Nick Bostrom

Yeah, well, I think that makes sense.

Well, so first of all, I don't claim that the only simulations that might be made are ancestor simulations.

I mean, if you imagine your technologically mature civilizations, you might simulate all kinds of things, like real histories as close as you can get, fantasy worlds, counterfactual histories, imaginary alien civilizations.

I mean, maybe there are lots of all of these kinds of simulations.

Yeah, so I mean, I guess when we extrapolate to these technologically mature, presumably post-human civilizations, well, first of all, I'm not sure how much we can infer from the kinds of movies we create to what types of simulations they would run.

But let's suppose for the sake of the argument that the majority of simulations they run are of...

people in their contemporary society.

So, I don't know, some super advanced space colonizing thing with super intelligences or whatnot.

And that's maybe the majority of what they do.

But that they assign some smaller fraction of their computational resources to doing these ancestor simulations.

Let's assume that

I still don't think that would defeat the simulation argument or indeed even the alternative that we are in a simulation because we kind of already know that we are not one of the post-humans.

I mean, you just look around and you don't see a lot of starships whizzing by outside your window and we are not currently running any simulations ourselves.

So we can kind of cross those out

Like all the actual post-humans, we know we're not one of those, and we also know we are not in a simulation of the post-humans.

That's not the world we experience.

Then that leaves only, A, the people in original history at the human level of development, and also whatever ancestor simulations are at that level of development.

And so my claim would then be that if the first two alternatives of the simulation argument are false, the simulated ones at our current level of development would still vastly outnumber the original ones at our stage of development.

It could be.

I mean, so the simulation argument itself is agnostic as to what the motivation would be of the simulators.