Was reading this article by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher from Oxford, on potential “existential risks”–risks that could threaten the very existence of human life on this planet. There was the normal stuff–nanobots run amok, nuclear winter–and then this:
4.3 We’re living in a simulation and it gets shut down
A case can be made that the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation should be given a significant probability. The basic idea behind this so-called “Simulation argument” is that vast amounts of computing power may become available in the future, and that it could be used, among other things, to run large numbers of fine-grained simulations of past human civilizations. Under some not-too-implausible assumptions, the result can be that almost all minds like ours are simulated minds, and that we should therefore assign a significant probability to being such computer-emulated minds rather than the (subjectively indistinguishable) minds of originally evolved creatures. And if we are, we suffer the risk that the simulation may be shut down at any time. A decision to terminate our simulation may be prompted by our actions or by exogenous factors.
While to some it may seem frivolous to list such a radical or “philosophical” hypothesis next the concrete threat of nuclear holocaust, we must seek to base these evaluations on reasons rather than untutored intuition. Until a refutation appears of the argument presented in, it would intellectually dishonest to neglect to mention simulation-shutdown as a potential extinction mode.
Wow!! Forget the “none of this is real” of post-modernism or even Buddhist wisdom, we’re talking REALLY not real! For some reason I find this scenario comforting…
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