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The simulation hypothesis or simulation theory proposes that all of reality, including the Earth Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage (that is, one capable of running.
Table of contents

• Will Humans Survive the Sixth Great Extinction?
• The Trinity
• Our Simulated Universe Is Just One Piece of a Matryoshka Doll of Annihilation
• Models shift blame for Neanderthal extinction away from modern humans

She might also be run on computer hardware that is more powerful than a human brain, and so think and live at a speed millions or even trillions of times faster than an ordinary human being. Hanson doesn't think that ems must necessarily live unhappy lives. On the contrary, they may thrive, fall in love, and find fulfillment in their competitive, flexible, high-speed world. Non-simulated people, meanwhile, may retire on the proceeds from their investments in the accelerated and increasingly autonomous em economy—a pleasant vantage point from which to observe the twilight of non-emulated civilization.

Steinhart focusses on the possibility of nested simulations. If we achieve posthumanity within our simulated universe, we might go on to simulate people of our own, and they may go on to simulate people of their own, in a recursive loop. Meanwhile, the advent of simulation technology will force us to accept that we are likely living in a simulation ourselves. Reality, therefore, may turn out to consist of a vast number of nested simulations. The afterlife may turn out to be an infinite journey into ever-higher levels of simulation.

The simulation argument is appealing, in part, because it gives atheists a way to talk about spirituality. About our simulators, one can ask the same questions one asks about God: Why did the creators of our world decide to include evil and suffering? Can they change that setting in the preferences? Where did the original, non-simulated world come from? In that sense, the simulation argument is a thoughtful and expansive materialist fable that is almost, but not quite, religious.

There is, of course, no sanctity or holiness in the simulation argument. Considered as a parable, the simulation argument is essentially ironic. The structure of the paper is as follows.

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First, we formulate an assumption that we need to import from the philosophy of mind in order to get the argument started. Second, we 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 that the argument employs.

Lastly, we discuss some interpretations of the disjunction, mentioned in the abstract, that forms the conclusion of the simulation argument. A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate-independence. 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 inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well.

Arguments for this thesis have been given in the literature, and although it is not entirely uncontroversial, we shall here take it as a given. The argument we shall present does not, however, depend on any very strong version of functionalism or computationalism. Moreover, we need not assume that in order to create a mind on a computer it would be sufficient to program it in such a way that it behaves like a human in all situations, including passing the Turing test etc.

We 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. 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 shortcomings will eventually be overcome. Some authors argue that this stage may be only a few decades away. 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.

We can with much greater confidence establish lower bounds on posthuman computation, by assuming only mechanisms that are already understood. For example, Eric Drexler has outlined a design for a system the size of a sugar cube excluding cooling and power supply that would perform 10 21 instructions per second.

The amount of computing power needed to emulate a human mind can likewise be roughly estimated. However, it is likely that the human central nervous system has a high degree of redundancy on the mircoscale to compensate for the unreliability and noisiness of its neuronal components. One would therefore expect a substantial efficiency gain when using more reliable and versatile non-biological processors. Memory seems to be a no more stringent constraint than processing power. We can therefore use the processing power required to simulate the central nervous system as an estimate of the total computational cost of simulating a human mind.

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3. The Extinction of Man Before Posthumanism.

Simulating the entire universe down to the quantum level is obviously infeasible, unless radically new physics is discovered. The microscopic structure of the inside of the Earth can be safely omitted.

The Trinity

Distant astronomical objects can have highly compressed representations: verisimilitude need extend to the narrow band of properties that we can observe from our planet or solar system spacecraft. On the surface of Earth, macroscopic objects in inhabited areas may need to be continuously simulated, but microscopic phenomena could likely be filled in ad hoc. What you see through an electron microscope needs to look unsuspicious, but you usually have no way of confirming its coherence with unobserved parts of the microscopic world. Exceptions arise when we deliberately design systems to harness unobserved microscopic phenomena that operate in accordance with known principles to get results that we are able to independently verify.

The paradigmatic case of this is a computer. The simulation may therefore need to include a continuous representation of computers down to the level of individual logic elements. This presents no problem, since our current computing power is negligible by posthuman standards. Moreover, a posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficient detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis.

Should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director could skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem. It thus seems plausible that the main computational cost in creating simulations that are indistinguishable from physical reality for human minds in the simulation resides in simulating organic brains down to the neuronal or sub-neuronal level. As we gain more experience with virtual reality, we will get a better grasp of the computational requirements for making such worlds appear realistic to their visitors.

But in any case, even if our estimate is off by several orders of magnitude, this does not matter much for our argument. We noted that a rough approximation of the computational power of a planetary-mass computer is 10 42 operations per second, and that assumes only already known nanotechnological designs, which are probably far from optimal. A single such a computer could simulate the entire mental history of humankind call this an ancestor-simulation by using less than one millionth of its processing power for one second. A posthuman civilization may eventually build an astronomical number of such computers.

This end is a shriek. Again, there is the possibility that a badly programmed superintelligence takes over and implements the faulty goals it has erroneously been given.

Our Simulated Universe Is Just One Piece of a Matryoshka Doll of Annihilation

Similarly, one can imagine that an intolerant world government, based perhaps on mistaken religious or ethical convictions, is formed, is stable, and decides to realize only a very small part of all the good things a posthuman world could contain. Such a world government could conceivably be formed by a small group of people if they were in control of the first superintelligence and could select its goals. If the superintelligence arises suddenly and becomes powerful enough to take over the world, the posthuman world may reflect only the idiosyncratic values of the owners or designers of this superintelligence.

Depending on what those values are, this scenario would count as a shriek. The catch-all. These shriek scenarios appear to have substantial probability and thus should be taken seriously in our strategic planning. One could argue that one value that makes up a large portion of what we would consider desirable in a posthuman world is that it contains as many as possible of those persons who are currently alive. After all, many of us want very much not to die at least not yet and to have the chance of becoming posthumans.

If we accept this, then any scenario in which the transition to the posthuman world is delayed for long enough that almost all current humans are dead before it happens assuming they have not been successfully preserved via cryonics arrangements [53,57] would be a shriek. If things go well, we may one day run up against fundamental physical limits. Even though the universe appears to be infinite [58,59] , the portion of the universe that we could potentially colonize is given our admittedly very limited current understanding of the situation finite [60] , and we will therefore eventually exhaust all available resources or the resources will spontaneously decay through the gradual decrease of negentropy and the associated decay of matter into radiation.

But here we are talking astronomical time-scales. An ending of this sort may indeed be the best we can hope for, so it would be misleading to count it as an existential risk. It does not qualify as a whimper because humanity could on this scenario have realized a good part of its potential.

Models shift blame for Neanderthal extinction away from modern humans

Two whimpers apart form the usual catch-all hypothesis appear to have significant probability:. It is explored in more detail in a companion paper [61]. An outline of that paper is provided in an Appendix. Selection would favor those replicators that spend all their resources on sending out further colonization probes [63]. Although the time it would take for a whimper of this kind to play itself out may be relatively long, it could still have important policy implications because near-term choices may determine whether we will go down a track [64] that inevitably leads to this outcome.

Once the evolutionary process is set in motion or a cosmic colonization race begun, it could prove difficult or impossible to halt it [65]. It may well be that the only feasible way of avoiding a whimper is to prevent these chains of events from ever starting to unwind. The probability of running into aliens any time soon appears to be very small see section on evaluating probabilities below, and also [66,67]. If things go well, however, and we develop into an intergalactic civilization, we may one day in the distant future encounter aliens.

If they were hostile and if for some unknown reason they had significantly better technology than we will have by then, they may begin the process of conquering us.

This is When Humans Will Go Extinct (Probably)

Alternatively, if they trigger a phase transition of the vacuum through their high-energy physics experiments see the Bangs section we may one day face the consequences. Because the spatial extent of our civilization at that stage would likely be very large, the conquest or destruction would take relatively long to complete, making this scenario a whimper rather than a bang.



The catch-all hypothesis. The first of these whimper scenarios should be a weighty concern when formulating long-term strategy. There are two complementary ways of estimating our chances of creating a posthuman world. What we could call the direct way is to analyze the various specific failure-modes, assign them probabilities, and then subtract the sum of these disaster-probabilities from one to get the success-probability.