Good questions. Firstly, let’s just take as an assumption that I’m very distinct — not just unique. In my calculation, I set Pr(I’m distinct | I’m not in a simulation)=0.0001 to account for this (1 in 10,000 people), but honesty I think the real probability is much much lower than this figure (maybe 1 in a million) — so I was even being generous to your point there.
To your second question, the reason why, in my simulator’s earth, I imagine the chance of uniqueness to be larger is that if I’m in a simulation then there could be what I will call “NPCs.” People who seem to exist but are really just figments of my mind. (Whereas the probability of NPCs existing if I’m not in a simulation is basically 0.) At least that’s my intuition. There might even be a way of formalizing that intuition; for example, saying that in a simulated world, the population of earth is an upper bound on the number of “true observers” vs NPCs, whereas in the real world, everyone is a “true observer.” Is there something wrong in this intuition?
Note that if your prior is “it’s much cheaper to simulate one person and have most of the rest of the universe be NPC/rougher-than-reality”, then you being unique doesn’t change it by much. This would STILL be true if you were superficially similar to many NPCs.
True, but that wasn’t my prior. My assumption was that if I’m in a simulation, there’s quite a high likelihood that I would be made to be so ‘lucky’ to be the highest on this specific dimension. Like a video game in which the only character has the most Hp.
Good questions. Firstly, let’s just take as an assumption that I’m very distinct — not just unique. In my calculation, I set Pr(I’m distinct | I’m not in a simulation)=0.0001 to account for this (1 in 10,000 people), but honesty I think the real probability is much much lower than this figure (maybe 1 in a million) — so I was even being generous to your point there.
To your second question, the reason why, in my simulator’s earth, I imagine the chance of uniqueness to be larger is that if I’m in a simulation then there could be what I will call “NPCs.” People who seem to exist but are really just figments of my mind. (Whereas the probability of NPCs existing if I’m not in a simulation is basically 0.) At least that’s my intuition. There might even be a way of formalizing that intuition; for example, saying that in a simulated world, the population of earth is an upper bound on the number of “true observers” vs NPCs, whereas in the real world, everyone is a “true observer.” Is there something wrong in this intuition?
Note that if your prior is “it’s much cheaper to simulate one person and have most of the rest of the universe be NPC/rougher-than-reality”, then you being unique doesn’t change it by much. This would STILL be true if you were superficially similar to many NPCs.
True, but that wasn’t my prior. My assumption was that if I’m in a simulation, there’s quite a high likelihood that I would be made to be so ‘lucky’ to be the highest on this specific dimension. Like a video game in which the only character has the most Hp.