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…