111 | Nick Bostrom on Anthropic Selection and Living in a Simulation

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 August 2020

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last for millions of years, it could be considered surprising that we’ve found ourselves so early in history. Should we therefore predict that human civilization will probably disappear within a few thousand years? This “Doomsday Argument” shares a family resemblance to ideas used by many professional cosmologists to judge whether a model of the universe is natural or not. Philosopher Nick Bostrom is the world’s expert on these kinds of anthropic arguments. We talk through them, leading to the biggest doozy of them all: the idea that our perceived reality might be a computer simulation being run by enormously more powerful beings.

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Nick Bostrom received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the London School of Economics. He also has bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and artificial intelligence from the University of Gothenburg, an M.A. in philosophy and physics from the University of Stockholm, and an M.Sc. in computational neuroscience from King’s College London. He is currently a Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. He is the author of Anthropic Bias: Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.0	I'm your host, John Carroll.
0:04.7	And today's guest is someone I had in mind right from the beginning as a wonderful guest
0:08.5	from Mindscape as soon as I started the podcast.
0:10.7	It's taken a while for us to work it out and get it to happen, but I'm very happy to have
0:14.7	Nick Bostrom as the guest on today's podcast.
0:18.0	Nick of course is relatively famous in the public sphere as a philosopher because he's one
0:23.8	of the driving forces behind the simulation argument, the idea that it is more likely than
0:28.4	not that we human beings and anyone else in our observable universe are actually simulated
0:34.7	consciousnesses part of a program being run on a computer designed and maintained by
0:40.8	a far more advanced civilization.
0:43.8	But he didn't start there, Nick did not first start with the simulation argument.
0:47.9	He got there from his thinking in philosophy.
0:51.0	Some of his first work was on the Anthropic Principle.
0:54.2	Anthropic psychologists of course know the Anthropic Principle as trying to figure out
0:58.2	the selection of facts that we should impose on cosmological parameters given the fact that
1:03.6	we have to live in a part of the universe where human beings can live.
1:07.5	But the Anthropic Principle is not just for cosmologists.
1:10.3	There's a famous version of it or I should say a famous application of it called the
1:14.1	Doomsday argument that goes back to John Leslie Richard Gott and other people.
1:19.1	The idea is our technological civilization is not that old, right?
1:23.4	I mean, maybe 500 years old, a few thousand years old, depending on what you count as technological
	...

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