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I'd give it about a 20% chance. ;-)
It's possible, &I can accept it...
I actually think the second response, "it's possible, likely, but hard to accept" is the most rational choice, even though I chose the first.
If your mind is not blown by the simulation argument, you are brain dead.
It was the Holographic Principle, and Fractal Cosmology that did it for me, once I finally heard of the Simulaiton Hypothesis.
It fits with Holographic/Fractal paradigms.
You're right, but it think the poll results says more about the ieet's fan base than general opinion. Personally I'd never heard of Bostrom, Matrix kinda did it for me tbh. To accept the Bostrom thesis, I think you just need to be open to seeing things really long term.
The last three commentators all make good points. Frankly I'm surprised at the acceptance so far that its highly likely we ARE living in a simulation (despite the limitations of the question and multiple choice answers). I get the feeling its not just because movie like the Matrix are trendy and the idea is so contemporary, but truthfully because many readers are familiar with the theories of Bostrom and others and understand that at a base level the generation of the concept pre-supposes the likelihood of it being true. A bit like the biblical garden of eden and the concept of evil? Once you think of it, it exists.
I'm always questioning the reality of it all. With weird brain malfunctions such as phanthom limbs and mental illness causing hallucinations and so on it's pretty clear that some part of our percieved reality is simulation. We reach some form of objective consensus about what's real by comparing our subjective experiences with others. So the more individuals the more objective our consensus should be, unless it's all just a simulation :)
Wether our percieved reality is driven by biological computation or technological computation is however impossible to know (does it really matter?).
I'm however missing one possible position in Nick Bostroms argument:
(4) We are the first species to approach the posthuman stage in the physically reachable part of our universe.
It may seem unlikely but it should be in there with the other propositions.
I concur. It doesn't matter if we are living in simulation if there are no ways to escape it. An isolated system simulation is reality enough.
And another possible way to look at it is that we are products of a lab experiment--it's both real and artificial depending how you look at it.
If bacteria we grow in petri dishes were sentient(at frequency too fast for us to conceive, just like our neurons communicate in nanoseconds)--are they living in a simulation or reality?
I would have liked a larger variety of answers to this question, as there is more than one way to view simulation.