Nick Bostrom

Although I think, to be fair, I think the difference between one human and another from the point of view of the simulators, it's like, well, there is one ant.

It's got a few more neurons.

It's a genius ant.

But I mean, we all like ants, I think.

So I don't think the difference in cost is that big.

Yeah, I mean, I think that would be higher up just because at that level, you would be able to run a lot more of these simulations.

And so even if there were some simulations run by, I don't know, a Kardashev scale, one civilization, like with the Dyson sphere around their sun, and that's all they did, you know, once the civilization expands beyond that, they could run billions of times more.

and there would be plenty of time for them to expand beyond that.

So you could imagine almost all simulations that are run are being run by civilizations that have reached the limits of whatever space they have to expand into.

That would presumably be Kardashian 4 or something, unless the universe is so crowded that each one only manages to get the sort of galactic level volume before it bumps up against its neighbors.

Panpsychism.

That would be my sort of default assumption.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think for the simulation argument, you can kind of plug in whatever your favorite theory of consciousness is, and most of them would work.

There might be some theories of consciousness which would not work.

The simulation argument, one of its assumptions is what I call the substrate independence thesis, which is just the idea that, in principle, you could implement consciousness not just on...

carbon-based biological structures, but on any suitable computational structure.

That what makes us conscious is not that we're made of carbon, but that our brains perform a certain type of computation.

Whoa.

But as to where to draw the line, I don't really have a very good account of exactly.