The Only Good Thing About the “We Are in a Computer Simulation” Theory

Early in the century Nick Bostrom advanced an argument claiming that there is a significant chance that we are merely living in a computer simulation. This idea has received a high degree of worldwide attention that makes no sense, given the extreme weakness of Bostrom's argument for such an idea.

Bostrom imagined extraterrestrial civilizations running computer programs that somehow produce experiences such as you and I are now having, calling these "ancestor simulations." I may merely quote a brief passage from Bostrom's original paper to show the sophistry of its reasoning.

"A technologically mature 'posthuman' civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations 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."

This cannot be careful reasoning, because Bostrom has sloppily spoken as if an interest in running “ancestor-simulations” is equivalent to actually running them. But there are 1001 reasons why extraterrestrial civilizations might not run such “ancestor-simulations,” even though they had some interest in running them if it was possible. He also does nothing to justify his claim that “at least one of the following propositions is true,” and it is certainly not clear that the third proposition is even possible, let alone that it must be true if the other two propositions are false.

Bostrom also makes the big mistake of implying that if there is one alien civilization interested in creating an “ancestor simulation,” that such a civilization would now be producing countless such simulations. He suggests that if there is one such civilization, the number of simulated lives would greatly outnumber the number of real lives. This is a completely unjustified insinuation. The more often some weird non-essential project has been done, the less people tend to be interested in doing it. If an alien civilization were able to run some ancestor simulation of the type Bostrom imagines, we have every reason to suspect that it would grow bored with such a thing after some particular number of years, and lose interest in it. Given an alien civilization that had one point in its long existence had an interest in running an ancestor simulation, there is no reason to think (given a very long lifetime for that civilization) that it would now be running such simulations. And there is also no reason to believe that it would now be running very many such simulations, so many that the number of simulated lives would outnumber the number of real lives.

Moreover, if we were to be living in a simulation, there would be no reason to believe that there are any extraterrestrial planets that might have super-advanced civilizations doing computer-generated "ancestor simulations," because a consequence of such a hypothesis is that all of our astronomical data (and all of our computer progress data and all of our video game progress data) is illusory, and that the stars and planets and computers and video games we observe are just "parts of the simulation."  So the simulation argument is like some guy who climbs up a ladder and then kicks the ladder out from under his feet. If you exist in a simulated reality, then you have zero basis for believing anything about extraterrestrials or computers outside of your simulated reality. 

A general rule of all successful arguments is: the conclusion never discredits one of the premises. Below is an argument that violates that rule:

Premise 1: My husband is a good man.
Premise 2: Good men tell the truth.
Premise 3: So when my husband said, "I'm going to flatten you!" when I told him I had thrown away his big stack of porn magazines, he must have been telling the truth. 
Conclusion: Therefore, my husband literally plans to flatten me, perhaps by renting a streamroller vehicle, and running over me. 

One reason this is a bad argument is that the conclusion invalidates one of the premises (if your husband is planning to murder you, then he's not a good man).  Something similar goes on in the argument that we are living in a computer simulation, which could be stated like this:

Premise 1: We have astronomical reasons for thinking maybe there are very old extraterrestrial civilizations. 
Premise 2: Such civilizations would have incredibly powerful computers.
Premise 3: Such computers would be so powerful they could simulate our lives. 
Conclusion: We're probably living in a computer simulation run by extraterrestrials.

In this case, as in the wife's argument, the conclusion discredits one of the premises. If we are living in a simulated reality, then all of our astronomical data is just "part of the simulation," and we have no reason for thinking there are old extraterrestrial civilizations. 

An argument for the simulated universe idea was advanced by Elon Musk, who stated the following:

“The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.

Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.”

What Musk describes is a progression of sophistication in video game technology. But we have not one bit of evidence that any computer or video game has ever itself had the slightest iota of experience, consciousness, or life-flow. We only have evidence that biological creatures such as us can have some experience, consciousness, or life-flow. So there is no basis for thinking that some super-advanced alien civilization could ever be able to produce computers or video games that by themselves were the source of experiences like the ones we have. Making such an assumption based on an extrapolation of technical progress in video games is as fallacious as arguing that one day video games will be so realistic that their characters or creatures will leap out of the video game screen and endanger your life (kind of like in the visual below). 

Musk's witless reasoning along the lines of  "we're probably in a computer simulation because video games are getting better" has recently been repeated by a computer science expert named Rizwan Virk. Regarding the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation, Virk has deluded himself into believing that "there is plenty of evidence that points in that direction"  (there is actually no such evidence). After making a completely inappropriate appeal to quantum mechanics and Schrodinger's cat, which have no relevance to this question, Virk tries to back up the simulation argument by telling us that physicist John Wheeler made the "discovery" that everything is information. That was merely a speculation of Wheeler's, one that hasn't won much acceptance; and if it is true, it wouldn't imply we are in a computer simulation. Virk also tries to back up the simulation idea by arguing that video games have got a lot better over the years. It's the same bunk argument presented by Musk. 

Arguments that we are living in a computer simulation have very little intrinsic worth. But there is one good thing about considering such arguments seriously. If we consider seriously the possibility that we are merely living in a computer simulation, our minds may be opened to an important general possibility that may very well be true: the possibility that reality is radically different from the way we it is officially portrayed.

Let us consider one way a person might think about the possibility we are living in a computer simulation. He might think like this:

“We have been told that our minds are being produced by our brains, but that may not be true.

We have been told that we are merely the product of blind evolution, but that may not be true.

We have been told that the matter we see around us exists independently of our minds, but that may not be true.

Maybe instead of being just the result of a long series of incredibly improbable accidents, we are here because of the intention of some purposeful intelligence.

Maybe we're just living in a computer simulation run by extraterrestrials.”

The last of these ideas is not a very viable one at all, but the preceding ideas are all well worth considering, particularly in forms outside of the “computer simulation” idea. Considering such possibilities very seriously would seem to be a step in the direction of philosophical maturity.  Once someone starts reasoning along the lines above, he may climb out of the thought prison that our mainstream experts have kept us chained in for so long.  But having escaped such a prison,  you should explore around and look for something better than the cheesy "we are in an extraterrestrial computer simulation" idea. 

Flying Pink Unicorns and Simulated Universes

Elon Musk is very good at technology, but he is much weaker at the game of philosophical arguments, judging from his recent reasoning on the subject of whether we live in a simulated universe. Here was the argument Musk gave:

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following. Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.

Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it's getting better every year. Soon we'll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?

Sure, Elon, I'll tell you what the flaw is in your argument. What Musk describes is a progression of sophistication in video game technology. But we have not one bit of evidence that any computer or video game has ever itself had the slightest iota of experience, consciousness, or life-flow. We only have evidence that biological creatures such as us can have some experience, consciousness, or life-flow. So there is no basis for thinking that some super-advanced alien civilization could ever be able to produce computers or video games that by themselves were the source of experiences like the ones we have. Making such an assumption based on an extrapolation of technical progress in video games is like arguing that one day video game characters will be so realistic that they will step out of the video game screen and help us clean our house.

Biological entities such as ourselves may have experiences (or simulated experiences) when we view the output of computers or video games, but it is not the computers or video games that ever have such experiences by themselves. We have no good reason for concluding that computers or video games will ever be able to have experiences or life-flow like that we experience, so there is no reason for thinking that our experiences or life-flow is caused by such electronic devices. As for the “one in billions” part of the argument, it is just an arbitrary number that Musk has picked out of a hat, without suggesting any basis for such reasoning.

The lives of humans have produced an ocean of life-flow or experience or consciousness, but we have not the slightest evidence that any computer has produced the tiniest bit of any such thing – not even a drop, we may say. Nor is there any reason for supposing that future advances will produce such a thing. There will never be a way to program a computer so that it “has a day” or “lives an experience.”

A video game is not something that produces experiences, a fact that we can prove by imagining a world in which there are no humans, and asking: how many video game experiences would we then have? A video game is something that can affect the experiences of agents (humans) that are capable of having experiences. Arguing that a video game or computer will be able to produce experiences is like thinking (based on the fact that thunderstorms can affect baseball games) that thunderstorms will one day be able all by themselves to produce baseball games when humans aren't around.

In the original paper discussing the simulation argument that you are (or may be) living in a computer simulation, Nick Bostrom defined an “ancestor simulation” as something that would be produced when a computer would “simulate the entire mental history of humankind.” Here is the unjustified claim given in the conclusion of Nick Bostrom's original paper presenting his argument regarding the idea that you are living in a computer simulation.

A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations 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.

Bostrom's paper justified no such assertion. He wants us to choose between one of three possibilities, when there is a very plausible fourth possibility: The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are capable of running ancestor-simulations is zero. Since we have no evidence that computers or video games will ever be capable of producing human-like experience, this is a very plausible possibility that short-circuits his whole line of reasoning. Also, Bostrom does nothing to justify any statements about fractions or ratios, so he has just "picked out of a hat" his third possibility. 

Bostrom also makes the big mistake of implying that if there is one alien civilization interested in creating an “ancestor simulation,” that such a civilization would now be producing countless such simulations. He suggests that if there is one such civilization, the number of simulated lives would greatly outnumber the number of real lives. This is a completely unjustified insinuation. The more often some weird non-essential project has been done, the less people tend to be interested in doing it. While an alien civilization might run some ancestor simulation of the type Bostrom imagines, we have every reason to suspect that it would grow bored with such a thing after some particular number of years, and lose interest in it. Given an alien civilization that had one point in its long existence had an interest in running an ancestor simulation, there is no reason to think (given a very long life-time for that civilization) that it would now be running such simulations. And there is also no reason to believe that it would now be running very many such simulations, so many that the number of simulated lives would outnumber the number of real lives. 

I may note that Bostrom's paper is filled with quite a few goofy misstatements, such as the completely incorrect claim that "there are certainly many humans who would like to run ancestor-simulations if they could afford to do so."  Not correct, as no one prior to Bostrom's paper expressed any interest in creating computer simulations to recreate "the entire mental history of mankind." 

Reasoning like Bostrom's could be used to establish a million and one goofy claims. For example, imagine you want to establish that there is a city populated by flying pink unicorns. You could argue that super-advanced alien civilizations would have the power to create flying pink unicorns, using either genetic engineering or advanced robotics. You could then argue that since there might be trillions of super-advanced alien civilizations, probably at least one of them has had an interest in creating a city filled with flying pink unicorns. Presto! You now have your magic city filled with flying pink unicorns, located somewhere out there in the depths of space. Of course, this is the same kind of reasoning used to establish some suspicion that we are living in an alien civilization's computer simulation. It is reasoning that leaps from “they might possibly have done this weird thing” to “they probably did do this weird thing.”

There is a general problem with all such lines of reasoning. As a civilization's technology increases, the number of possibilities and opportunities available to that civilization exponentially increases. So if we imagine some super-advanced civilization with a technology millions of times greater than ours, we must imagine that the number of possibilities and opportunities open to that civilization would also increase by millions of times, or probably even billions or trillions of times. So with all those nearly infinite possibilities available to such a civilization, millions of which we might be able to imagine and billions of which we could never imagine, what is the chance that a super-advanced civilization would undertake one particular non-essential technological project we might imagine – whether it be creating “ancestor simulations” or creating cities filled with flying pink unicorns? No greater than one in a million.

So let's summarize the case against the idea that you are living in a simulated universe.

1. There are very strong reasons for believing that experience and consciousness and life-flow such as we have cannot be electronically produced, completely ruling out the possibility that human experience is computer-generated.
2. Even if it were possible for human experience to be electronically simulated, there is no reason to believe that any extraterrestrial civilization currently has a very strong (and abundantly funded) interest in creating “ancestor simulations” that electronically reproduce lives such as ours, given the nearly infinite number of other projects such extraterrestrials might be preoccupied with.
3. Even if an extraterrestrial civilization did have such an interest in creating “ancestor simulations,” there is no reason to think that they would create so many such simulations that the number of simulated lives would outnumber the number of real lives.
4. There is therefore no probability basis for assuming some substantial chance that you are part of some “ancestor simulation” created by extraterrestrials, based on a comparison between the number of simulated lives and the number of real lives. 
   
   
   
    This is not your life

The Main Argument for a Simulated Universe is Self-Destroying

The theory that we live in a simulated universe continues to attract attention, and it seems like a month never goes by without a web site producing a headline such as: Do We Live in a Simulated Universe? But the argument given for such a possibility is basically the same old argument that has been circulating since Nick Bostrom advanced it quite a few years ago.

The argument goes something like this:

1. The universe is billions of years old, and contains billions of galaxies, each containing many millions or billions of stars.
2. It is therefore likely that advanced civilizations arose on many planets long ago.
3. Such advanced civilizations would have fantastically advanced computing powers, including the ability to create incredibly complicated simulations so realistic they would be indistinguishable from reality.
4. Even if only a small fraction of such civilizations created such simulations, the total number of simulations they would create would be incredibly high, probably many times higher than the total number of planets containing civilizations similar to ours.
5. We therefore should conclude that we are probably living in such a simulation, rather than living on a real planet in a non-simulated universe. 
   
   
   
   Artistic depiction of a culture living on a moon revolving around an alien planet
   
   

There are a number of problems with such an argument, some of which I mentioned in a previous post entitled Why You Are Not Living in a Computer Simulation. One of the objections I made in that post is that it is very doubtful that any extraterrestrial civilization could produce a simulation matching the reality we observe. Some have estimated that such a simulation could be produced by creating a planet-sized computer. I doubt the feasibility of creating a computer that large. I also think it is very doubtful that even a computer the size of the sun would be enough to produce a simulation of what we observe, given the nearly infinite number of combinations that are possible, assuming that free will is real. 

 

In this post I will discuss a different objection to such an argument for a simulated universe, an objection I did not previously make. The objection I refer to is simply that the basic argument for a simulated universe is an argument that is self-destroying. This is because the argument reaches a conclusion that ends up destroying some of its premises.

To understand the concept of a self-destroying argument, let us consider a much simpler example. Consider the following argument:

1. John was born in the city of San Ansales in the United States.
2. Everyone born in the city of San Ansales looks like a Mexican.
3. People who look like Mexicans must have been born in Mexico.
4. Therefore John must have been born in Mexico.

This is a self-destroying argument, because the conclusion ends up destroying one of the premises used to derive the conclusion. If the conclusion is correct, and John was born in Mexico, then he cannot also have been born in the United States; and if he was not born in the United States, the whole argument falls apart.

The argument for a simulated universe discussed above is also a self-destroying argument. The argument reaches a conclusion that we are probably living in a simulated universe. But if we are living in such a simulated universe, there is no reason to believe in the first three premises of the argument. If we are living in a simulated universe, there is no reason to believe that the universe is billions of years old, no reason to believe that there are many other planets, and no reason to believe that there are other civilizations vastly older than ours.

If you assume that you are living in a simulated universe, what can you conclude about the existence of entities other than yourself? Almost nothing. You cannot conclude that observations of entities outside our planet correspond to an actual reality, because all such observations may simply be part of the fictional simulation. You cannot conclude that there really is a planet Earth, because your observations of our planet may merely be part of the simulation.

Shockingly, if you assume that you are living in a simulated universe, you cannot even assume that the people you observe with your own eyes are real people who exist, either physically or as people who are experiencing a simulation that partially matches the simulation you observe. You may have observations of your mother, but if you assume that you are living in a simulation you cannot assume that your mother really exists, and cannot even assume that your mother is at least experiencing some simulation similar to the simulation you are experiencing. What you perceive as your mother could be just a part of the simulation, like a CGI character in a video game or a movie. Or course, if you are living in a simulation, you also cannot assume that any of the people you see on the street really exist, either in a physical form or even in the minimal form of minds that are actually experiencing consciousness.

There is no reason to think that simulators creating a simulation would follow some “rule of simulation” which says that any human perceived in a simulation must also be experiencing his own simulation. So if you are in a simulation, there is no particularly good reason for believing that anyone else is experiencing the simulation other than yourself.

So once you have assumed that you are living in a simulated universe, you are only entitled to assume two things: that you exist at least as some form of consciousness, and that some unknown external agent exists that is producing the simulation you are experiencing.

Given such a radical situation, in which you can't even assume that anyone else you perceive really exists outside of your mind, it is very clear indeed that once you assume that you are in a simulation there is then no reason to believe that there exist other stars, other planets, and other alien civilizations, nor is there any reason to believe that the universe is old enough to have produced technically advanced civilizations on other planets.

This, then, is why the basic argument for a simulated universe is self-destroying. It starts out with some fairly plausible premises. But once it reaches its conclusion, that conclusion destroys the very premises used to reach that conclusion.

We can have no basis for assuming that there really are highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations capable of simulating our experience unless we believe that we live in a real, material, non-simulated universe. But if we believe that, we cannot possibly use the likelihood of such civilizations as a basis for assuming that we live in a simulation.

Why You Are Not Living in a Computer Simulation

In 2001 Nick Bostrom created something of a sensation with his provocative paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Bostrom argued that super-advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might be able to create computer simulations that mimic the type of experience humans have, and that we might all be living in such a simulation. I would guess that such an idea may have come from the appearance two years earlier of the popular film The Matrix, which depicted people living in a reality that they thought was normal life, but was really just a computer simulation.

I will now discuss some reasons why such a possibility is extremely unlikely.

Reason 1: The technical feasibility of such a simulation is very low.

Bostrom's paper glosses over the many huge technical hurdles of creating a computer simulation in which the end result is many conscious minds who think they are living on a planet when they really are just living in a computer.

Bostrom's first gloss is to ask us to suppose that in his alien-generated simulation of human experience “these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained
and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct)." We have no idea whether it is actually possible to produce human-like consciousness in a computer, so this is a very questionable assumption.

Bostrom estimates that all of human consciousness could be simulated in a computer that performs between 10³³ and 10³⁶ operations per second. He estimates that an alien civilization could handle this, because it could build a planet-sized computer capable of 10⁴² operations per second. Of course, the idea of a planet-sized computer is very farfetched. We have no experience with any computer a trillionth that size, and there may be all kinds of technical reasons why you can't build a computer even as large as twenty miles in width (such as the fact that the combined heat from all the circuits would cause everything to get messed up, the fact that the speed of light may slow down the communication between internal parts, and the fact that it may be impossible to properly cool a computer of that size).

There is also reason to think that Bostrom has vastly underestimated the required number of operations to simulate our existence in a computer simulation. Bostrom gets his number of between between 10³³ and 10³⁶ operations (for a simulation of all of human consciousness) by naively taking an estimate of the number of operations in the human brain per second, and multiplying that number by the number of humans and the lifespan of a human. But a simulation that allows for free-will and branching possibilities would seem to require vastly more computing power – probably far more than the operations of Bostrom's hypothetical planet-sized computer (or even a star-sized computer).

It requires a relatively small number of bits to display the famous film The Godfather. But imagine a computer generated virtual experience in which you are Michael Corleone, and you can make any choice at any point in the film – you can kill the guy in the restaurant, or kill any other person you see; you can marry the woman in Sicily, or marry any other woman in Sicily, and so forth. Every possible choice involves a combinatorial explosion which vastly and exponentially increases the computer operations needed for a free-choice simulation in which any agent in the simulation can do whatever he wants.

Bostrom seems to have made the mistake of calculating the computing cost of a passive human experience (one in which we are like roller coaster riders without any branching options), rather than computing the infinitely higher cost of a free-will human experience (in which we are like car drivers who can drive anywhere and get out of the car anywhere and interact with people anywhere).

In fact, the likely computing cost of a simulation creating something like the consciousness of all human beings (with complete free will and a full range of choices) would in all probability greatly exceed the maximum capability of a computer that had all of the mass in a solar system (the sun, all the planets, and all the asteroids). And forget about interstellar computers – there is no reason to think that computers spanning multiple solar systems are practical (because of the years it takes for light to travel from one star to another).

It short, it would not be technically feasible to create a computer simulation of all of human consciousness using any technology we can imagine.

Reason 2: Aliens would have no motive to create a computer simulation that consisted of lives like ours, having experiences like we now experience.

The question of motive is one that Bostrom doesn't even address. If extraterrestrials had the ability to create a computer simulation that could include our current experience, why would they go to all the trouble of doing that?

Let's imagine some possible motives. We can imagine a malevolent motive. We can imagine very evil aliens who get pleasure from creating pain for others, like a sick boy who enjoys sticking a lit cigarette on a caged mouse. But our human experience (with usually more pleasure than pain) doesn't correspond to the type of computer simulation that such beings would create, which presumably would be something more like one of Dante's depictions of hell.

Consider the opposite motive. We can imagine benevolent, loving extraterrestrials who create our lives in a computer simulation just so that there can be some more happiness in the universe. But presumably beings with such a motive would create a computer simulation in which there was more pleasure and less pain than we see in human experience.

What about the possibility that we were created in a computer simulation by extraterrestrials who are doing some big experiment, to find something out? This motive also doesn't work. Psychological or sociological experiments would be done by relatively ignorant beings with a whole lot to learn, not by godlike beings powerful enough to create computers the size of planets or suns (such beings would have presumably already learned whatever knowledge might be received from such an experiment).

In short, we have no plausible motive for why extraterrestrials would create a computer simulation consisting of minds like our minds, and lives like our lives.

Reason 3: If we were part of an extraterrestrial computer simulation, we would probably see “realism imperfections” in the simulation that we do not see.

Because of the combinatorial explosion problem described above, the computing cost of a fairly realistic computer simulation of human experience (with less than perfect detail everywhere) would be many, many orders of magnitude less than the computing cost of making such a simulation perfectly realistic, with perfect detail everywhere. So according to the principle that slightly imperfect things (and vastly easier things) should be far more likely than perfect and incredibly difficult things, we should expect that if we were living in a computer simulation, we would occasionally see signs of imperfection in the simulation: what we can call “realism imperfections.”

One can easily imagine the type of things you would be likely to sometimes observe if your life was part of a not-quite-perfect simulation. For example, you might look at a distant point in the sky, but see no further detail when you looked at it again with a telescope much more powerful. Or you might dissect an organism, and find only a featureless mass when you looked inside it, instead of all the realistic details. Or you might go to a randomly selected distant library and start opening books, and find that they had only white pages in them. But we never see anything like such “realism imperfections” in our universe. There are various strange, paranormal things that people sometimes claim to see or experience (UFOs, ghosts, and the like), but nobody sees anything like these types of “realism imperfections.” That's not what would be likely if we lived in a computer simulation.

Moral Issues

The reasons above are good intellectual reasons for not believing that our lives are part of a computer simulation. There is also a powerful moral reason. If you believe that your life is part of a computer generated simulation produced by extraterrestrials, then the logical next step is to suspect that none of your fellow humans exist. Because if the extraterrestrials are simulating in their computers the sky, the ground, the trees, and the rocks that you see, you might as well assume that they are simulating all of the humans (except you) also. This is because doing a computer simulation with just one observer is so much easier than doing a computer simulation with billions of observers. So if you believe in Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, the next stop on the train is the belief that you are the only human that exists. Such a belief (which would give you a license to murder and rape as you please, since you're not really hurting anyone else) is morally suicidal.

In short, the simulation hypothesis is both intellectually untenable and morally disastrous.