Robin wrote:
"So the more we want our descendants to be rich, the more we should hope
that we are in fact living in a simulation :-)."
I show in my paper that at least one of the following is true:
1. The probability that we will never become posthuman is approximately one.
2. The fraction of posthuman civilizations that contain individuals who run
plenty of ancestor-simulations is very close to zero.
3. The probability that we are in a simulation is close to one.
So we should hope for either 2 or 3. Since there seems a good likelihood
that simulators will often terminate simulations when they become expensive
(i.e. when they become posthuman), the best scenario would be 2. This
entails a strong convergence hypothesis, where practically all posthuman
civilizations lose a typical human motivation.
One conclusion that I draw is that the naive transhumanist dogma that we or
our descendants will become posthumans who'll run ancestor-simulations is
false. This hypothesis has a negligible probability, unfortunately.
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy
Yale University
Homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
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