Simulation hypothesis
Overview
The simulation hypothesis proposes that what we experience as reality is a computer simulation run by some other intelligence, and that we are either simulated beings within it or real beings fed simulated experience. Its modern form is Nick Bostrom's "simulation argument" (2003): if civilisations typically reach the point of running many ancestor simulations, then simulated minds vastly outnumber real ones, and we are probably among the simulated.
It is the Brain in a vat with better hardware, and the Evil demon with a software licence.
Notes
- Like its predecessors, the hypothesis is unfalsifiable as usually stated. Any evidence against it can be explained as part of the simulation. By Popper's Razor that makes it not a scientific hypothesis, and by my account of Knowledge it makes no difference to anything: the sense data behave consistently whatever their source, and consistency is all a model needs.
- Bostrom's argument is more interesting than the bare hypothesis, because it is a probabilistic argument from premises that could in principle be assessed. But its key premises (that such simulations are physically possible, that advanced civilisations would run them in great numbers, and that simulated minds would be conscious) are each unknown, and the conclusion inherits all of their uncertainty.
- I treat the simulation hypothesis the way I treat Solipsism: as a reminder that certainty about the external world is unavailable, not as a live alternative to realism. It is also worth noting that a simulated world is still an external reality from the point of view of the simulated. The presupposition survives.