No, You Are Not Living in a Computer Simulation | decodingvibes.com

Imagine a performer puts 99 black balls and 1 white ball in a bucket and covers the bucket’s lid with a blanket, leaving a special slot in the middle that lets one put their hand through and reach inside. He claims that it is almost certain that if an audience member picks out a random ball from the bucket, it will be black.

An audience member says, “Of course. I watched you put the balls into the bucket.”

The performer then says, “No, this is the most rational way to arrange the bucket.”

“How do you know that’s the most rational way to arrange it?”

“Because nearly every advanced civilization eventually arranges its buckets this way.”

At this point, what matters more? Why the performer arranged the balls that way, or the fact that it contains far more black balls compared to white ones?

This is one of the major issues with Nick Bostrom’s famous 2003 paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” When his work is discussed in mainstream media, it is often portrayed as suggesting that we almost certainly live in a digital simulation.

Yet, that’s not what the paper really says. It argues that we are most likely to live in a simulation if its assumptions are true, just as a randomly selected ball is overwhelmingly likely to be black if the bucket contains 99 black balls and one white ball.

It specifically claims that if simulated observers vastly outnumber biological observers, then we are overwhelmingly likely to be among the simulated observers.

But this is not really the important part; what matters is Bostrom’s justification for believing that simulated observers would vastly outnumber biological observers and the underlying inherent assumptions made. That is where many of the argument’s most controversial assumptions arise.

Assumptions and Outcomes of the Simulation Theory

The paper states only one of the three outcomes must be true:

Civilizations end before they can start simulations

No civilization is interested in running advanced simulations

We must live in a simulation because simulated observers will vastly outnumber biological observers

There are also two inherent and profound assumptions the paper makes to get to this conclusion, which are:

It is possible for technology to simulate consciousness and human civilization at scale

It is possible to make justified predictions about the motivations and behavior of advanced civilizations capable of (1), given our current knowledge

If we look at the two underlying major assumptions, it becomes straightforward to demonstrate a competing possibility whose probability cannot be dismissed without additional evidence, using the same overall assumptions and arguments, that we do not live in a simulation and the number of simulated observers is not guaranteed to outnumber the number of biological observers.

This fundamentally challenges the central claim that only one of the three outcomes can be true, which would then affect the reasoning that we are most likely in a digital simulation.

If we believe both assumptions are true

If we believe in both assumptions, then it becomes possible to project our best guesses of what the aliens want as their real movitation (the concept of ancestor simulations is just speculation at its core); then it is possible to also project that instead of running ancestor simulations, the aliens run a simulation where every person is Canadian comedian and YouTuber Ryan George and the entire world is just Pitch Meetings because that is what they enjoy more than simulating every boring life ever on every planet.

They might prioritize entertainment, scientific exploration, artistic creation, or goals entirely unrelated to recreating their ancestors. The Ryan George claim proposed above and the claim that advanced civiliations will run ancestor simulations are both speculative possibilities, and there is no justified basis for assigning ancestor simulations overwhelming priority.

The point is that if one is allowed to infer the preferences of posthuman civilizations from one’s own limited perspective, then many competing inferences are possible; moreover, we have no principled method for deciding that historical curiosity will dominate entertainment, scientific research, artistic creation, or any other possible motivation.

Without a justified basis for predicting the goals of advanced civilizations, we cannot conclude that ancestor simulations would create the overwhelming majority of observers, and thus we cannot conclude we are likely a simulated observer.

If we believe assumption 2 is true, but don’t believe assumption 1 is

In this case, we can even start off by assuming the idea that aliens really do want to create ancestor simulations, but they just cannot due to a potential technological limit that prevents consciousness from being fully simulated, which cannot be solved, even with millions of years of advancement.

Since there is a...