If you think that the probability that we’ve all been lied to about this (the relative sizes of the bones in the human body) might be as high as 0.5%, then you live in a more interesting world than I do.
Unless you just mean that you checked Wikipedia, and somebody who knowingly puts a false statement on Wikipedia (a public website) is technically lying to everybody, and you didn’t check the references or even the edit history, so you were unsure whether the probability of having found such a false statement was higher or lower than 0.5%, then … well then I still think that that’s much too high!
(Edits: precise phrasing of stuff about technical lying.)
Well it gets really murky as to what constitutes lying if we’re in a simulation, which is more probable than 0.005 by far. What if there were historic humans, but you’re just a virtual facsimile of one? Is that a “we were lied to about our bones”-scenario? And so on. That’s mostly what I was pondering.
Well, the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation. You may not have bones that exist in the universe outside the simulation, but you still have “bones” within the simulation. The name “bone” as well as the names for specific bones would be accurate if those are the agreed-upon names within your simulated culture. Whether the bones need to physically exist in the most fundamental level of reality in order to be considered bones seems like an argument over semantics. They still possess the other typical characteristics of bones that our culture has decided bones are supposed to possess. In everyday practice, people assign objects to linguistic categories based on resemblance to a prototypical example, not by making sure they fulfill a list of necessary criteria.
Oh, I agree that “the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation”. Likely so, in fact, which is why we go down all the way to 0.005 from P(we all live in a grand ol’ simulation, in a simulation, in a simulation).
The whole survey was full of definitional quibbles. What is ‘supernatural’ etc.
If you think that the probability that we’ve all been lied to about this (the relative sizes of the bones in the human body) might be as high as 0.5%, then you live in a more interesting world than I do.
Unless you just mean that you checked Wikipedia, and somebody who knowingly puts a false statement on Wikipedia (a public website) is technically lying to everybody, and you didn’t check the references or even the edit history, so you were unsure whether the probability of having found such a false statement was higher or lower than 0.5%, then … well then I still think that that’s much too high!
(Edits: precise phrasing of stuff about technical lying.)
Well it gets really murky as to what constitutes lying if we’re in a simulation, which is more probable than 0.005 by far. What if there were historic humans, but you’re just a virtual facsimile of one? Is that a “we were lied to about our bones”-scenario? And so on. That’s mostly what I was pondering.
Well, the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation. You may not have bones that exist in the universe outside the simulation, but you still have “bones” within the simulation. The name “bone” as well as the names for specific bones would be accurate if those are the agreed-upon names within your simulated culture. Whether the bones need to physically exist in the most fundamental level of reality in order to be considered bones seems like an argument over semantics. They still possess the other typical characteristics of bones that our culture has decided bones are supposed to possess. In everyday practice, people assign objects to linguistic categories based on resemblance to a prototypical example, not by making sure they fulfill a list of necessary criteria.
Oh, I agree that “the statement could still be true in the context of the simulation”. Likely so, in fact, which is why we go down all the way to 0.005 from P(we all live in a grand ol’ simulation, in a simulation, in a simulation).
The whole survey was full of definitional quibbles. What is ‘supernatural’ etc.