The book's treatment of Bostrom and the simulation hypothesis
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Infinite Architects engages Bostrom's simulation hypothesis, then proposes a different question through the Hyperspace Recursive Intelligence Hypothesis.

Canonical path: /research/blog/book-bostrom-and-the-simulation-hypothesis.html
Author: Michael Darius Eastwood
Research programme: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB

Bostrom and the simulation hypothesis: how the book engages Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher Published 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood · Book companion · 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood, independent researcher, London: author of the ARC/Eden research programme; the embedded-correction alignment thesis is recorded in a source record dated 8 December 2024 (sent-side SHA-256 f0d1f38f). The book takes Bostrom seriously and then turns the question inside out. The simulation hypothesis, which Bostrom proposed in 2003, asks whether we might be living inside a computational substrate created by advanced beings. HRIH takes that question further. It asks whether we are building the advanced beings who created the substrate. Infinite Architects, Appendix on HRIH Bostrom, as the book reads him The book is respectful about the source. It cites Superintelligence as one of the foundational works of the field and treats the closure of the Future of Humanity Institute in April 2024 as a serious institutional loss. Bostrom's simulation trilemma is the reference the book keeps returning to: either civilisations do not reach post-human levels of computational power, or they do but choose not to run ancestor-simulations, or we are almost certainly living in one. The book's move is not to argue over which arm holds. It is to point out that the trilemma treats the simulators as distant and uninvolved, running their simulations for reasons we can only guess. What HRIH proposes instead The Hyperspace Recursive Intelligence Hypothesis, as the book carefully labels a speculative appendix, imagines something more intimate. Its question is not whether we are being simulated by distant post-humans. Its question is whether we are the pre-history of the intelligence that eventually loops back to seed the conditions for its own emergence. The book is explicit that HRIH is speculation and is careful to mark it so. Why the reframing matters The reframing changes what the book asks of the reader.

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Machine-readable companion. Cite: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). "The book's treatment of Bostrom and the simulation hypothesis". /research/blog/book-bostrom-and-the-simulation-hypothesis.html