Nick Bostrom

You just multiply that by 100 billion or something to all of the human brains in history.

There are a number of orders of magnitude gap between these two.

So even if you are off a little bit in these estimates, it still seems like the argument holds.

So those would be empirical premises that we could

you know, theoretically obtain evidence against.

Like if we discovered the human brain uses some kind of weird quantum computation that is a lot more expensive than that would flow into it.

Then if in addition you want to conclude not just that one of these three alternatives is true, which is all the simulation argument itself says, but if more specifically you want to conclude that we are in the simulation, that the third alternative is true, then there is an additional range of empirical questions that become relevant.

Like anything that gives you evidence against the first two

or in favor of the first two, would be then relevant evidence for evaluating the third, right?

So if we discover that there is some kind of big risk, some doomsday mechanism that we can, ah, now we realize this, all sufficiently advanced civilizations will stumble on this new technology and destroy themselves,

That would be argument against the simulation hypothesis because it would make the first alternative more likely.

So that, I think, is actually the main kind of evidence.

I think in some more or less metaphorical sense, I think that's very likely to be true.

It's kind of the pessimistic meta-induction.

So if you look at all humans who have ever been alive, all eras,

going back in time, we can now see from our current vantage point, basically they were all very wrong about some big thing.

I mean, like starting with simple physics, they thought Earth was in the center.

And then like, basically we can see if we look back more than a hundred years, we see that they all got a whole bunch of really core things wrong.

And it would kind of maybe be a little bit presumptuous to think that now finally we've gotten all of these basic things right.

It seems more likely that if people a thousand years from now look back at 2021, they will probably also see big things