Bad ideas in practical philosophy, Nick Bostrom edition

Nick Bostrom is a prominent Swedish philosopher, currently at the University of Oxford. In 2011, he founded the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, and is the founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. In other words, someone to reckon with in the field of practical philosophy — if one considers humanity’s existential risks practical enough.

Bostrom first came to prominence because of his idea that it is likely that we live in a computer simulation. You know, kind of like the Matrix sci-fi movie. His argument for this goes along the following lines. He maintains that one of these three propositions must be almost certainly true:

(i) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; or:

(ii) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; or:

(iii) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

There are lots of problems with this. My friend Sean Carroll, the cosmologist, for instance, has pointed out that the simulation hypothesis leads to a contradiction: if a civilization is capable of performing simulations, then it will likely perform many simulations, which implies that we are most likely at the lowest level of simulation (from which point one’s impression will be that it is impossible to perform a simulation), which contradicts the arguer’s assumption that advanced civilizations can most likely perform simulations.

Physicist Paul Davies has accepted the first option, instead of the third, as part of an argument against a near-infinite multiverse (a notion about which I am also very skeptical, though I usually don’t agree with Davies).

Others point out that there is no reason to believe that simulated beings would be conscious, a big assumption made by Bostrom, and which contradicts what we know of consciousness so far (i.e., that it is an evolved biological phenomenon, not just a matter of substrate-independent information shuffling).

I sympathize with all of the criticisms, but more crucially, I simply think the sort of…