Why are you so sure it’s a computer simulation? How do you know it’s not a drug trip? A fever dream? An unfathomable organism staring into some kind of (to it’s particular phenomenology) plugging it’s senses into a pseudo-random pattern generator from which is hallucinates or infers the experience of OP?
From the way things sure seem to look, the universe is very big, and has room for lots of computations later on. A bunch of plausible rollouts involve some small fraction of those very large resources going on simulations.
You can, if you want, abandon all epistemic hope and have a very very wide prior. Maybe we’re totally wrong about everything! Maybe we’re Boltzmann brains! But that’s not super informative or helpful, so we look around us and extrapolate assuming that’s a reasonable thing to do, because we ain’t got anything else we can do.
Simulations are very compatible with that. The other examples aren’t so much, if you look up close and have some model of what those things are like and do.
I don’t understand how the assumption that we are living in a simulation which is so convincing as to be indistinguishable from a non-simulation is any more useful than the Boltzmann brain, or a brain in a vat, or a psychedelic trip, or that we’re all just the fantasy of the boy at the end of St. Elsewhere: since, by virtue of being a convincing simulation it has no characteristic which knowingly distinguishes it from a non-simulation. In fact some of those others would be more useful if true, because they would point to phenomena which would better explain the world.
How are the other examples not compatible? What fact could only necessarily be true in a simulation but not on a psychedelically induced hallucination? Or a fever dream? What do you mean “look up close” close to what exactly?
Why are you so sure it’s a computer simulation? How do you know it’s not a drug trip? A fever dream? An unfathomable organism staring into some kind of (to it’s particular phenomenology) plugging it’s senses into a pseudo-random pattern generator from which is hallucinates or infers the experience of OP?
How could we falsify the simulation hypothesis?
From the way things sure seem to look, the universe is very big, and has room for lots of computations later on. A bunch of plausible rollouts involve some small fraction of those very large resources going on simulations.
You can, if you want, abandon all epistemic hope and have a very very wide prior. Maybe we’re totally wrong about everything! Maybe we’re Boltzmann brains! But that’s not super informative or helpful, so we look around us and extrapolate assuming that’s a reasonable thing to do, because we ain’t got anything else we can do.
Simulations are very compatible with that. The other examples aren’t so much, if you look up close and have some model of what those things are like and do.
I don’t understand how the assumption that we are living in a simulation which is so convincing as to be indistinguishable from a non-simulation is any more useful than the Boltzmann brain, or a brain in a vat, or a psychedelic trip, or that we’re all just the fantasy of the boy at the end of St. Elsewhere: since, by virtue of being a convincing simulation it has no characteristic which knowingly distinguishes it from a non-simulation. In fact some of those others would be more useful if true, because they would point to phenomena which would better explain the world.
How are the other examples not compatible? What fact could only necessarily be true in a simulation but not on a psychedelically induced hallucination? Or a fever dream? What do you mean “look up close” close to what exactly?