Simulation Argument

Many of you have seen this before, but Hec­tor just for­ward­ed me a link to Are You Liv­ing In A Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion? is a site that argues that at least one of the fol­low­ing is true:

(1) The chances that a species at our cur­rent lev­el of devel­op­ment can avoid going extinct before becom­ing tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mature is neg­li­gi­bly small

(2) Almost no tech­no­log­i­cal­ly mature civil­i­sa­tions are inter­est­ed in run­ning com­put­er sim­u­la­tions of minds like ours

(3) You are almost cer­tain­ly an artif­i­cal enti­ty in a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion.

The author leaves off option 4 (or rather, dis­miss­es it in his set­up).

(4) It is not pos­si­ble to run a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion of a mind like ours.

Any­way, it struck me as a Chris­t­ian that my response is that num­bers 1 and 2 (and pos­si­bly num­ber 4) are true. The world will end via divine inter­ven­tion before our civ­i­liza­tion is capa­ble of such a feat (and once in heav­en we will pre­sum­ably have no inter­est in run­ning such sim­u­la­tions even if they prove tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble).

Fun­ny how Chris­tian­i­ty affects your repons­es to everything–even bizarre aca­d­e­m­ic papers. 🙂