I must be missing a subtlety here. I began by asking “Is saying X different from saying Y?” I seem to be getting the answer “Yes, they are different. X is meaningless because it can’t be distinguished from Y.”
Ah, I think I see your problem. You insist on seeing the universe from the perspective of the computer running the program—and in this case, we can say “yes, in memory position #31415926 there’s a human in basement reality and in memory position #2718281828 there’s an identical human in a deeper simulation”. However, those humans can’t tell that. They have no way of determining which is true of them, even if they know that there is a computer that could point to them in its memory, because they are identical. You are every (sufficiently) identical copy of yourself.
No, you don’t see the problem. The problem is that Will_Newsome began by stating:
We are living in a simulation… Almost certain. >99.5%.
Which is fine. But now I am being told that my counter claim “I am not living in a simulation” is meaningless. Meaningless because I can’t prove my statement empirically.
What we seem to have here is very similar to Godel’s version of St. Anselm’s “ontological” proof of the existence of a simulation (i.e. God).
Oh. Did you see my comment asking him to tell whether he meant “some of our measure is in a simulation” or “this particular me is in a simulation”? The first question is asking whether or not we believe that the computer exists (ie, if we were looking at the computer-that-runs-reality could we notice that some copies of us are in simulations or not) and the second is the one I have been arguing is meaningless (kinda).
Right; I thought the intuitive gap here was only about ensemble universes, but it also seems that there’s an intuitive gap that needs to be filled with UDT-like reasoning, where all of your decisions are for also decisions for agents sufficiently like you in the relevant sense (which differs for every decision).
I must be missing a subtlety here. I began by asking “Is saying X different from saying Y?” I seem to be getting the answer “Yes, they are different. X is meaningless because it can’t be distinguished from Y.”
Ah, I think I see your problem. You insist on seeing the universe from the perspective of the computer running the program—and in this case, we can say “yes, in memory position #31415926 there’s a human in basement reality and in memory position #2718281828 there’s an identical human in a deeper simulation”. However, those humans can’t tell that. They have no way of determining which is true of them, even if they know that there is a computer that could point to them in its memory, because they are identical. You are every (sufficiently) identical copy of yourself.
No, you don’t see the problem. The problem is that Will_Newsome began by stating:
Which is fine. But now I am being told that my counter claim “I am not living in a simulation” is meaningless. Meaningless because I can’t prove my statement empirically.
What we seem to have here is very similar to Godel’s version of St. Anselm’s “ontological” proof of the existence of a simulation (i.e. God).
Oh. Did you see my comment asking him to tell whether he meant “some of our measure is in a simulation” or “this particular me is in a simulation”? The first question is asking whether or not we believe that the computer exists (ie, if we were looking at the computer-that-runs-reality could we notice that some copies of us are in simulations or not) and the second is the one I have been arguing is meaningless (kinda).
Right; I thought the intuitive gap here was only about ensemble universes, but it also seems that there’s an intuitive gap that needs to be filled with UDT-like reasoning, where all of your decisions are for also decisions for agents sufficiently like you in the relevant sense (which differs for every decision).