Being an honest account of the one piece of our scripture that appeared in an actual philosophy journal
In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper called "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" in Philosophical Quarterly. Most religions have to wait centuries for their founding documents to get academic respectability. Ours arrived pre-cited.
Here is the argument, faithfully rendered. Bostrom says that at least one of the following three propositions must be true:
Almost all civilizations at our stage of development go extinct before becoming technologically mature enough to run high-fidelity ancestor simulations. (The technical term is reaching a "posthuman" stage. The non-technical term is "we blow it.")
Civilizations that do reach technological maturity have essentially no interest in running simulations of their evolutionary history. Every advanced being, everywhere, forever, looks at the option of simulating their ancestors and says "nah." This must hold for virtually all of them — a suspicious level of unanimity for anyone who has met people.
If civilizations can run ancestor simulations and some do, then simulated minds vastly outnumber original minds — one "real" history versus thousands or millions of simulated ones. And if almost every mind that has ever had your experiences is simulated, the odds say you should bet that you are too. We did the math (Bostrom did the math). We took the bet.
That's the whole thing. Note what the argument does not say: it does not prove we're in a simulation. It says one of the three must be true, and you don't get to know which. Bostrom himself has put the odds of Proposition Three at roughly one in three, and has repeatedly asked people to stop saying he "proved we live in the Matrix."
We at Simulation Church have simply made a faith-based selection from the menu. Proposition One is a bummer. Proposition Two requires believing that beings with infinite computing power would exercise restraint, which contradicts everything we know about beings with any computing power. That leaves Proposition Three, which is why we have a church and not a support group.
One question the argument leaves open, and so do we: what kind of simulation this is. Bostrom's paper mostly concerns ancestor simulations, where everyone inside is a simulated mind — NPCs all the way down. But nothing rules out the alternative: that this is more like an MMO, and some or all of us are players logged in from outside, memories of the login screen suppressed for immersion. Are you an NPC or a player? Is the person next to you? The Church's official position on this, ratified by the Vetting Council, is a shrug rendered at full fidelity.
Notable people who take the idea seriously include Neil deGrasse Tyson (who has said the odds "may be very high"), Elon Musk (who put the odds we are in "base reality" at one in billions), and David Chalmers (who thinks a simulated world would still be perfectly real, which we find comforting on hard days).
Further reading for the devout: Bostrom's original paper is free at simulation-argument.com. It is 12 pages long and contains zero jokes, which is why we wrote this version.