“Like, it seems perverse to make up an example where we turn on one sim at a time, a trillion trillion times in a row. … Who cares? No reason to think that’s our future.” The point is to imagine a possible future—and that’s all it needs to be—that instantiates none of the three disjuncts of the simulation argument. If one can show that, then the simulation argument is flawed. So far as I can tell, I’ve identified a possible future that is neither (i), (ii), nor (iii).
So, like, a thing we generally do in these kinds of deals is ignore trivial cases, yeah? Like, if we were talking about the trolley problem, no one brings up the possibility that you are too weak to pull the lever, or posits telepathy in a prisoner’s dilemma.
To simplify everything, let’s stick with your first example. We (thousand foks) make one sim. We tell him that there are a thousand and one humans in existence, one of which is a sim, the others are real. We ask him to guess. He guesses real. We delete him and do this again and again, millions of time. Every sim guesses real. Everyone is wrong.
This isn’t an example that proves that, if we are using our experience as analogous to the sim, we should guess ‘real’. It isn’t a future that presents an argument against the simulation argument. It is just a weird special case of a universe where most things are sims.
The fact that there are more ‘real’ at any given time isn’t relevant to the fact of whether any of these mayfly sims are, themselves, real. If there are more simulated universes, then it is more likely that our universe is simulated.
“The fact that there are more ‘real’ at any given time isn’t relevant to the fact of whether any of these mayfly sims are, themselves, real.” You’re right about this, because it’s a metaphysical issue. The question, though, is epistemology: what does one have reason to believe at any given moment. If you want to say that one should bet on being a sim, then you should also say that one is in room Y in Scenario 2, which seems implausible.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘it is a metaphysical issue’, and I’m getting kind of despairing at breaking through here, but one more time.
Just to be clear, every sim who says ‘real’ in this example is wrong, yeah? They have been deceived by the partial information they are being given, and the answer they give does not accurately represent reality. The ‘right’ call for the sims is that they are sims.
In a future like you are positing, if our universe is analogous to a sim, the ‘right’ call is that we are a sim. If, unfortunately, our designers decide to mislead us into guessing wrong by giving us numbers instead of just telling us which we are...that still wouldn’t make us real.
This is my last on the subject, but I hope you get it at this point.
“Like, it seems perverse to make up an example where we turn on one sim at a time, a trillion trillion times in a row. … Who cares? No reason to think that’s our future.” The point is to imagine a possible future—and that’s all it needs to be—that instantiates none of the three disjuncts of the simulation argument. If one can show that, then the simulation argument is flawed. So far as I can tell, I’ve identified a possible future that is neither (i), (ii), nor (iii).
So, like, a thing we generally do in these kinds of deals is ignore trivial cases, yeah? Like, if we were talking about the trolley problem, no one brings up the possibility that you are too weak to pull the lever, or posits telepathy in a prisoner’s dilemma.
To simplify everything, let’s stick with your first example. We (thousand foks) make one sim. We tell him that there are a thousand and one humans in existence, one of which is a sim, the others are real. We ask him to guess. He guesses real. We delete him and do this again and again, millions of time. Every sim guesses real. Everyone is wrong.
This isn’t an example that proves that, if we are using our experience as analogous to the sim, we should guess ‘real’. It isn’t a future that presents an argument against the simulation argument. It is just a weird special case of a universe where most things are sims.
The fact that there are more ‘real’ at any given time isn’t relevant to the fact of whether any of these mayfly sims are, themselves, real. If there are more simulated universes, then it is more likely that our universe is simulated.
“The fact that there are more ‘real’ at any given time isn’t relevant to the fact of whether any of these mayfly sims are, themselves, real.” You’re right about this, because it’s a metaphysical issue. The question, though, is epistemology: what does one have reason to believe at any given moment. If you want to say that one should bet on being a sim, then you should also say that one is in room Y in Scenario 2, which seems implausible.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘it is a metaphysical issue’, and I’m getting kind of despairing at breaking through here, but one more time.
Just to be clear, every sim who says ‘real’ in this example is wrong, yeah? They have been deceived by the partial information they are being given, and the answer they give does not accurately represent reality. The ‘right’ call for the sims is that they are sims.
In a future like you are positing, if our universe is analogous to a sim, the ‘right’ call is that we are a sim. If, unfortunately, our designers decide to mislead us into guessing wrong by giving us numbers instead of just telling us which we are...that still wouldn’t make us real.
This is my last on the subject, but I hope you get it at this point.