Assumption 1: It’s Possible to Simulate Consciousness#

Nobody really knows exactly what consciousness is. But for the sake of this argument, let’s assume you could create consciousness by simulating a brain.

Brains are incredibly complex. If you count every single interaction between synapses as one operation, your brain runs at about 10 to the power of 17 operations per second (that’s one hundred million billion!).

Let’s be super generous and say you need 10 to the power of 20 operations to simulate just one second of human consciousness.

But we wouldn’t want to simulate just one person. We’d probably want to simulate all of human history at once, maybe so the simulators can jump around in time. Let’s say we want to simulate 200 billion humans, each living for an average of 50 years.

Let’s do the math:

• One year is roughly 30 million seconds.
• Total seconds for one person’s life: 50 years * 30 million seconds/year = 1.5 billion seconds.
• Total seconds across all simulated people: 1.5 billion seconds/person * 200 billion humans = 3 x 10^20 seconds.
• Total operations needed: 3 x 10^20 seconds * 10^20 operations/second = 3 x 10^40 operations.
• To run this at once, you’d need a computer capable of handling a simply massive number of operations per second. The text says it would be a “million, trillion, trillion, trillion” operations per second (which is roughly 10^36 or 10^42 depending on how you read it, but the point is it’s huge). That’s more operations than there are stars in the observable universe!

Right now, a computer like that seems impossible.

Except… maybe it isn’t forever impossible.

Assumption 2: Technological Progress Won’t Stop Anytime Soon#

If we assume that technology keeps advancing at a pace similar to what we’ve seen so far, then eventually, civilizations might reach a point where they span galaxies and have what seems like unlimited computer power. These beings could be so advanced, we might barely tell the difference between them and gods.

A computer handling that “million, trillion, trillion, trillion” number of operations per second is serious business, but there are actually theoretical concepts for computers that could handle it.

• One idea is the Matrioshka Brain. This is a theoretical giant structure built around a star, made of billions of parts that orbit the star and feed on its energy. A computer on this scale could have enough power to simulate not just one, but many thousands, even millions of humanity’s histories or versions of reality all at the same time.
• Other future tech, like really high-end quantum computers, might drastically reduce the size needed. It could potentially be possible with a structure the size of a large city, or maybe even smaller.

But, this is only possible if there’s still someone around advanced enough to actually build such a computer.

Assumption 3: Advanced Civilizations Don’t Destroy Themselves#

This is a big one. If civilizations always reach a point where they wipe themselves out, then the whole discussion ends here because no super-advanced simulator civilization would exist.

When we look out into space, you’d expect to see signs of millions of alien civilizations, right? But we don’t see anyone. One possible reason for this is the idea of Great Filters. These are major barriers that life has to overcome to survive and advance to a super-advanced stage. Examples could be things like:

• Nuclear war
• Giant asteroid impacts
• Climate change
• Or even something crazy like inventing a black hole generator that gets out of control.

If life is just naturally self-destructive and can’t get past these filters, then no civilizations reach the point of running simulations, and therefore, we aren’t simulated by them. We talk more about this lack of aliens in our Fermi Paradox video (the original text implies this video exists).

Assumption 4: Super Advanced Civilizations Want to Run Simulations#

When we talk about civilizations so far beyond us, like “posthuman” civilizations, we honestly have no idea what their motivations would be.

Thinking we know what beings as powerful as gods might want is pretty arrogant.

Imagine the smartest ant you can think of, living right next to a huge amusement park. It’s curious about what the humans are up to. You try to explain rollercoasters, standing in lines, going on holidays, and the concept of “fun”. The ant, living its ant life, just wouldn’t understand. Those concepts wouldn’t make sense to it.

It’s likely the same situation between us and a posthuman being. Compared to them, we are like ants. Running simulations, whether just for fun or for scientific study, might seem like an absurdly pointless or stupid idea to them.

However, if they do want to run simulations for some reason, and assumptions one, two, and three are also true (it’s possible to simulate consciousness, technology keeps advancing, and advanced civilizations survive), then the chances that you are living inside a simulation are not zero.

Assumption 5: If There Are A Lot of Simulations, You Are Probably Inside One#

This is the final step. If simulated civilizations are possible and advanced civilizations want to run them, it’s likely they would run many.

Remember, we’re assuming these posthuman beings have access to practically unlimited computing power (from Assumption 2). If they decide to run simulations, it would be much more efficient and convenient for them to run millions or even billions of them at the same time.

If there are billions of simulated universes running, that means there are probably trillions and trillions of simulated conscious beings living inside them.

This would mean that the vast, vast majority of all conscious beings that have ever existed, or will exist, are simulated.

So, for every one conscious being made of flesh and blood, there might be a billion simulated ones.

Since we have no way right now to tell if we are simulated or not, statistically speaking, the chances of you being one of the 999,999,999 simulated ones (out of every billion) are incredibly high.