The disjunct made up of the three statements seems fairly solid and many of us have lowish priors for the first two disjuncts, and so assign a highish probability to the third disjunct.

The simulation argument makes many assumptions, like: "a non-simulated person and a simulated person have the same chance of subjective experienced existence" and also "we can actually count number of simulations meaningfully".

Which is really really problematic -- for example what's the difference between a single simulation double-checking every computation vs two simulations of the same thing? What's the difference between a simulation running on circuitry of 2nm width, vs two simulations running on circuitry of 1nm width each?

We don't really have a clue about how to count and compare probabilities of existence.

You want to run a model history, but you don't want to simulate it in enough detail that it actually contains people who experience history, if you have the slightest scrap of ethics.

• I want to simulate history.
• I'm a human.
• Therefore, some humans want to simulate history.

This is one of: an inference expressed as a deduction, a deduction with a premise left out or a deduction with a qualifier left out.

Bostrom's trilemma is as follows:

1. No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities.

2. No civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a significant number of simulated realities, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.

3. Any entities with our general set of experiences are almost certainly living in a simulation.

The disjunct made up of the three statements seems fairly solid and many of us have lowish priors for the first two disjuncts, and so assign a highish probability to the third disjunct.

Reductio ad absurdum.

I clicked on the PDF and found the first few chapters to be rather childish, to be blunt. Assuming we can transform large amounts of matter into thinking material than what conceivable reason would there be for an ancestor simulation to be made? Do you imagine that we could create simulations on our laptops? Please tell me how we will be able to conjure infinite information out of nothing. "we don't know that it can't happen" is hardly an answer and isn't really unprovable either.

Also, what would the point be in creating humans to be in the sim? Why not just have them be controlled by some AI and have them act as humans do (assuming that it isn't for "research purposes" which is ridiculous as well because a transhuman civilization of that level wouldn't actually need the information from it)?

• I want to simulate history.
• I'm a human.
• Therefore, some humans want to simulate history.

This doesn't actually invalidate my statement. I don't see how it makes a difference, though, unless you can prove that a lot of people are very interested in creating ancestor simulations- enough to utilize large amounts of resources to achieve that end- or that one day you'll be able to create worlds on your personal computer.

The rest of your comment seems incredibly...uninformed of the relevant literature, to say the least.

The article held up Civilization as a precursor to future ancestor sims. I pointed out how ridiculous that was. I suppose Occam's Razor works if you believe in an infinite reality, which I'm not certain of.

Well, I don't want to go through all of that just to find where it talks about my specific objections... but let me ask, how many people here believe this?