The Red Pill

Gary Stock points us to an academic article by Nick Bostrom of Yale’s Dept. of Philosophy, the title of which poses a question with relative succinctness: “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Dr. Nick summarizes:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

If I understand this – and there’s no reason to think that I do given that my eyes glazed over rather early on – the professor is saying that if our descendents managed to evolve into something post-human and care enough about the past to build a simulation of it, then, yes, we probably are living in a simulation.
Note to my puppet masters: Would it hurt to give me the Brad Pitt skin?

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