Nick Bostrom’s argument, published as “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” in Philosophical Quarterly in 2003, and the piece of philosophy that every later simulation claim is standing on.
What it actually says
It is a disjunction, not a conclusion. At least one of three propositions is almost certainly true: that civilisations almost always go extinct before reaching a posthuman stage; that almost no posthuman civilisation runs simulations of its own ancestors; or that we are almost certainly living in one. The argument’s force is that the three are hard to escape together, not that the third is established. It is routinely reported as the claim that we are in a simulation, which is precisely what it declines to assert.
Why the distinction matters here
The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk takes the third horn and builds a worldview on it; the Jorjani - Danny Jones Podcast 2025 interview tries to make it physical with Landauer’s Principle and dark matter. Both go well past Bostrom, who is careful that his argument yields probabilities over hypotheses rather than a description of the world. A reader who wants to argue with the descendants should know that the ancestor is a much narrower claim, and a much better one.
Connections
Nick Bostrom · The Simulation Hypothesis · Rizwan Virk · Many-Worlds Interpretation · John Archibald Wheeler · Landauer’s Principle · Jorjani - Danny Jones Podcast 2025 · Silurian Hypothesis