Street Style

There’s a classic philosophical thought experiment called the ‘brain in a vat’ theory which proposes that you’re really just a brain floating in a tank and are hooked up to a computer which simulates all your experiences. Therefore, it says, there’s no way of knowing conclusively whether you are actually yourself, with a brain inside a skull connected to a body, or whether you’re just a brain in a vat being manipulated by outside forces. From your point of view, the experiences you have could be produced either way.

Throw in a bit of modern technology to this theory and apply it on a massive scale and you get something called the Simulation Argument, first proposed by a philosopher at Oxford University called Nick Bostrom.

In a theory that at first appears either moronic or just way too sci-fi, Bostrom argues that it’s almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation. He claims that once computing power reaches a certain level (in any civilisation, not just ours), advanced people could run simulations of, for instance, their own evolutionary history which would involve the creation of millions of fully-developed virtual people, as part of which you and I are included.

Bostrom reaches the conclusion that it’s almost certain we’re living in a computer simulation through some old-fashioned probability theory. At least one of these propositions must be true, he says:

1. Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

So, if the first proposition is false, then a large proportion of civilisations become technologically mature at some point. If the second is false then a large proportion of civilisations run “ancestor simulations”. Therefore, if you reach the (presumably likely) conclusion that the first two statements are false then the only position you are left with is to accept the third proposition as true.

As part of this argument, the humans involved in the simulation would have no idea whether or not they’re actually real people or just computer circuitry. This prompts all sorts of questions about how one should behave within a computer simulation - do the designers of the simulation reward certain types of behaviour or not? Is there any meaning to life at all if we have no control over it? Will the designers of the simulation just shut the whole thing down before we get to the point where we can make our own simulations on the same scale? Are they themselves living in a simulation?

Or maybe they just want us to be nice to people and to try to lead interesting lives. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

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Hello? Can anyone hear me?