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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simulation hypothesis | 3/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:10:30.034179+00:00 | kb-cron |
Bostrom argues that if "the fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one", then it follows that humans probably live in a simulation. Some philosophers disagree, proposing that perhaps "Sims" do not have conscious experiences the same way that unsimulated humans do, or that it can otherwise be self-evident to a human that they are a human rather than a Sim. Philosopher Barry Dainton modifies Bostrom's trilemma by substituting "neural ancestor simulations" (ranging from literal brains in a vat, to far-future humans with induced high-fidelity hallucinations that they are their own distant ancestors) for Bostrom's "ancestor simulations", on the grounds that every philosophical school of thought can agree that sufficiently high-tech neural ancestor simulation experiences would be indistinguishable from non-simulated experiences. Even if high-fidelity computer Sims are never conscious, Dainton's reasoning leads to the following conclusion: either the fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage and are able and willing to run large numbers of neural ancestor simulations is close to zero, or some kind of (possibly neural) ancestor simulation exists. The hypothesis has received criticism from some physicists, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, who considers that it is physically impossible to simulate the universe without producing measurable inconsistencies, and called it pseudoscience and religion. Cosmologist George F. R. Ellis, who stated that "[the hypothesis] is totally impracticable from a technical viewpoint", and that "late-night pub discussion is not a viable theory". Some scholars categorically reject—or are uninterested in—anthropic reasoning, dismissing it as "merely philosophical", unfalsifiable, or inherently unscientific. Some critics propose that the simulation could be in the first generation, and all the simulated people that will one day be created do not yet exist, in accordance with philosophical presentism. The cosmologist Sean M. Carroll argues that the simulation hypothesis leads to a contradiction: if humans are typical, as it is assumed, and not capable of performing simulations, this contradicts the arguer's assumption that it is easy for us to foresee that other civilizations can most likely perform simulations. Physicist Frank Wilczek raises an empirical objection, saying that the laws of the universe have hidden complexity which is "not used for anything" and the laws are constrained by time and location—all of this being unnecessary and extraneous in a simulation. He further argues that the simulation argument amounts to "begging the question," due to the "embarrassing question" of the nature of the underlying reality in which this universe is simulated. "Okay if this is a simulated world, what is the thing in which it is simulated made out of? What are the laws for that?" Brian Eggleston has argued that the future humans of our universe cannot be the ones performing the simulation, since the simulation argument considers our universe to be the one being simulated. In other words, it has been argued that the probability that humans live in a simulated universe is not independent of the prior probability that is assigned to the existence of other universes.
=== Arguments, within the trilemma, against the simulation hypothesis ===