Hilary Putnam made (or gave a tantalising sketch of) an argument that even if we were living in a simulation, a person claiming “we are living in a simulation” would be incorrect.
Err… I’m not intimately acquainted with the sport myself… What’s the approximate difficulty rating of that kind of verbal gymnastics stunt again? ;)
It’s a tricky one—read the paper. I think what he’s saying is that there’s no way for a person in a simulation (assuming there is no intervention) to refer to the ‘outside’ world in which the simulation is taking place. Here’s a crude analogy: Suppose you were a two-dimensional being living on a flat plane, embedded in an ambient 3D space. Then Putnam would want to say that you cannot possibly refer to “up” and “down”. Even if you said “there is a sphere above me” and there was a sphere above you, you would be ‘incorrect’ (in the same paradoxical way).
Err… I’m not intimately acquainted with the sport myself… What’s the approximate difficulty rating of that kind of verbal gymnastics stunt again? ;)
It’s a tricky one—read the paper. I think what he’s saying is that there’s no way for a person in a simulation (assuming there is no intervention) to refer to the ‘outside’ world in which the simulation is taking place. Here’s a crude analogy: Suppose you were a two-dimensional being living on a flat plane, embedded in an ambient 3D space. Then Putnam would want to say that you cannot possibly refer to “up” and “down”. Even if you said “there is a sphere above me” and there was a sphere above you, you would be ‘incorrect’ (in the same paradoxical way).
But … we can describe spaces with more than three dimensions.