No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities.
No civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a significant number of simulated
realities, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.
Any entities with our general set of experiences are almost certainly living in a simulation.
The disjunct made up of the three statements seems fairly solid and many of us have lowish priors for the first two disjuncts, and so assign a highish probability to the third disjunct.
Reductio ad absurdum.
I clicked on the PDF and found the first few chapters to be rather childish, to be blunt. Assuming we can transform large amounts of matter into thinking material than what conceivable reason would there be for an ancestor simulation to be made? Do you imagine that we could create simulations on our laptops? Please tell me how we will be able to conjure infinite information out of nothing. “we don’t know that it can’t happen” is hardly an answer and isn’t really unprovable either.
Also, what would the point be in creating humans to be in the sim? Why not just have them be controlled by some AI and have them act as humans do (assuming that it isn’t for “research purposes” which is ridiculous as well because a transhuman civilization of that level wouldn’t actually need the information from it)?
I want to simulate history.
I’m a human.
Therefore, some humans want to simulate history.
This doesn’t actually invalidate my statement. I don’t see how it makes a difference, though, unless you can prove that a lot of people are very interested in creating ancestor simulations- enough to utilize large amounts of resources to achieve that end- or that one day you’ll be able to create worlds on your personal computer.
The rest of your comment seems incredibly...uninformed of the relevant literature, to say the least.
The article held up Civilization as a precursor to future ancestor sims. I pointed out how ridiculous that was. I suppose Occam’s Razor works if you believe in an infinite reality, which I’m not certain of.
Reductio ad absurdum.
I clicked on the PDF and found the first few chapters to be rather childish, to be blunt. Assuming we can transform large amounts of matter into thinking material than what conceivable reason would there be for an ancestor simulation to be made? Do you imagine that we could create simulations on our laptops? Please tell me how we will be able to conjure infinite information out of nothing. “we don’t know that it can’t happen” is hardly an answer and isn’t really unprovable either.
Also, what would the point be in creating humans to be in the sim? Why not just have them be controlled by some AI and have them act as humans do (assuming that it isn’t for “research purposes” which is ridiculous as well because a transhuman civilization of that level wouldn’t actually need the information from it)?
This doesn’t actually invalidate my statement. I don’t see how it makes a difference, though, unless you can prove that a lot of people are very interested in creating ancestor simulations- enough to utilize large amounts of resources to achieve that end- or that one day you’ll be able to create worlds on your personal computer.
The article held up Civilization as a precursor to future ancestor sims. I pointed out how ridiculous that was. I suppose Occam’s Razor works if you believe in an infinite reality, which I’m not certain of.