that would be required to simulate all human brains it turns out that the latter quantity is a tiny tiny fraction of the former so in other words by devoting a tiny fraction of their computational resources to this end they could create astronomical numbers if we are in a simulation how would we know critics argue that the absence of concrete verifiable evidence renders the hypothesis unfalsifiable and outside the scope of scientific inquiry Advocates of the simulation hypothesis argue that the absence of evidence may be an inherent feature of the simulation itself designed to maintain the

illusion of a base reality some speculate that anomalies or inconsistencies in our universe akin to bugs or errors in computer programs might reveal its simulated nature just like bugs or errors in a video game or computer program can cause unexpected things to happen that don't fit with the normal rules maybe we'd see similar anomalies in our simulated reality what just happen one example that's been proposed is the speed of light in our universe nothing can travel faster than light this could be seen as a kind of speed limit that that was set on the simulation

similar to how a video game might limit how fast characters can move due to the processing power of the gaming console or computer the immense volume of information processed by the universe every second from the interactions of quantum particles to the vast movements of galaxies is profoundly vast this remarkable observation leads to a thought-provoking suggestion could the universe itself be akin to a grand Cosmic computer simulation Skeptics of the simulation hypothesis might argue that this immense complexity and physicality of the universe present insurmountable challenges for any conceivable simulation questioning whether even the most advanced civilizations

could must the computational resources to create a simulation yet if we were to discover that we are indeed living in a simulation it would fundamentally reshape our understanding of the nature of reality Consciousness and Free Will the this discovery would suggest that Consciousness can arise from sufficiently complex information processing regardless of whether the substrate is biological like our brains or digital like a computer simulation I would like to introduce you to my present and the rest of the world's future I call it stem some people think that some of these things are sort of science

fictiony far out there crazy but I like to say okay let's look at the Modern Human Condition if we think about it we actually recently arrived guests on this planet think about if the world like was created Earth was created one year ago the human species then would be 10 minutes old the industrial era started 2 seconds ago there have only been 250,000 Generations since our last common ancestor and we know that complicated mechanisms take a long time to evolve so a bunch of relatively minor changes take us from broken off tree branches to intercontinental

ballistic missiles so this then seems pretty obvious that everything we've achieved pretty much and everything we care about depends crucially on some relatively minor changes that made the human mind and the corollary of course is that any further changes that could significantly change the substrate of thinking could have potentially enormous consequences some of my colleagues think we're on the verge of something that could cause a profound change in that substrate and that is machine super intelligence in this light our pursuit of creating Advanced Ai and simulated worlds takes on a new significance we are not

just playing the role of creators we may be unwittingly replicating the very process that led to our own existence the Bostrom argument when applied to our own technological trajectory serves as a powerful reminder of the mindbending possibilities that lie ahead