ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
BY NICK BOSTROM
[Published in Philosophical Quarterly (2003) Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243‐255. (First version: 2001)]
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1)
the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a
“posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely
to run a significant number of simulations of their 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 will one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is
false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other
consequences of this result are also discussed.