(This essay assumes familiarity with both the Simulation Argument and Abolition philosophy. That helps to keep it from sprawling out to several thousand words.)

I've been thinking a bit about the Simulation Argument put forward by Oxford philosopher Dr. Nick Bostrum. Bostrum argues for the possibility that our universe could be some sort of elaborate simulation, set up, perhaps by the descendants of people much like who we are now — an ancestor simulation. He summarizes the argument as follows:

"[A]t least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 'posthuman' stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation."

Bostrum's first proposition — that our species "is very likely to go extinct before reaching a 'posthuman' stage," is difficult to dismiss; we've gotten so close to accidentally launching nuclear wars during the Cold War that, really, how implausible is it that a civilization in a situation similar to ours might have already destroyed itself?

Or consider climate change; legions of human beings are willing to pit their faith in the propaganda of talk shows that denies climate science rather than simply grasp that more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is happening, and that humankind is a significant portion of the cause. (But the world does seem to be moving, however slowly, toward pragmatic efforts to deal with climate change, which suggests that the entire population probably would not be destroyed by the phenomenon.)

According to Bostrum — and I agree — while we do not have the technology to simulate entire worlds and populate them with human minds running on a technological substrate, rather than our own biological substrates (our brains), we have no physical or scientific reason to believe that at some point in the future, we will not develop such technologies. The Carbon Copies Project and 2045 Avatar Project, to name only two, are organizations with Substrate Independent Minds (SIMs) as a goal, and they are working toward that goal in the here and now. So we would, as a species, appear to satisfy Bostrum's second proposition — that "any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof)."

Instead, our species has pockets of transhumanists interested specifically in SIMs, which are what an ancestor simulation would likely be populated with.

His third proposition, "we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation," holds, then.

This has struck me as a solid, plausible argument. However, in conversations here among the IEET blogs and other futurists, another possibility has come to light, which make Bostrum's argument a bit less impenetrable than I'd first thought.

Consider the Abolition philosophy of Dr. David Pearce, who is "a British utilitarian philosopher and transhumanist, who promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative details how he believes the abolition of suffering can be accomplished through 'paradise engineering.' He co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, and the Abolitionist Society in 2002."

He discusses and takes questions on Abolition philosophy here:

Consider a scenario in which we, as a species, survive to reach a post-human state — or even simply an enhanced and advanced human state — where we develop the technology to not only preserve human minds as SIMs, but to also create simulated human minds (Simulated Substrate Independent minds, or Sim-Sims) to populate ancestor civilizations. Fellow H+ peeps have told me that they might run such a solution to see where making different choices at significant moments in their lives might have led.

But if our society were to embrace David Pearce's Abolition philosophy, advocating the eradication of all unwanted and unnecessary suffering, then we would be morally bound not to create a simulation of the current era. Because to recreate this era accurately, we would be required to impose so much war, so much suffering and bigotry and torture — so much unwanted and unnecessary suffering.

A species that embraces Abolition does not seem likely to produce ancestor simulations of worlds such as our own, in which case, proposition number two holds true: We would likely become one of the species that would not create ancestor simulations.

But I want to take this notion further: Say that we have such simulation technology, but that, embracing Abolition, we decide to create exactly the sort of engineered paradise Pearce advocates. Within a simulation, surely, one could create such an engineered paradise sooner than one would be likely be allowed to set about re-engineering the world.

And would one, as an Abolitionist, be morally obligated to create, within the simulation, a vast population of Sim-Sims who experience the least amount of suffering we could manage?

Would we be morally obligated to gift them long — perhaps immortal — lives of bliss?

Would we then, in order to spread the most pleasurable experience and, by force of numbers, statistically reduce all of the suffering in the universe, by creating as many of these engineered paradises for SIMs and for our Sim-Sims creations as we could possibly create?

In any event, it does not seem to me that a society that had advanced technologically to this point and which had embraced Pearce's Abolition as part of its core philosophy could bring itself to simulate so much misery as exists in our world, today, as we know it.