ARE WE LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 33, jNo. 211 ISSN 0031-8094

April 2003

ARE WE LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

By Nick Bostrom

/ 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. 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. I discuss some consequences of this result.

• I. INTRODUCTION

Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely to be among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore if we do not think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we shall have descendants who will run lots of simulations of their forebears. That is the basic idea. The rest of this paper will spell it out more carefully.

Apart from the interest this thesis may hold for those engaged in futuristic speculation, there are also more purely theoretical rewards. The argument is a stimulus for formulating some methodological and metaphysical questions,

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and it suggests naturalistic analogies of certain traditional religious conceptions, which some may find amusing or thought-provoking.

The structure of the paper is as follows. First, I formulate an assumption which I need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument started. Secondly, I consider some empirical reasons for thinking that running vastly many simulations of human minds would be within the capability of a future civilization that has developed many of those technologies that can already be shown to be compatible with known physical laws and engineering constraints. This part is not philosophically necessary, but it provides an incentive for paying attention to the rest. Then follows the core of the argument, which makes use of some simple probability theory, and a section providing support for a weak indifference principle the argument employs. Lastly, I discuss some interpretations of the disjunction mentioned in the abstract, which forms the conclusion of the simulation argument.

• II. THE ASSUMPTION OF SUBSTRATE-INDEPENDENCE

A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrateindependence. The idea is that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates. Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors in a computer could in principle do the trick too.

Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although it is not entirely uncontroversial, I shall here take it as given.

The argument I shall present does not, however, depend on any very strong version of functionalism or computationalism. For example, I need not assume that the thesis of substrate-independence is necessarily true (either analytically or metaphysically) - merely that a computer running a suitable program would in fact be conscious. Moreover, I need not assume that in order to create a mind on a computer it would be necessary to program it in such a way that it behaves like a human in all situations, including passing the Turing test, etc. I need only the weaker assumption that it would suffice for the generation of subjective experiences that the computational processes of a human brain are structurally replicated in suitably fine-grained detail, such as on the level of individual synapses. This attenuated version of substrate-independence is quite widely accepted.

Neurotransmitters, nerve growth factors and other chemicals that are smaller than a synapse clearly play a role in human cognition and learning.

The substrate-independence thesis is not that the effects of these chemicals are small or irrelevant, but rather that they affect subjective experience only via their direct or indirect influence on computational activities. For example, if there can be no difference in subjective experience without there also being a difference in synaptic discharges, then the requisite detail of simulation is at the synaptic level (or higher).

• III. THE TECHNOLOGICAL LIMITS OF COMPUTATION

At our current stage of technological development, we have neither sufficiently powerful hardware nor the requisite software to create conscious minds in computers. But persuasive arguments have been given to the effect that if technological progress continues unabated, then these technological shortcomings will eventually be overcome. Some authors argue that this stage may be only a few decades away.1 Yet present purposes require no assumptions about the time-scale. The simulation argument works equally well for those who think that it will take hundreds of thousands of years to reach a ‘posthuman’ stage of civilization, where humankind has acquired most of the technological capabilities that one can currently show to be consistent with physical laws and with material and energy constraints.

Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers. It is currently hard to be confident in any upper bound on the computing power that may be available to posthuman civilizations. As we are still lacking a ‘theory of everything’, we cannot rule out the possibility that novel physical phenomena, not allowed for in current physical theories, may be utilized to transcend those constraints that in our current understanding impose theoretical limits on the infor