Supervisor: Nikolaj Zinner

In recent decades the question of our reality being a computer simulation has been popularized; as e.g. Wachowski’s The Matrix is an example of.

Is it fantastic Science Fiction or could it be that the world we perceive is a simulated reality?

In 2003 Nick Bostrom published the article Are we living in a computer simulation?, in which he argues that one of these three seemingly unlikely propositions is almost certainly true:

1.      "The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage [defined as one capable of running high-fidelity ancestor-simulations] is very close to zero"

2.      "The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations [defined as a simulation of the entire history of humankind] is very close to zero"

3.      "The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one"

In this colloquium I intent to examine the assumptions put into Bostrom’s trilemma; the possibility, capability and reasoning for a civilization to compute simulated realities before its own demise, and what kind of experimental setups could be used to test, if reality is a rendering before our eyes.